TY - JOUR
AU - Ramoni, Teresa
AB - Abstract This essay analyzes Vera Caspary’s novel Laura (1943) and the 1944 film adaptation (Preminger) in order to demonstrate an approach to adaptation studies we call fugal. If a fugue is a composition based on a ‘subject’ or short melodic phrase and its various ‘answers’—in other words, variations that maintain elements of the melody but also play with and revise it—how might we position the film as a variation on, rather than a reproduction of, Caspary’s novel? To explore this question, we analyze the sonic register of both the novel and film. Caspary doesn’t want us to merely read her novel; she wants us to listen to the voices that narrate it and the tunes that populate it. Similarly, listening to the film—not simply the dialogue but also the voiceover narration and David Raksin’s groundbreaking score—allows us to identify content not overt in, and sometimes at odds with, the visuals. When we listen critically and carefully, we can distinguish nuances that get lost in a strict fidelity approach; in particular, we can identify both works’ feminist content, especially their attempts to decentre patriarchal hard-boiled conventions and to confound notions of a singular truth. Vera Caspary, Otto Preminger, Laura, adaptation studies, Fugue, gender The cover of The Dark Galleries, a coffee table book that constructs an imaginary museum exhibit of famous mid-century film portraits such as Vertigo’s Carlotta Valdes, features the painting of Laura Hunt from the film noir Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944), an adaptation of Vera Caspary’s mystery novel of the same name from 1943. The publisher’s choice to highlight this painting—actually a touched up photograph of the actress who plays Laura, Gene Tierney—speaks to its prominent place in cinematic visual memory. The portrait also looms large in scholarship on both Caspary’s novel and its film adaptation. For example, Brian Matzke, in “Hardboiled Feminism: Vera Caspary’s Laura as a Revision of the Detective Genre,” argues that the portrait—created by the character Jacoby, a ‘highly unoriginal’ artist who was in love with Laura while painting it—allows Caspary to critique the patriarchal gaze: ‘it misrepresents its female subject, it imposes on her meanings that have been constructed by male artists and audiences, and it portrays her by means of a highly derivative style’ (121). In “De-Feminizing Laura: Novel to Film,” Liahna Babener makes a similar argument about how the portrait operates in the film: ‘Held inside her frame, made eternally enticing and thus conveniently culpable for their lust while unable to counteract their objectification of her, Laura languishes in her specular prison, the very epitomization of Mulvey’s notion of the enforced “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the conventional film female, bearer of but banned from being maker of meaning’ (Babener 94). Mistakenly believed to be dead for most of the novel and film, only to reappear during detective Mark McPherson’s investigation of her murder, Laura is mainly accessible through this questionable portrait. Therefore, the painting, these scholars argue, functions not merely as a plot device—for instance, Laura’s close friend Waldo Lydecker, later revealed as the villain, knows Mark is falling for Laura when the detective places a bid on the painting—but also as an ideological tool that the novel and film mobilize to explore questions of gender and power. While the portrait, and the novel and adaptation’s visual discourse more generally, is an important subject, this essay instead examines the sonic register of both Caspary’s novel and the Preminger adaptation to demonstrate how it, too, performs ideological work. Although they have gone unremarked upon in the scholarship on the novel, Caspary’s sonic references are frequent and meaningful. On a concrete level, they often advance the plot in significant ways. Although Shelby Carpenter ultimately is proven innocent, it is his failure to name Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue’ that ‘shoots . . . holes’ in his alibi (Caspary 37). Similarly, Laura’s maid, Bessie Clary, only confesses to having tampered with evidence after hearing a church hymn: ‘if they hadn’t played that music at the funeral, I’d never’ve told you’ (42). Caspary also embeds clues about the identity of the murderer in moments that feature sonic imagery. In retrospect, it is telling that Waldo, who accidentally murders Diane Redfern in an attempt to kill Laura—his protégé, who is blind to his pathological tendencies—gets discomfited by a performance of the Jerome Kern tune ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. On a broader level, the novel’s very structure and manipulation of point of view borrow from musical traditions, namely, polyphonic compositions. Laura is narrated in first person by multiple characters: the writer Waldo (Part 1), the detective Mark (Part 2), Laura herself (Part 4), and Mark again (Part 5). Part 3 consists of a stenographer’s report of testimony given by Shelby Carpenter, Laura’s fiancé, a document that both approximates first-person narration and problematizes its reliability, forcing us to reflect back on the unofficial testimonials we have just read and to scrutinize the ones to come. This narrative structure—its combination of three, or four if the novel’s stenographic account is taken into consideration, distinct voices that each take up the shared subjects of gender, independence, and violence—draws striking resemblance to polyphonic music and, even more specifically, to the fugue: a contrapuntal musical composition in which several melodic lines, or ‘voices’, take up and vary a repeated subject, or musical theme. Prioritizing an interpretation of sound at both a micro- and macro-level, we suggest, doesn’t merely provide new insight into the novel; it also reveals a new understanding of the film adaptation and adaptation studies more broadly. While Caspary was an experienced writer for Hollywood, she did not work on the film adaptation; indeed, she and Preminger had a notorious disagreement about their competing conceptions of Laura as a character (Caspary, Secrets, 176–78). But she did collaborate with George Sklar to adapt her novel for the stage in 1946, and the theatrical adaptation emphasizes music more than the portrait. For example, while the opening stage directions for Act I mention the ‘oil portrait of Laura’, which Mark looks at, the playwrights also stress that ‘the stage is in darkness except for the light from the radio phonograph, which is playing a slow, hot mood record’ (Caspary and Sklar 5). The audience’s first information is aural, not visual, and this privileging of sound is further reinforced in the opening lines of dialogue, wherein Mark and Danny, a character invented for the stage version, have an extended conversation about musical taste, which becomes an ongoing subplot in the unfolding mystery. Therefore, Caspary’s attention to sound, particularly music, should prompt us to be more attuned to how it works not only within the novel but also in the process of adaptation. Caspary doesn’t want us to merely read her novel; she wants us to listen to the voices that narrate it and the tunes that populate it. Similarly, listening to the film—not simply the dialogue but also the voiceover narration and David Raksin’s groundbreaking score—allows us to identify content not overt in, and sometimes at odds with, the visuals. To explore this subject, we develop a process of analysing the relationship between Caspary’s novel and the film adaptation that we call fugal. We maintain that this fugal approach not only illuminates these two particular works but also models an alternative to fidelity studies as well as a distinctly feminist methodology within adaptation studies. While critics haven’t examined the