Laura was probably one of the more interesting and unsettling movies I’ve seen in a long time. Waldo Lydecker was such a little weasel. I felt very uneasy about him from the beginning of the movie. His qualities included more than just a slight pinch of flamboyance. He just seemed to me like Laura’s homosexual best friend and certainly protected and advised her as if she were instead of a lover. As the film went on, he pulled Laura’s strings and seemed to just control Laura’s actions like a puppeteer. He would write the columns on the men Laura had been seeing and picking apart their flaws. Laura would listen to these, laugh and almost agree with Waldo, and never really got mad at what he wrote.
Shelby Carpenter was the most normal to me out of the three. He embodied the typical player or pig-headed male having many women to amuse himself with. Shelby also seemed to display a hint of homosexuality (no not because it was Vincent Price), although I couldn’t really figure out why.
McPherson, although he seemed pretty normal, he could have been the most messed up one. When he snooped around Laura’s place sniffing her perfume, going through her drawers, and going through her closet, he just seemed to become obsessed with her.
Laura herself was never really a person. You got three ideas of who she was, but you never really knew who Laura was. You get perspective from Waldo, the intelligent, puppeteer-like, but sexually inferior man, Shelby, the mindless doofus, and McPherson, the rugged, manly man. You get their ideas and what they shape what they want Laura to be, but Laura never really has an identity or an original personality. Laura, dead or alive, is just a name and nothing more.
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I think that it is interesting that you labeled Carpenter as the "normal" one. He slept around used women for money, which is pretty funny concerning the time at which the film was made because stereotypically women were like that. The gold diggers. Men were the ones that made the money and the women lived off them. In Laura we see both of these aspects. Laura gains respect and financial security through Lydecker, and Carpenter comes in and lives off of Laura, gives him a job and he still sleeps around on her even though she was so kind to him. So maybe that is where the feminine part of Carpenter was coming out.
ReplyDeleteHell, maybe Lydecker and Carpenter would gotten together if Lydecker killed Laura. Lydecker and Carpenter would be perfect for each other... lol
A most definitely agree that the relationship between Lydecker and Laura is probably the most unusual in the movie. Even though he seems to be setting off everyone's gaydar, and there is no reason for the viewer to believe the relationship between the two is in anyway sexual, he still seems to be the most obsessed with and possessive of her out of the three men. I felt in the end that it was almost kind of obvious that he should be the killer. It's odd that you think Carpenter was the most normal of the three-- I wasn't quite sure what I thought of him as I watched the movie, but reflecting back on it I almost viewed him the way we talk about viewing Laura-- he didn't really have a personality. He was this do-nothing guy that wanted money and women without true commitment to either. In my opinion, McPherson was the most "normal", other than falling in love with a dead woman after going through her undies drawer.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there was definitely a type of famine side to carpenter, as to Waldo who just seemed to let his personality go. I felt that Carpenters was a bit more subtle, for example when I think of movie land and a male character in a film, it's my opinion that they could take a punch and not break so easily when under questioning, lol but that is like comparing him to John Mclaine in Die Hard...clearly men of two different leagues.
ReplyDeleteI also found McPherson to be odd at times especially when in Laura's apartment.I mean jeez, who drinks heavily sniffs a "dead" girls perfume, looks at her undergarments, and then passes out at the scene of a crime...that's pretty professional huh?
I agree with oh bees knees in that although unprofessional, McPherson was the most normal out of the three men. As it was mentioned, Lydecker just came across as really creepy. For me, it wasn’t necessarily that he came across very flamboyant or controlling. It was the fact that he was so old in comparison to Laura. The two clearly did not belong with each other and I struggled to find out what exactly was going on in that relationship.
ReplyDeleteYou said at the end that Laura was just a name. I’m wondering, what exactly do you mean by that? Saying that she is just a name and nothing else, in my opinion, takes away all substance and purpose of her character, which I think is very important to this film. Rather than being just a name, I think we could say that she is just a concept. As the one article mentioned, she’s the object of male desire and a symbol of that obsession.
I don't really think that women had the reputation of being gold diggers at this time, it was more that they didn't have the same opportunity as men and society put them in this "housewife" role. Women's rights in the workplace weren't equal to men's by any means at this time.
ReplyDeleteI'm taking fahy6338 to mean that women were often depicted as goldiggers in movies during this period (or femmes fatales, or nice girls next door). Depiction of women in movies didn't really reflect the lives of actual women very well at all. It's almost as if Preminger is playing on this split between cinematic images of women and real women. Laura is a real, fairly ordinary woman, but all three men are fixated, and dangerously so, on the image of her.
ReplyDeleteGood discussion!