Hanging Portraits: Obsession and Resurrection in Laura
Detours, episode 10
Hanging Portraits: Obsession and Resurrection in Laura
Stephen Broomer, November 24, 2022
Otto Preminger's Laura is classical work of the early period of film noir, a skewering critique of the poisonous hypocrisies and sublimated desires of the ruling class. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer addresses the themes of unrequited, obsessive love projected onto the figure of Laura Hunt.
SCRIPT:
Pygmalion, the Cypriot sculptor, fell in love with his creation Galatea. Their tale is too often reduced to an allegory for the creative act itself, be it the illusion of life forged through the skill of the artist, or the inaccessible tether that bonds maker to work and blinds them to all else. When Pygmalion falls in love with Galatea, he, like Narcissus, falls in love with what is essentially himself, or at least, his own hand, his own skill. Ovid carved his Pygmalion from the mold of Daedalus, who animated statues, and Hephaestus, who made automata, marking him as an evolution on the image of the puppeteer, whether trickster or journeyman, as perpetuated in the Greek myths. But in Ovid’s telling of the myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor is also a celibate misogynist who embodies this duality, to adore and to hate women. To give life to a statue by a kiss is to vanish into an ideal love. Such idealism is onanist and necrophilic, or it would be, but for the intervention of the gods.
There are no Olympian Gods to intervene in the glamorous penthouses and society lunches of Otto Preminger’s Laura. Here there are only the Gods that men imagine themselves to be. Among them runs that same strain of obsessive love, passed like a torch from the Greek craftsmen to precious bon vivant Waldo Lyedecker, a professional celebrity who sentimentalizes love but thrives on venom. He is a variation on the columnists and radio hosts that became entrenched in American society culture in the 1920s, caustic wits like H.L. Mencken, or that elite mix of geniuses and logrolling bullies that populated the Algonquin Round Table. The fictional Waldo Lyedecker has paid the price of admission to high society, as a professional sophisticate famous simply for being famous. Groucho Marx once estimated that cost of admission as “a serpent’s tongue and a half-concealed stiletto.” As the film begins, Lyedecker is offered up as narrator, and his narration, and the ensuing digressions as he imparts his unreliable account to Detective Mark McPherson, reveal him as less a raconteur than a puppeteer. His attempts to intervene in and direct McPherson’s investigation give proof to his immense ego and will cast suspicion back onto him. Lyedecker’s mannered way, his precise enunciation, his rehearsed stares, mark him as a megalomaniac, a man who must assert total control over himself and all around him. Even in his telling of the first meeting between himself and Laura Hunt, he is less a man than a God whose routines mustn’t be disturbed. His account of Laura Hunt’s life is that of a plaything, raw material sculpted by him into the ideal woman. His love for Laura Hunt is obsessive, but intently self-flattering: that she, in his words, “deferred to his judgment and taste,” is a sign of his sense of total authorship over Laura. He speaks of her innate authenticity, but seems to cherish with higher regard his own careful machining of her appearance.
McPherson is introduced as a wounded hero, naturally suspicious, with a sharp wit and a lazy, easy attitude. He’s tough, but he knows that in these rooms, he’s just a warden attending to the affairs of self-styled Gods. His wounds are soon shown to be deeper than a silver shinbone. To hear McPherson tell it, Laura is just another corpse and this is all routine. Underneath his placid expressions, she has become much more than that. To the irritation and bewilderment of those he interrogates, he perpetually plays a handheld baseball puzzle. He explains that it keeps him calm. Lyedecker and McPherson exert control over others, but there is a sense that both men are also accustomed to controlling themselves. Lyedecker’s manners and McPherson’s lack of them are one and the same: both are men full of passion and longing and pain.
In their collaborations, director Otto Preminger exploited Dana Andrews’s natural stiffness; in Laura, Andrews cuts the figure of a heartbroken golem. Under the brim of his hat, Mark McPherson becomes the essential detective, a man whose performed inattention and deep, nasal indifference declares the cold heart of justice. This will be exposed as a mask concealing a lonely, vulnerable disposition. That front goes through a strange transformation when, midway through the film, he finds himself alone in the victim’s apartment, pacing, probing, frustrated, lingering on her delicate cloths and perfumes, and exasperated. He finds himself studying her portrait, and that familiar melody creeps in as to remind him that she’s only a dream.
The romantic spell is broken. Lyedecker arrives, intimating that he can see through McPherson’s mask—revealing with gleeful disgust that he knows McPherson has purchased a portrait of Laura Hunt—the limits of their control collide. This rupture that marks the film’s second act transforms McPherson from the by-the-book investigator to something strange and pitiful, someone for whom love might even begin beyond the dark shadow of death. In Frank Perry’s Man on a Swing, the policemen who investigate a woman’s murder keep pictures of her in their wallets, a detail that repulses the protagonist’s wife for the obvious reason that it has a necrophiliac implication. McPherson is a template of that, a tragic figure, but tragic like Pygmalion, as if a kiss to the portrait would render the dead woman as flesh and blood. He is only allowed to occupy this pathetic state for a moment, but it is a moment that will hang heavily over his relationship with the real and still-living Laura Hunt. For the lonesome detective, love at first sight transcends the boundary between life and death.