novel’s sonic content or taken this fugal approach to the Preminger film, they have pointed to the polyphonic structure that Caspary employs, arguing that it reveals the novel’s feminist impulses. These critics also suggest that the film’s failure to maintain Caspary’s pointed gender commentary can be attributed directly to the fact that the novel was stripped of its polyvocality for the film adaptation. While the script originally called for voiceovers from Waldo, Mark, and Laura’s perspectives—and Dana Andrews, who plays Mark, even recorded parts of his (Kalinak 163)—the studio ultimately abandoned this plan and limited the narrating voiceover to just one character: Waldo. Scholars like Babener view this change as a gendered violation: ‘Reconstructing the narrative to silence Laura’s voice and deny her discursive power . . . the film advances a disturbing assault on the feminine’ (83). While most scholarship on the novel echoes Babener’s arguments about the ideological implications of the film’s monologic narration,1 Julie Grossman complicates these readings. In ‘Women and Film Noir: Pulp Fiction and the Woman’s Picture’, Grossman analyses such novels as Dorothy Hughes’ In a Lonely Place and Caspary’s Laura alongside their film adaptations, and while she acknowledges that the films can threaten to ‘eclipse the feminist force of the narrative’ (46), she also contends that we can see feminist commentary in them if we look—and, we would argue, if we listen—differently. Readings like Babener’s, Grossman implies, are too entrenched in a fidelity approach that expects that a film, a medium with its own codes and textual operations, should function like a novel. Describing how many critics view Laura’s character in the film as a femme fatale, for example, Grossman states that ‘The impulse to read her as such may, in the case of a feminist approach, result from disappointment that the film fails to re-present a source text that functions differently, textually and culturally, an attitude that underlines the problems with using fidelity as a central criterion for evaluating adaptations’ (53). Building on foundational work by Robert Stam, Linda Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch, and others, Grossman instead adopts what she calls a ‘relational mode of reading film and literature’ that embraces the ways in which ‘different media . . . transpose form and content’; such an approach puts ‘texts in dialogue with, rather than in opposition to, one another’ (53). Here Grossman echoes language used by feminist scholars in the field of adaptation studies such as Shelly Cobb, who opts for the term ‘conversation’ (35) when examining adaptations, as well as Esther Sonnet, who suggests that we move beyond analysing ‘the single act of transposition’ and instead prioritize ‘the location and circulation of texts within a plurality of cultural discourses’ (7). The fugal approach we mobilize in this essay calls for a similar methodology. If a fugue is a composition based on a ‘subject’ or short melodic phrase and its various ‘answers’—in other words, variations that maintain elements of the melody but also play with and revise it—how might we position the film adaptation of Laura as a variation on, rather than a reproduction of, Caspary’s novel? And how might we position adaptations, more broadly, in this manner, considering them part of an ongoing fugal composition, one that takes up and echoes, in modified form, motifs presented in previous iterations? In “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” Stam contends that adaptation theory has a ‘constellation of tropes’ from which it can draw and benefit, such as translation and dialogization (549). We propose the fugue—a composition that engages in the processes of transposition and recycling and is dependent upon the idea that the layering of voices is a constructive rather than destructive process—as one of those tropes. Taking this approach allows us to build on Stam’s notion of a ‘matrix’ of interlocking texts (550) while also dispelling the myth of primacy. It is infelicitous and even unproductive to position Caspary’s novel as the ‘original’ or ‘parent’ text that Preminger appropriated and bastardized. For one, the novel originally was a play, which Caspary didn’t finish, a play that then became a twenty-two-page film scenario, which she never sold (Emrys, Wilkie Collins, 112). The novel itself—originally serialized in 1942 in Collier’s as Ring Twice for Laura, yet another version in this complex web—is, then, an adaptation of these works, just as Caspary and Sklar’s stage play, as well as various telecast versions from the 1950s and 1960s based on it, would serve as others many years later.2 Moreover, these versions of Laura are indebted to various other works and traditions, including hard-boiled crime fiction from the era and the nineteenth-century casebook novels of Wilkie Collins, which Caspary cited as inspirational models (Secrets 166). Therefore, while we examine the novel’s polyvocality—its characters share the narration and in some cases read and refer to one another’s accounts—we also want to position the film adaptation as an interlocutor participating in a discursive exchange. To hear the film’s discourse, we need to listen—not just to the diegetic dialogue the characters engage in but also to the sound design more generally, including the music and the voiceover. When we listen critically and carefully, we argue, we can distinguish nuances that get lost in a strict fidelity approach; in particular, we can identify both works’ feminist content, especially their attempts to decentre patriarchal hard-boiled conventions and to confound notions of a singular truth. ‘I Attached the Words to a Melody’: Vera Caspary’s Contrapuntal Crime Fiction In addition to penning Laura, Vera Caspary, a Jewish-American writer whose name and works draw scant results from academic database searches, also authored some twenty novels and screenplays, several short stories and dramas, and an Edgar Award-winning autobiography. Her novel Laura, a detective thriller with an unforgettable twist, one which ‘resurrects’ its eponymous subject by revealing her to be the victim of misidentification rather than murder, belongs to an understudied subset of mid-twentieth-century crime fiction, a group of novels that owe their obscure status not to inferior plot lines or poor characterization but to the gender of their authors. As Jean Lutes somewhat jokingly asserts in her essay “Sirens Blaring: Desire and Women-Authored Crime Fiction in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” ‘most anyone who reads contemporary detective and crime fiction knows that women write crime novels’ (181). But while Ruth Ware, Tana French, and Gillian Flynn have become household names, their predecessors, women such as Caspary, Dorothy B. Hughes, or Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, writers whom Lutes calls ‘the foremothers of today’s crowded field’ of crime fiction, remain largely neglected and forgotten (181). In her essay “‘Both a Woman and a Complete Professional’: Women Readers and Women’s Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction,” Erin A. Smith contextualizes such authors’ absence from literary scholarship,3 explaining that ‘there are both historical and literary-historical reasons for the hypermasculine packaging of hard-boiled detective fiction’ (194). For instance, ‘women became voters in 1920, transforming the once all-male world of partisan politics’ (194). Between 1880 and 1930, ‘the female wage-labor force increased twice as fast as the adult female population’ (194). Throughout the 1920s and 30s, mystery novelists such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh made their way to the tops of international bestseller lists, signifying that women were indeed ready to enter a variety of traditionally