Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) is one of the great film noir classics, and one whose status as a noir is (not coincidentally) often questioned. It’s a story of noirish twisted male desire and masochistic male castration, but that story obscures a female career melodrama about the cost of women’s ambitions in a patriarchal order dedicated to misogynist subjugation. The fact that the film itself doesn’t entirely seem aware of what it’s saying about Laura or her (very limited) choices is less a weakness than an extension of its themes. Preminger, along with his viewers, has put Laura in a frame, reducing her to her own beautiful image, behind which nothing’s allowed to thrive.
The movie’s ostensible narrative is driven by a murder mystery; Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) is investigating the murder of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), who was shot in the face with a shotgun in the entrance to her home. Among the suspects are Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), an eccentric writer who devoted himself to advancing Laura’s advertising career; Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), a good-looking downwardly mobile failson and Laura’s fiancée; Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), Laura’s aunt who’s in love with Shelby; and Diane Redfern, a woman in Laura’s office, also in love with Shelby.
The first half of the film is largely narrated by Waldo, who we first discover in his opulent apartment, typing in his bathtub. While Mark asks him questions, he orders him to pass him his towel and his robe, a homosocial power move or tease. This anticipate the dynamics of the film, in which Waldo and Mark circle each other over the space left by Laura, and then over Laura herself when it turns out halfway through wasn’t the one shot after all. Diane Redfern died in her place.
Waldo we learn—mostly from his own narration—has often in the past stalked Laura and discouraged her relationships with other men; in one instance he wrote a poisonous review of the work of an artist who was painting her portrait. Mark slowly becomes obsessed with that same painting, perhaps because of Laura’s beauty, perhaps because it captures the patriarchal struggle over that beauty. Since it’s to be auctioned off following her death, Mark bids on it, wanting to own it and her, just as Waldo does.
The most famous sequence of the movie is overshadowed by the portrait, as Mark rifles through Laura’s house, reads her diary, and falls asleep while the painted image of her looks on. When Mark wakes he sees the living Laura standing before him, underneath her own image, a fantasy come to life, and a possession animated. Mark is haunted by a woman who is possessed by her own possessibility. Her image in painting is set over her image on film, both set up to be looked upon by the investigator who knows and grasps her. The first thing Mark tells her, practically, is that she can’t leave the house or talk to anyone but him.
Waldo mocks Mark for falling in love with a corpse. But Waldo’s the murderer, which means he prefers to love Laura dead as well. His fussiness, self-regard, and age suggest effeminacy; so does Mark’s wounded leg, damaged in a gun fight; so does Shelby’s inability to earn a living. Laura’s surrounded with men who aren’t really men—men transfixed by her image in attitudes of supplication and subordination. She’s in that sense a kind of femme fatale, who fascinates and castrates the men who obsessively gaze.
Laura isn’t a master (or mistress) manipulator like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. She doesn’t actually do anything to make the men fall apart; she just wears sleek outfits, throws parties, and, oh right, tries to pursue a career.
Laura makes one offhand remark about how her mother made her learn to cook even though she wanted a job, and that’s about the extent of what we learn about her ambition. Waldo talks with a ring of obsession about her taste and purity and intelligence, but he’s obviously flattering himself for recognizing her talent—and even more for introducing her in the right circles and creating his own beautiful Pygmalion. Laura’s portrayed as unmanning Waldo through her unwomanly pursuits—but her existence and success in the working world is largely through her connection to him. At the end of the movie, she even admits that she knew that her association with him was unhealthy and dangerous. But she was grateful, and, it’s suggested, she needed him. Men have the power; women who want power, or even a job, have little choice but to associate themselves with patriarchs.
The patriarchy in the film, as in most film noirs, is twisted and weak in the face of the image of the feminine. But in contrast to noirs—and in line instead with melodramas like Gaslight—the weak, twisted patriarchy nonetheless forms cages within cages, so even when women escape they simply see more bars.
Laura tries to elude her supposed roles as a woman. She pursues a career. She leaves her own narrative at a crucial moment, heading to a cabin to think about her marriage to Shelby, which is, suggestively, the moment Waldo ends up accidentally shooting Shelby instead of her. Yet even though she’s not a housewife, and doesn’t marry Shelby, and doesn’t get shot, she’s not free either. Her career makes her Waldo’s; her escape from Shelby and Waldo leave her falling into the arms of Mark, a man she barely knows, who loves her as a painting, not a person. More, Mark attacks Shelby unprovoked out of jealousy, evincing in a more earthy register the same kind of violent obsession as Waldo. The black and white cinematography, all clean lines and pale skin, contains her beauty in a formal perfection while carefully excluding her inner life. She’s an immaculate surface, because men—Waldo, Mark, Preminger—don’t want her to be anything but the image that they can claim undoes them.
Laura becomes, then, not just a noir, but a critique of noir. It’s a dream about male anxiety in the face of powerful women. But it also shows how those fever dreams are constructed—as Waldo constructs Laura—without regard to women’s desires or selves. In noir women are corpses, or paintings, or ghosts. Their power in these films is an illusion. Mark’s constantly engrossed in a hand-held baseball pinball skill puzzle because, Laura suggests, noir is men playing with themselves.