A Film Canon

Laura makes the astonishing, genre-bending gesture of replacing the hard-boiled lens that typifies noir with that of a verbose, effete aesthete (Clifton Webb), ensuring that the rugged masculinity proffered by the police officer (Dana Andrews) investigating the murder of socialite Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) is subordinated to his status as a beautiful object, and his examination of the case subsumed into the audience's predatory contemplation of his adherence to those "muscular and handsome" ideals that constitute the real motivation for the crime. In the same way, his mobility is radically circumscribed, as is the province of the narrative, most of which takes place in two cluttered apartments, and, more generally, in a striking relocation of the noir universe from L.A. to Manhattan, and from a bourgeois to aristocratic mileu, both of which remove these spaces from the amorphous anonymity of their West Coast forbears. That said, mobility still remains, but is artfully transferred to the aesthete's omniscient, invisible poison pen, and the gossip that it generates, while romance finds itself caught between these two extremes; or, rather, finds expression in terms of the love affair between a gay man and his doll - an homme fatale and his sujet d'art - such that Laura is ultimately indistinguishable from her uncannily radiant portrait/reflection, and her sudden return merely clarifies that she was never really alive; a fine, porcelain ghost.