male-dominated spaces. Fuelled by anxiety over ‘women’s greater mobility’ during the interwar period, hard-boiled detective fiction, as Kathleen Urda writes, ‘operated as a defense’ against women ‘moving into the spaces that had once been the preserves of men’ (294). In their book Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition, Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones maintain that ‘the traditional hard-boiled novel demonized and punished the female character who contravened conventional ideas about feminine submissiveness by desiring and acting’, as is exemplified perfectly by some of the genre’s most remembered and celebrated novelists: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain (195). As Smith states, the genre ‘was founded . . . by men who defined themselves in opposition to all things genteel, feminine, and female-authored’, who, in an effort to assert their patriarchal ideologies, ‘filled their texts with misogynist scenes and language’, telling tales of unsentimental male saviours and the dead and deadly women who plague them (197). Such was the environment in which Caspary composed Laura, a novel that grants the type of woman being both diegetically and socially ‘driven out’ the invaluable instrument of a voice. Given her novel’s own polyvocal standing—its use of multiple narrators as well as its being written in conjunction and contention with other ‘voices’, namely those of mid-twentieth-century crime film and fiction—it is rather fitting that Caspary would select Johann Sebastian Bach, the ‘father of polyphony’ and composer most frequently associated with the fugue, to be Laura’s favourite musician. Caspary’s choice not only embraces a transtextual conception of artistic media—Laura only becomes exposed to the Baroque composer after hearing ‘King of Swing’ Benny Goodman cover Bach’s work—but also disrupts certain stereotypical and hierarchical understandings of art itself. Within Caspary’s novel, it is author and aesthete Waldo Lydecker who is depressed by ‘the timbre of organ music’ (29) and ‘lowbrow’ Laura Hunt who calls Bach her ‘one great’ (53). As we argue, Caspary’s Laura not only references Bach but also models itself on the Baroque composer’s ‘ideal illustration of polyphonic form’: the fugue (Lachman 40). Through her novel’s meta and metatextual4 content—Laura both consciously refers to itself as a detective novel and engages in critical commentary regarding the genre of crime fiction—Caspary voices her own ‘answer’ to hard-boiled detective fiction’s misogynistic narratives, highlighting not only the fugue form’s dialogic abilities but also its disruptive ones. Throughout Laura, Caspary goes to great lengths to remind the reader that she is simultaneously writing in and actively subverting the crime fiction genre. When Mark questions Laura and Shelby, for instance, he remarks, ‘I was crisp and efficient. I sounded like a detective in a detective story’ (108). Mark likens Shelby’s staunch defence of Laura to a scene directly borrowed from a crime narrative: ‘it seemed to me that words were printed on a page or rolling off a soundtrack’ (110). Moreover, the vigilant reader cannot help but hear the voice of Caspary, who ‘declared openly’ that she ‘didn’t like crime fiction, and had no interest in private eyes and police procedures’ (Emrys, “Afterword,” 174), in Waldo’s ‘I have never stooped to the narration of a mystery story’, a work of fiction designed to fulfill a ‘barbaric need for violence and revenge . . . in the reading public’, or in his Shakespearean appraisal of the mystery novel as an ‘excess of sound and fury, signifying far worse than nothing’ (16–17). Such overtly self-reflexive statements serve to implicate Caspary’s novel in an intertextual and, we would argue, fugal, meta-conversation with the genre in which she writes. While the fugal mode of analysis we put forth positions Caspary’s Laura as a voice in an ongoing discussion on the gender politics of crime narratives, it also provides us with a productive means of assessing the novel’s narratorial voices themselves. As scholars such as Stephen Benson have observed, it is Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of novelistic polyphony, advanced in his seminal work Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, that has most notably exemplified the ways in which musical texture could inform narrative structure. Bakhtin, responding to ‘an earlier use of a musical analogy in the Dostoevsky literature—V.L. Komarovich’s idea of fugal organization in The Adolescent’—mobilized musical terminology as ‘an organizing concept’, a means of expressing ‘ideas of part and whole, of independence and mutuality’ (296). According to Benson, there is no ‘metaphor more appropriate than polyphonic music’ to articulate the novel’s own attempt to place ‘voice[s] in dialogue’ (298). In fact, Bakhtin defines literary polyphony as ‘different voices singing variously on a single theme’, a definition one could also apply to the fugue (Bakhtin 42). According to Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony, voices are ‘semantic orientations of whole human beings’ (239). Voices serve as a crucial motif within Caspary’s novel. For instance, Mark reflects on the human voice’s transience: ‘the tone of a voice was something that died with a word’ (99). Laura considers both the voice’s autonomy—‘I heard my voice as something outside of me’ (148)—and its power, thinking, ‘when he spoke like that...[Shelby] knew how his voice worked on me’; he could color [it] with the precise shade of reproach so that I would . . . forgive his faults’ (124). Throughout her novel, Caspary also connects the voice to female agency. When Waldo describes his first encounter with Laura, for example, he comments, ‘she gave a little clucking sound. Fear had taken her voice’ (13). It is thus not coincidental that Laura later uses her voice to confront her betrayer, ‘shout[ing] bravely’ and ‘scream[ing] for revenge’ (155). While the connections among voice, gender, and power are evident in both the novel’s themes and structure, the feminist implications of these issues have not been adequately explored in the scholarship. In assessing what he called the ‘multi-voicedness of the Dostoevskian novel’ (16), Bakhtin attempted to describe a type of literary work that is ‘constructed beyond the boundaries of ordinary monologic unity’ (22). Dostoevsky, according to Bakhtin, had discovered a new kind of novel, one consisting not of ‘a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness’ but of a ‘plurality of consciousnesses with equal rights’, an assembly of ‘independent’, ‘unmerged’, and ‘fully valid’ voices (6).5 As we have mentioned, various scholars locate Laura’s feminist content within the very structure of its narrative. Babener describes how ‘Vera Caspary’s Laura establishes Laura Hunt as the protagonist, subject, and controlling sensibility of her own story’ (83). Matzke remarks upon Laura’s ability to ‘write her own portion of the narrative’ (122). Urda, too, highlights Laura’s ability ‘to tell the story of her life’ (305). Caspary’s particular deployment of novelistic polyphony demonstrates that the fugue, a compositional model that asserts the value of each voice as an independent part of a collective whole, can be considered a progressive model for narratology, one that has potential to grant traditionally disenfranchised subjects with a voice. However, in marvelling at Laura’s gift of narrative expression, scholars have arguably applied a monologic framework to a polyphonic novel, mentioning the novel’s polyvocality only to dismiss its other voices by deeming them inferior to Laura’s. As Lachman writes, a polyphonic composition ‘consists of a horizontal and vertical dimension’ (45–6). Bakhtin ‘emphasiz[ed] the spatial dimension of polyphony by describing how voices in the novel