Laura (1944)

Laura (1944)

A detective becomes obsessed with Laura’s portrait after she is violently murdered (via shotgun to the face!) inside her apartment.

A limited number of suspects, and an even more limited number of motives make the mystery kinda irrelevant, even after a mid-movie surprise reveal: is the murderer her gigolo-like fiancée? Her aunt? A gossip column writer protegee/would-be-lover, except that he’s coded as gay, or at the very least as impotent? A servant? The attractive model her fiancée had been going out with?

Aside from the exploitative pseudo-necrophiliac aspects, (which might easily be construed as commentary on undeniable perverse before-one’s-time movie fandom, and which… aren’t we all there already even when our own objects of obsession might not even be dead?) more important to the enjoyment of the film are the colorful, eccentric weirdo murder suspects and the post-mortem infatuated detective with his pre-Columbo genius and silly quirks, (he likes to play a baseball puzzle apparently simply to annoy the suspect he’s questioning but he also is merely one step away from being a dead-woman’s-panty-sniffing creep.)

Based on responses I've gotten already I doubt most anyone wants to accept that the film is a sly commentary on movie fandom; we all idolize imaginary people we generate in our minds based on the attractive images we see of them on the big screen and glamour magazines and based on carefully crafted stories other sources tell us about the person, (press releases, studio hype, etc.)
In that sense, we are very much like Mark.
I don't know if that was the intent of the novel, but the film very much becomes that whether inadvertently or not.
Instead, audiences today want to build this film up in their mind as a great mystery, (it is not; one comment I got was "as soon as I heard that the victim's face was destroyed, I knew...") or even a great story of romance. It is not that either.

Those criticizing my mention of necrophilia would do well to read the script:

“You better watch out, McPherson, or you’ll end up in a psychiatric ward. I don’t think they’ve ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse.”

I'm not saying anything that isn't already there.
I'm being nice enough to not only add "pseudo," (which some critics don't even bother doing,) but, to further make the distinction, I am comparing it to the Emily Brontë example which better approximates the definition.

For the precise definition one would have to go to Jörg Buttgereit's Nekromantik (1987), since even Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) never went that far.

One can easily make a romantic case for the surreal amour fou seen in other works, the tragic, uncontrollable passion that makes someone go dig up the corpse of their lover, (a closer approximation to the true concept of necrophilia); this mad passion appealed to surrealists like Luis Buñuel by way of Brontë, but what we have here is simply a false phantom Mark has created of someone he's never even met with whom he has convinced himself he is in love.
He could not be more wrong.
And Waldo, despite the creep he is, could not have been more right about Mark.

More difficult to make out is who or what Laura is and why she would think she is in love with Mark. She remains a cipher. But considering the casting and directorial trickery present in the film, (unlike other fey or ineffective characters, Mark is the one virile male in the cast,) it's easy to see why he's her choice... At least for now.

I suspect most will simply enjoy the simple, classic mystery or romance they would prefer to be getting, but the film is much more than that.
In time, Michael Powell and Alfred Hitchcock would be a lot more poisonously critical of their scopophilic audiences, with DePalma and Verhoeven showing outright contempt for them, but this is where it all began.

With Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, and Judith Anderson.