Lyedecker’s love for Laura Hunt is frightening. McPherson’s love is grotesque and absurd. He has fallen in love with a painting. Lyedecker has fallen in love with a mirror. The image of elegance that McPherson loves is, in a sense, Lyedecker’s creation. The real Laura Hunt, who deliberates on love even as her loves are, seemingly, controlled by the interference of Lyedecker, is driven from his control into the arms of fate. Her own sudden love for McPherson is something like his for her: a surrender to love-at-first-sight, for the living or the dead. McPherson and Lyedecker are both Pygmalion. They are both men who understand love as a necrophilic imposition on the image of woman.
The high-key lighting of the glamorous parlours of Manhattan’s elite is, in itself, a contrast to the stereotypical markers of film noir that were, in 1944, in the process of becoming standard tropes. Rather than deal with a criminal underclass, as the crime film of the 1930s so often did, Laura is instead about wealthy people in beautiful rooms doing ugly, cruel things. The conditions of its narrative are those of the gothic mystery, those stories that, like Laura, dealt so often with the darkness of the soul, as discovered through the longings and love traumas of women in decaying manors. The hanging portrait of Laura Hunt, like the picture of Dorian Gray, is a painting as it can only exist in gothic horror: a totemic double to kindle obsessive desire. It represents Laura Hunt in a literal fashion, but it also represents the faceless victim for whom Laura has been mistaken; the portrait is of the woman that Waldo Lyedecker destroyed and the woman that Lyedecker wished to destroy. Much as a character like Charles Foster Kane can be less a man than a system, Laura Hunt becomes less a woman than a ghost; the portrait of Laura is the face in the misty light, footsteps that you hear down the hall; the laugh that floats on a summer night that you can never quite recall. And for all of the accounts that McPherson gathers about the life of Laura Hunt, none of the characters know her any better than they know this portrait, because she’s only a dream.
Sheri Chinen Biesen has argued that Laura Hunt is “complex, elusive, yet almost ethereal, like a ghost or supernatural spirit that haunts the narrative and whom no one in the film really understands.” For the first half of the film, Laura Hunt is, like the women of Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window, an idealized image, surface-deep, illusory. Her image is something like the call of the Siren. Even after she has emerged out of the fog of flashbacks as a fully-formed character, Laura Hunt remains marked by this projection, as the story continues to privilege the narratives offered by those who would manipulate her and those who deify her, and even her own actions remain mysterious, a balance of charm and cunning. Eugene McNamara has argued that, because Laura Hunt is not, in his words, a “spider woman,” Preminger’s film is not a film noir at all, as if the presence of this stock character is a necessary trope. Does Laura Hunt’s essential goodness, along with her apparent obliviousness to the power she has over men, undermine the film’s qualifications? She is not the stock character of the femme fatale; she is not deadly or lethal but she is fatal in another sense, fatal not for her own immorality and violence, but for all that is projected onto her. In the film noir, the femme fatale reflects an escalation of violence between the sexes. Laura Hunt represents that same violence, because of her unblemished face, a face that the detective, the one who loves her, had thought destroyed by buckshot.
Beyond Laura Hunt’s characterization, the film doesn’t suffer the wartime inertia that early examples of noir suffer, resembling in some ways the classical detective stories that dominated the crime genre in the decade leading up to the emergence of the film noir. Yet, Laura is distinguished by its perversity, its mystical undercurrents, its brokenheartedness, which goes some leagues further than the world-weary cops-and-robbers of the crime film. When Waldo Lyedecker reads from Dowson in his final broadcast, it is ironic, that after he declares love undying and unending, love that endures beyond the dark shadow of death, he should quote Edward Dowson’s poem on the short lifespan of all things, including love and desire. Dowson took his title for that poem from Horace: vitae summa breves spem nos vetat incohare longam, the shortness of life forbids us long hopes. It’s like something The Continental Op would say, a noir epigram straight from 65 BC. Lyedecker never finishes reading the Dowson poem; its second stanza suggests something of the oneiric and haunting nature of Lyedecker’s own excruciating, unrequited sense of romance: “out of a misty dream / our path emerges for awhile, then closes / within a dream.” Laura Hunt is unknowable because she has become a canvas, a projection screen, and even when she emerges as a full-blooded woman, she remains a fantasy, carried by one man, it would seem, into a happy future; followed by the other man to his death. This itself is a marker of noir, a cinema in which unstable identity collides with the material greed and territoriality of American midcentury life.