do not merely follow one another in sequence’ (Lachman 46) but ‘spread out in one plane, as standing alongside or opposite one another’ (Bakhtin 30). While these voices need not be in harmonious agreement, they are, as a result of their compositional association, linked. Much of the scholarship on Laura’s narrative structure sees Caspary’s voices as standing in competition rather than coexistence. Babener, for instance, writes that ‘each subsequent retelling of the events serves to discredit the various male speakers while it enhances Laura’s [own] authority’ (87). Urda contends that ‘Caspary successfully performs Waldo’s dethronement in the organization of her narrative’ and ‘the structure again suggests Caspary’s determination to diminish the perspective Waldo represents’ (303–10). And according to Urda, Mark’s and Laura’s accounts ‘render Waldo’s previously powerful narratives null and void’ (308). On the one hand, the degree of narrative agency with which Caspary accords Laura is decidedly feminist, and Laura’s disruption of the discourse aligns her with Caspary herself, a female crime fiction writer who uses her novel to challenge male-authored narratives that malign and silence female voices. But on the other hand, just as Laura is intertextually and in some ways inextricably linked to these other narratives, so is Laura’s voice connected to Mark’s and Waldo’s and so do these voices enrich rather than encroach upon one another. As Laura confronts Waldo for crafting her in his grossly misconstrued image, she repeatedly shouts ‘shut up!’ (155). While’s Laura’s enraged reaction is a fitting way to confront an assailant and murderer, the silencing of voices, however unpleasant or, in this case, criminal they may be, is not a productive or feminist methodological approach to literary analysis or adaptation studies. By advocating for Laura’s superiority over her fellow male narrators or defending Caspary’s novel from its filmic ‘bastardisation’, we don’t just risk reinforcing a binaristic and patriarchal understanding of gender and power by reversing hierarchies and placing women and women authors on top.6 We also fail to acknowledge that ‘the relation of juxtaposed voices is’, as the fugue form exemplifies, ‘always productive’ (Benson 299). Laura’s polyvocal narration furthers Caspary’s feminist project in other, perhaps more subtle, ways. Considering Caspary’s use of polyvocality to voice the condition of the modern woman and to critique openly a genre that demonized and dismissed her, we may expect her to present perspective shifting as a vehicle for pursuing truth, positing that collections of richer, more representative voices create more accurate narrative accounts. Indeed, this is the position several critics have adopted. Babener, for instance, maintains that Caspary ‘mesh[es] together several points of view that in combination yield the full story’ (87). Similarly, Urda’s assessment of Caspary’s different voices identifies Laura’s account as an authoritative narrative: ‘[Laura’s] self-conception resembles how we traditionally think of an omniscient narrator, a godlike deity looking down from the mount’; ‘Laura takes on that role and violently pushes Waldo out of it’ (306–07). While Caspary may on one level valorize the practice of perspective shifting, directly deploying it to empower a female subject, her novel is also wary of its own voices, including Laura’s. Through her novel’s own rich narrative structure, Caspary draws attention to the limits of the crime fiction genre. Yet she also, in more circumspect ways, draws attention to the limits of her own narratives, particularly in terms of their reliability. The fugue exemplifies the rather democratic principle that each voice is independent and valuable, but maintaining that a voice warrants listening to does not imply that a particular voice, or the sum of certain voices, holds an authoritative claim on reality. In fact, the fugue form’s egalitarian dynamics and, as Lachman writes, ‘plurality of interpretations’ call the principles of power and authority themselves into question (34). According to Lachman, Bakhtin believed that ‘the polyphonic novel holds ethical value because it preserves uncertainty and difference’ (39). He maintained that polyphony ‘evokes the particular capacity of the novel to accommodate contradictory positions and multiple discourses’ (29) and to ‘embrac[e] dissonance and moral ambiguity’ (30) while not ‘imposing any central authoritative view’ (29). Throughout her novel, Caspary directly invites, even urges, her readers to question the authenticity of Laura’s narratives. Even the novel’s seemingly authoritative document, the police report that divides Mark’s and Laura’s accounts, is undermined by Mark’s statements regarding it: ‘the most interesting developments of the case never got into the Department files’ and ‘the story deserves more human treatment than the police records allow’ (157–58). By entrusting a good third of the novel’s episodic content to Waldo, a narrator who openly declares that he will ‘describe scenes which . . . [he] did not hear’ and whose credibility is further damaged by his criminal behavior, Caspary makes a forceful statement on the unreliability of narration (18). Waldo, himself an author, exemplifies the ways in which neither the author nor his creations are authoritative. Waldo’s narrative, for example, contains two instances that can be interpreted as meta-commentaries on the role of the narrator or author. When art dealer Lancaster Corey informs Waldo of a prospective buyer for Stuart Jacoby’s portrait of Laura, Waldo expresses his desire to craft an ‘ironic small story’ based on the painting’s sale (47). As the two men bicker over Waldo’s potential inclusion of Jacoby’s name, and whether Waldo’s story will seek to be factually accurate, Caspary explicitly addresses the processes involved in and consequences of constructing narrative. Therefore, it seems less than coincidental that Corey and Waldo’s conversation occurs only pages after Bessie Clary admits to ‘concealing’ evidence from the police (42). Bessie’s actions—her deliberate arrangement of materials in order to project a desired image—can be seen as a more covert commentary on the functions of the author or narrator. As Mark notes, Bessie’s actions construct a certain ‘picture of the crime’, one that is blatantly false (45). Such provocative meditations on narration are not only found in Waldo’s account. It is one thing for Caspary to repeatedly emphasize and draw attention to her villain’s unreliability and quite another for her to present her hero as deeply biased. Yet, Mark’s narrative is also compromised, not as a result of fabrication or a deficiency of character, but through the very process of its production. Mark admits to having had ‘Waldo’s unfinished story and Laura’s manuscript . . . in [his] hands before [he] put a word on paper’ (158). He confesses, ‘I have tried to tell what happened as it happened, without too much of my own opinion or prejudice. But I am human. I had seen what Waldo wrote about me and had read Laura’s flattering comments. My opinions were naturally influenced’ (158). If Waldo’s and Mark’s narratives, as well as the novel’s stenographic account, are actively presented as unreliable, what do we make of Laura’s narrative? Shaped by her fear ‘of facts in orderly sequence’, Laura’s account is certainly the most experimental of Caspary’s narratives (144). Moreover, it is perhaps the only account that independently possesses polyphonic or fugal attributes. For example, Laura’s account toys with linear temporality, embodying what Lachman calls, ‘one of the most radical attributes of polyphony’: its ‘potential for temporal simultaneity’ (45). Laura’s account includes frequent flashbacks, reflections on the present, and, through phrases such as ‘young Salsbury would ask’ (134, emphasis