Laura Hunt: You forced me to give you my word. I never have been and I never will be bound by anything I don’t do of my own free will.
Otto Preminger’s Laura is another film noir from the quintessential film noir classics. It also happens to be part two of my villain origin story.
This film’s premise is a love story between a detective and a young woman whose murder he is assigned to investigate. His investigation brings to light two other men’s infatuation with Laura in her life before she was murdered. (Spoiler alert if you haven’t gathered it already: she wasn’t really killed and is in perfect health.)
I wasn’t very drawn to this film at first. It was a simple detective story, of which I had seen many at this point and beside the ultimate twist of having her be alive instead of murdered, I wasn’t very impressed. For an evil feminist in the making, my thinking wasn’t very nuanced. But the more I thought about it over time, the more I liked it. This wasn’t a film about love or murder, it was about male perception and projection. Throughout the film, we have three different men in love with the titular character, Laura, and all of them are in love with a different woman.
They each talk about the Laura they loved, what she liked, how she acted, and how she loved them. They even fight about who she loved more, and judge each other’s version of Laura because she wasn’t really like that. Each version of Laura is superior to the other’s and nothing else quite matters except the flattery of their own male egos. (Similar to my WP1, this film is a narrative on the female and her death and existence beyond life.) It doesn’t matter that Laura is dead, our detective falls in love with her despite knowing it’s her murder he’s investigating; the fact that he finds out she’s alive is just a bonus.
And the audience falls in love with an idea of her, too. I created my own version of Laura, I knew she was this and she wasn’t that, and I was fine that Laura was dead because I knew what she was like. But when she showed up, not dead, I couldn’t believe that she wasn’t just my version of Laura, but that she wasn’t any of the other men’s version of Laura either.
I knew this had to be something. I was just like those men. I had perpetuated everything I detested about the projection of feminine roles on women by men with my version of Laura and just because I was a girl didn’t mean that I was exempt from projecting the standards I didn’t want to be labeled with onto other women. Because if women aren’t intrinsically what we (as a male society) want them to be, what becomes of our understanding of how to categorize them and keep them in a place where we overpower them?
This movie wasn’t exactly like Double Indemnity for me, but it certainly opened my eyes on my path to wanting to study feminist theory and to why I thought the way I did and how this mode thinking seeps its way into our daily lives and how we impose it on women, even as women.