added) and ‘he will find me . . . in a pink slip’, suggestions of the future (157, emphasis added). Laura’s narrative also takes up the fugal element of repetition. Throughout her account, Laura not only revisits the night of Diane’s murder but also fixates on her law firm’s rather rhythmic name ‘Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone’, words that become like a repeated fugal subject as she keeps hearing them in her mind and ‘attache[s] the words to a melody’ (133). While Caspary calls attention to the ways in which Waldo’s and Mark’s narratives are untruthful as a result of fabrication or bias, she mobilizes different, subtler strategies in order to indicate that Laura’s voice, while independent and fully valid, is not authoritative. On one level, Caspary alludes to the ways in which Laura’s voice is compromised by forces beyond her control, one of those being the mystery genre in which she is placed. While Laura may ‘[step] in to . . . seize her own story’ (87), she neither confirms nor denies the allegations made against her. Caspary features Laura’s narrative before revealing the identity of Diane’s murderer, and this plot construction allows her to engage with certain tropes of mystery fiction, namely, misguiding the reader to suspect an innocent character and not revealing the identity of the perpetrator until the work’s final stages. Through the act of reading, we participate in forming our own misinterpretations of Laura by believing or entertaining the possibility that she is guilty of a crime she did not commit. In this way, we are most closely aligned with the position of the detective, suspecting a woman we may be inclined to cast as a femme fatale. But Laura’s silence on her innocence or guilt serves a purpose other than fulfilling crime fiction tropes; it also compels us to draw associations between words, power, and women’s access to expression. In her narrative, Laura writes, ‘I thought of my mother and how she had talked of a girl’s giving herself too easily’ (138); ‘myself I have always withheld’ (139). In Laura, Waldo is a published writer. References to his works frequent the pages of his and Mark’s narratives—sometimes in footnotes, which lends his writing more credibility and weight—and his name, as he demonstrates to Laura upon their first encounter in which she seeks his endorsement for a pen, has power. But Laura, perhaps because of her position as a woman, is confined to an internal narrative form; she uses the somewhat gendered term ‘diary’ to classify her account, even linking the practice of keeping one to ‘girlhood’ (121). Caspary also chooses to have Laura work in advertising, generating headlines for public consumption, producing a form of writing that, unlike Waldo’s, remains unlinked to her own name and identity. Her words are, in this regard, unclaimable. The mystery genre is deeply concerned with having readers question whom they can trust. While Caspary may position Laura, or even Mark, as viable options, it appears that she is ultimately urging us to realize that we cannot and should not elevate any one narrative voice. Caspary’s decision to give Laura a career in advertising—a career she herself pursued before becoming a journalist, screenwriter, and author—serves a function other than commenting on femininity, authorship, and ownership; it is her most overt way of suggesting that Laura’s voice is also unreliable. As she expresses her desire ‘to remember the facts . . . and send them out in neat parade like sales arguments’, Laura conflates advertisements with authoritative truth (121). Yet, as Caspary demonstrates, these advertisements are deeply problematic. Laura’s job signifies her own willingness, or at least her own ability, to produce unreliable and even manipulative language—language like the Lady Lilith face cream headline she endorses and edits: ‘is yours just another face in the crowd? Or is it the radiant, magnetic countenance that men admire and women envy?’ (113). When Laura reflects on her manipulation of Shelby, she also directly acknowledges the ethical implications of her work: ‘I was ashamed; I thought of the way we proud moderns have twisted and perverted love, making arguments . . . just as I make arguments for Jix and Lady Lilith when I write advertisements’ (139). Nowhere does the ‘cynicism about the work she does’ (115) become more apparent than through the story of Diane Redfern, the young model who is accidentally murdered instead of Laura. Despite their quarrelling over Shelby, Laura acknowledges her own connection to Diane, commenting, ‘she wanted something better than she had . . . I’m not so different’ (98). While Laura may not have murdered Diane, Caspary points out that she profits from her exploitation. Indeed, it is Diane’s exposed body that adorns Laura’s Lady Lilith ads—the same body that is reduced to ‘blood and membrane and hideous shattered bone’ for its occupation of Laura’s space (135). Thus while Babener argues that Caspary ‘structures the novel’s narrative to authorize Laura as verbal arbiter of the discourse’ (87), it is crucial to note that Laura’s story also belongs to another woman, a murder victim whose silenced voice haunts the novel’s pages. Though Caspary advocates for Laura’s voice, she doesn’t naively valorize it; rather, she positions it as complex and even overdetermined, a narrative move that advances rather than hinders her feminist objectives. By undermining hegemonic, singular truths and problematizing the categorical authority of voice, even that of her eponymous heroine, Caspary decentres patriarchal logic. In what follows, we turn to—and, more pointedly, listen to—Otto Preminger’s film to explore how it uses cinematic techniques related to voice to engage in similar work. We primarily analyze the score, situating it as an unheard ‘voice’ in the film, but we also briefly consider the voiceover. The film’s sound design, we argue, complicates generic noir conventions and, in many places, challenges visual content. In so doing, it interacts fugally with Caspary’s novel, conversing with and responding to its feminist vision in provocative and under-examined ways. ‘More Eloquent Than Speech’: Music and Narration in Laura (1944) Listening to Laura (1944), or to any film, is no easy task. The medium is dominated by visual information, information structured by codes that we know, if only informally, how to recognize and occasionally even to name. By contrast, with the exception of dialogue, film sound is almost exclusively an invisible discourse, and this is especially the case when it comes to non-diegetic music. As Claudia Gorbman established in her seminal study of film music, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, conventional film scores are, ironically and paradoxically, inaudible. That is, the spectators obviously hear the score, but they do so without ‘hearing or attending to it consciously’ (76). The codified sound practices of classical cinema dictate, among other things, that the score should never supersede dialogue (77), that the ‘duration of a music cue’ follow strict patterns (76), and that the mood of the music complement narrative content so as not to call attention to itself (78). Given such customs that render Hollywood film scores ‘inaudible’, it is important to observe that the audience did hear Raksin’s score for Laura, to the point of demanding copies of the theme music. This prompted the studio to create a release—a version with lyrics by Johnny Mercer—which in turn initiated a new and profitable trend in Hollywood composing: the theme score (Kalinak 170). What were audiences hearing in the score? And in other components of the sound track, such as the voiceover? And, perhaps most significantly, how does what Michel Chion calls the audiovisual—the interaction between image and sound—function in this film and converse with Caspary’s novel? An extremely prolific and successful Hollywood composer, David Raksin studied composing under Arnold Schoenberg, the famous twentieth-century composer known for developing influential innovations in, among other things, atonality and motivic structures. Schoenberg’s theories and practices are evident in a number of Raksin’s scores, with critics like Kalinak and Jon Newsom emphasizing in particular Raksin’s experimentation with the fugue form throughout his career. Newsom, for instance, identifies the ‘Schoenbergian counterpoint’ featured in Raksin’s score for Carrie (161), the ‘four-part free fugato’ that underscores a key scene in Separate Tables (164), and Bach’s influence on the instrumentation in The Redeemer (167). Kalinak explains that these techniques distinguish Raksin’s work from that of other influential Hollywood composers like Max Steiner: ‘The harmonic structures of his scores are more impressionistic and postimpressionistic than romantic or late romantic; their texture tends toward the contrapuntal or fugal rather than chordal’ (160). Raksin didn’t adopt a fugue form for the score of Laura. But he does, as we will demonstrate, experiment with repetition, melodic sequences, and inversions in ways that invoke the fugue and echo the polyvocality of the novel. Raksin also uses formal aspects of the score to shape the audience’s perceptions of the main characters, especially Laura but also Mark and Waldo. In an oft-cited story about the film’s production, Raksin describes how Preminger and studio head Darryl Zanuck viewed Laura as a ‘whore’ and wanted to use the song ‘Sophisticated Lady’ to signal her promiscuity to viewers.7 Raksin resisted: ‘Like Caspary, Raksin saw Laura as a sensitive romantic and not as the fallen woman envisioned by Preminger and Zanuck; he wanted to compose a score reflecting this conception of her. In attempting to do so he challenged prevailing musical conventions for representing female sexuality’ (Kalinak 166). The resulting score, organized around one main theme, is defined by the following features: it rejects common noir music conventions; it resists tonal categorization; it is marked by irresolution; and it is repetitious but nuanced in ways that simulate fugal practices. In these ways, the film’s music, both its formal features and its ideological aims, engages Caspary’s experimentation with voice and perspective shifting. Raksin’s score, which viewers first hear during the opening credits, resists generic classification and thereby complicates our understanding of the titular character. For one, Raksin ‘blur[s] the distinctions between the classical and the popular idioms’ (Brown 90), mixing techniques from both musical traditions into a unique hybrid sound. He also, as Kalinak persuasively argues, rejects various sonic ‘stereotypes’—including brass, ‘unusual harmonies’, and rhythms derived from the blues—that ‘evolved as a type of shorthand for sexual experience, subconsciously affecting spectator response’ (166). The resulting score interacts with the visuals in complex ways. The opening credits consist of a single stationary frame of the portrait of Laura hanging on her apartment wall. Dressed in a strapless black evening gown, she stares out at the viewer while holding a filmy wrap to her breast; she wears no jewellery, which brings attention to her bare skin and lustrous hair, highlighted both through strategically placed tints within the painting itself and through the set’s lighting design. Critics have noted the portrait’s change from the novel—in Caspary’s version the portrait is less glamorous, depicting Laura ‘perched on the arm of a chair, a pair of yellow gloves in one hand, a green hunter’s hat in the other’ (33)— and see in it an attempt to align Laura with a ‘ghostly femme fatale’ (Matzke 121). However, the music sends different messages, situating Laura as a romantic heroine. Here it is instructive to compare Laura’s opening credits to those of another key film from 1944 with a paradigmatic femme fatale, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. In the latter film, we see the silhouette of a man on crutches slowly hobble toward the camera until his shadow eclipses the frame. This image is accompanied by Miklós Rózsa’s memorable score, stripped down music played by two instruments, horns and a drum, in a low register to a march-like rhythm. The instrumentation, tonality, and meter combine to produce an iconic noir sound. As scholars such as Marc Vernet and Richard Ness have argued, the typical noir score from the 1940s was united by several features: ‘dissonance’ (Ness 53), spare arrangements—created through ‘smaller ensembles and selective instrumentation’ (Ness 54)—and atonality.8 By contrast, Raksin’s score resides in the classical sphere. It eschews percussion and brass, relying primarily upon strings and woodwinds; unlike Rózsa’s score, dominated by a single drum and horns, Raksin’s is played by a large symphony orchestra that produces a rich spectrum of sound. These features of the score, along with its stylized flourishes, evokes the realm of the romantic and perhaps even, as Kalinak claims, the epic, thereby ‘rest[ing] uneasily with the ideological message of the portrait’ (168). Our first aural information, then, creates dissonance and ambiguity in the audiovisual register. This ambiguity is heightened by Raksin’s refusal to resolve the main melody of the score. The theme laid out in the opening credits, for example, concludes not where we might expect but rather on chordal irresolution as we shift into the first diegetic scene; and while this is not an unusual sonic trope at the beginning of films, particularly ones that feature a mystery, that chord is never resolved, even at the end of the film. The score at the end is in the key of B flat, but the final note, as the image shifts to the closing credit frame, is a G, lending the music, and perhaps the film as a whole, an unfinished quality. One might argue that this aligns the film’s score with others—Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock’s Vertigo comes to mind—that defy chordal resolution in order to advance the theme of the unknowable Woman. Ciocia, for example, believes that the monothematic, unfixed melody strips Laura of her richness as a character—‘unresolved music equals ephemeral woman’ (32)—while Brown claims it encourages obsession with and fetishization of her (86). However, we argue that the repetitious and wandering nature of the main musical motif empowers Laura by resisting closure. Even Brown acknowledges that the score upsets conventions by refusing to conform to codified practices and that this has implications for our understanding of the titular character: ‘Laura Hunt evades the “saint” and in particular the “whore” labels: she remains her own person, never to be wholly possessed by the song’ (89). Richard Ness, in “A Lotta Night Music: The Sound of Film Noir,” makes this claim more forcefully. Noting the ‘fluid and constantly changing’ aspects of the repeated main theme, he states: ‘Thus, the numerous variations on the main theme seem not to reflect different conceptions of Laura, but rather, her refusal to be contained within a single musical interpretation’ (60). The score, in other words, releases Laura from the figurative prison of the portrait, a point made most evident in the opening credits. The stationary frame of the camera and the borders of the portrait doubly contain Laura, while the score not only refuses to categorize her as a femme fatale but also traverses boundaries and wanders where she cannot, affording her character a mobility that the visuals curtail. Moreover, we hear the main theme played multiple times, both diegetically and non-diegetically, before Laura reappears partway through the film; through the music, she uncannily presides over the narrative even when she isn’t physically present and, in fact, is believed to be dead. And that music, which we might call the Laura theme, takes on distinct meanings. When Mark plays a recording of the song on Laura’s phonograph—the first time we hear the theme in full after the opening credits—Shelby refers to the tune as ‘sweet’, a term Laura’s maid Bessie also uses to describe Laura, and we come to associate the music not with the deviousness of a femme fatale but rather with Laura’s benevolence and virtue. She is, as Bessie says and as the romantic Laura theme implies, ‘a real, fine lady’. Caspary’s feminist takedown of the hard-boiled crime genre involves rejecting both the scheming femme fatale and angelic homebuilder stereotypes and instead developing a main female protagonist who is successful and generous, if flawed, but this project also entails reworking the stock character of the detective. In a short piece she wrote in 1978 for the compilation The Great Detectives, Caspary describes in retrospect how she had to surmount her ‘prejudice’ against detectives when writing Laura (143). In popular fiction and films, detectives were, she writes, generally flat—‘swaggering’ and impulsive men motivated, as she puts it, by ‘large exposed breasts’ (144). By contrast, she wanted to make her detective figure ‘[come] alive’ (144). While some critics have argued that Mark’s complexity gets erased in the film adaptation (Ciocia 36), listening to the film offers another perspective. The score works to release not just Laura but also Mark from the prison of stock characterization, namely the hard-boiled detective archetype. Significantly, no music gets attached to Mark until over forty minutes of screen time have elapsed. As Mark walks toward Laura’s apartment on a rainy night, we hear a new theme in Raksin’s score: a dark melody organized around diminished harmony and played by muted brass. With its clear tonal centre, low register, steady 4-4 rhythm, and brass-driven instrumentation, the music recalls scores like Rózsa’s for Double Indemnity. This is music, that is, that we might expect to underscore the actions of hard-boiled males in classical 1940s noir. Moreover, the visual iconography complements the sound: Mark walks down a dark and rainy urban street, wearing a rain-slicked trench coat and a hat tilted down over his eyes; as he dismisses the officer guarding Laura’s front door, he places a cigarette into the corner of his mouth. However, only a few measures into this new musical sequence, Raksin shifts gears. It is as if Raksin introduces a shorthand musical cue, ‘hard-boiled detective’, only to immediately expose its limitations and reject it. As Mark enters Laura’s apartment and gazes upon her portrait, the main theme we have come to associate with Laura returns. For the remainder of the scene, which shows Mark wandering around Laura’s apartment, touching her belongings, and, after a brief interruption by Waldo, finally pouring himself a drink and falling asleep in an armchair, the score cycles through various motivic structures, but they are all dominated by the main Laura theme. However, it is played in different meters—by turns frantic and leisurely—and with changing instrumentation, suggesting Mark’s agitation with Laura’s influence over him and his unsettled feelings about her. Significantly, when the studio threatened to cut this scene, believing that viewers would be perplexed by it, Raksin convinced Zanuck that the score could narrate here; more specifically, he believed it could convey to the audience, without a single spoken word in voiceover or dialogue, that Mark was falling in love with the dead Laura (Kalinak 176). This point is driven home aurally toward the end of the scene. As Mark is drawn toward the portrait again, now with a drink in hand, the pace of the music slows down and accompanying instruments recede into the background in order to amplify the sound of a piano plucking out the Laura theme. Raksin used the Len-a-tone process to soften and slightly distort the sound of the piano, imbuing it with an oneiric quality. The music and visuals combine here to act as what Sarah Kozloff calls ‘narrating agents’ (44); in other words, the cohesive audiovisual register tells us, using only the language of cinema, that Mark is falling in love and wrestling with those feelings. This lends nuance to his character and allows us to penetrate his tough exterior to a degree unprecedented in contemporary noirs featuring male detectives. While he does use the term ‘dame’ a handful of times, Mark is not the stereotypically hardened detective that Waldo would have us believe he is. ‘He isn’t capable of any normal, warm human relationship’, Waldo tells Laura after she returns. ‘He’s been dealing with criminals too long’. This pivotal scene and others belie such a claim, demonstrating, through the score in particular, that Mark is a thoughtful individual with a rich and imaginative, if conflicted, inner life. The score also shapes Waldo’s character, covertly undermining his authority through experimentation with fugal practices that emerge as early as the first diegetic scene. We hear Waldo’s introductory voiceover as the camera wanders around his apartment and ultimately comes to rest on Mark as he investigates the room. Eugene McNamara claims that the main musical theme introduced in the opening credits ‘remains attached to Laura alone’ and that the opening scene introduces not just new characters but ‘a different kind of music’, full of ‘brooding, foreboding menace’ (2). But this is not the case. We hear, underneath Waldo’s voiceover, not new music but rather the main theme, albeit a stripped down version played only by a few instruments. After several measures of the main sequence play out in this muted fashion, Raksin introduces a new sequence, a loose inversion of the main theme played on a flute or piccolo. This new motif, akin to a fugal answer to the main sequence—it borrows rhythms of the main sequence and similarly draws heavily on half steps—enters just as we hear ‘I, Waldo Lydecker’ in the voiceover. And, indeed, this inverted melody will come to be associated with Waldo over the course of the film, notably in moments where he reveals his obsession with Laura. We hear it, for example, when Waldo stalks Laura’s apartment on a snowy night after she stands him up and several minutes later when he explains to Laura his ruthless investigative practices when researching her suitors. Both of these scenes occur in the film’s extended flashback, wherein Waldo narrates the history of his relationship with Laura to Mark. Describing the voiceover of the film, Babener states that ‘unlike the novel where his narrative is undermined by conflicting versions of the story, most particularly Laura’s own, the film ratifies Lydecker’s account by granting it unchallenged verbal license’ (Babener 91). While we will say more shortly about the status of Waldo’s voiceover, it is worth noting here how the score complicates Babener’s argument. While it is true that the flashback is controlled by Waldo via narrative point of view and voiceover, the Waldo motif, with its uncanny tones, also functions as a ‘narrating agent’ (Kozloff 44). And this agent tells a story markedly different from the romantic and nostalgic memory Waldo seeks to construct. The music, that is, eludes his discourse, again producing a disconnect within the audiovisual frame. In this way, the film makes use of the cinematic tools available within the medium to render us sceptical of Waldo’s authority, not unlike the strategies Caspary uses within Waldo’s section in the novel. Just as Caspary plants seeds of doubt for the reader that disrupt the seamless authority of Waldo’s narration—for example, Waldo claiming that he can describe perfectly scenes at which he physically wasn’t present—the sound design produces small moments of rupture, ones that expose Waldo’s true obsessive nature. If the score functions to challenge noir tropes and shape our understanding of characters, the voiceover functions, much like Caspary’s perspective shifting, to caution us about the reliability of narration. That is, while the monologic voiceover clearly departs from the novel’s polyvocality—we hear only Waldo’s voice—the end result is the same: it makes the viewer suspicious of supposedly authoritative voices. J. P. Telotte argues that voiceovers in noir generally ‘point up not only truth’s elusiveness but also the very contentiousness of what often passes for truth’ (15), and while this is certainly the case when it comes to Waldo’s narration, his voiceover in other ways defies convention. Andrew Spicer identifies two main types of voiceover in noir films: the investigative and the confessional (75). Waldo’s falls into neither category, though at times it approximates the confessional. For example, his narration foregrounds the subject of memory—the first line of dialogue in the film, spoken in voiceover, is ‘I shall never forget the weekend Laura died’—and, particularly in the extended flashback, he divulges his occasionally unsavoury behaviours, such as hounding Laura’s suitors. This recalls the voiceovers of characters like Walter Neff (Double Indemnity) or Joe Gillis (Sunset Boulevard), who retrospectively walk through their past in order to expose their illicit actions, identify where they went wrong, and, perhaps most importantly, lay themselves open to judgement. However, confessional voiceovers like Walter’s and Joe’s generally facilitate a connection with the viewer, ‘mark[ing] our privileged access to a consciousness, to a world of memory and thought that is far more detailed and vivid—if potentially more colored by the imagination—than any simple linguistic utterance’ (Telotte 15). By contrast, Waldo’s narration is not testimony, nor does it provide ‘telling access’ to his ‘inner world’ (Telotte 15). Rather, it leads us away from his inner world and away from the truth. In other words, while we might doubt the objectivity of Walter’s narration in places—he is, after all, so consumed by Phyllis that he is ‘all twisted up inside’—we never doubt that he is authentically attempting to testify to his friend and boss, Keyes, whom he has betrayed. Waldo’s voiceover is strikingly different: it deliberately misdirects and lies. The validity of Waldo’s voiceover is undermined in other ways. For one, it is not the voice of the acousmêtre, as defined by Chion. While we might align him with that figure in the first part of the opening scene—the ‘not-yet-seen’ voice that ‘becomes invested with magical powers’ (23)—he almost immediately undergoes ‘de-acousmatization’ (28). He is not only shown on screen but also embodied in a way that highlights his vulnerability: he is naked, aging, and—unlike the rotund Waldo of the novel—so thin as to appear fragile. Moreover, his voiceover doesn’t preside over the entire film, as do typical noir confessionals. Rather, it abruptly disappears only a third of the way into the film, displaced by other voices, including the score, that provide more reliable information. In this way, his narration is not unlike the ‘vanishing love songs’ Krin Gabbard describes. Analyzing the sound design of Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947) and Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia (1953), Gabbard demonstrates that musical motifs associated with love and romance recede and then disappear altogether as the films’ couples grow disenchanted with one another. In a similar way, Laura’s sound design creatively challenges Waldo’s reliability by granting him narrating agency that it then, suddenly and strikingly, strips him of. Finally, the vague ontological status of Waldo’s voiceover—from where and what temporal register is he narrating?—undermines its authority. Even though Sunset Boulevard finally reveals its voiceover to be otherworldly, it is nevertheless situated: Joe is narrating from the afterlife while floating face down in Norma’s pool. Therefore, while Urda, Babener, and others argue that denying a voiceover to Laura produces a type of gendered violence—‘she is denied discursive authority, forbidden to advance her own viewpoint’ (Babener 93)—they fail to acknowledge not only the cinematic language that endows Laura with a voice (the score, dialogue, framing, etc.) but also the ways in which the film categorizes the voiceover device as polluted, fraudulent, and, ultimately, impotent. That is, within this film’s textual operations, not speaking in voiceover accords one more integrity and power. Last Words, Dying Voices In closing, we will touch briefly on the endings of the novel and film, since the issues we have discussed throughout—voice, music, power, and gender—collide in provocative ways. In the novel, Waldo, realizing he will never possess Laura, returns to her apartment late at night to kill her, but Mark, having identified Waldo as the killer, arrives in time to save her. In a physical struggle, he knocks Waldo’s head against a banister, a wound that will prove fatal. In the closing pages of the novel, Caspary emphasizes questions of voice. While Mark has resumed the narration at this point, it is Waldo’s voice that dominates. Mark recalls that as he and Laura rush Waldo to the hospital in an ambulance, Waldo ‘kept on talking. Always about himself, always in the third person. . . . It was the same thing over and over again, never straight and connected, but telling as much as a sworn confession’ (170). Caspary embeds Waldo’s voice into Mark’s narrative here, setting the next six paragraphs into italics and producing a curious narrative rupture that we haven’t seen elsewhere in the novel. Waldo is in a sort of fugue state here—speaking in the third person, he is dissociated from himself and the violence he enacted. But his rambling vocal confession, with its repetitions and variations on a theme—how women’s ‘treachery’ inspires men’s criminal behaviours (170)—recalls a fugue. The final lines of the novel similarly stress questions of voice. While the section remains framed by Mark’s point of view, the final lines are given to Waldo, as Mark reproduces a written confession that Waldo left behind. With the italicized passage and confession, it is as if Mark and Waldo are ‘singing’ at the same time, in counterpoint, on these closing pages, a sentiment underscored by the fact that Waldo wrote his confession ‘while the records were waiting on the phonograph’ the night that Laura stood him up and he determined to kill her (171). His statement, a more coherent version of his dying fugal thoughts on punishing women, is a libretto written into and out of the silence in his apartment. The ending of the film similarly stresses voice, though in different ways. As Laura prepares for bed while Waldo creeps back into her apartment to kill her, she turns on her radio to listen to Waldo’s broadcast, a meditation on love and the actions it can compel people to take. His acousmatic voice saturates the frame, penetrating the privacy of Laura’s bedroom as she sits at her vanity table pinning up her hair for the night. Transcending both time and space—the broadcast was recorded earlier and at a different location—Waldo’s voice powerfully, and uncomfortably, invades this intimate setting. Seeing Waldo in Laura’s living room, loading his shotgun while he listens to his own voice, produces a jarring effect for the viewer. Unlike the opening scene, which immediately strips him of his acousmatic powers by embodying him, here Waldo’s powers are overdetermined: he is at once the ‘radio acousmêtre’ (Chion 21) and the filmic acousmêtre, as well as a diegetic agent about to enact violence upon the film’s heroine. These issues are articulated through an emphasis on fugal voices. The broadcast ends with Waldo reading Ernest Dowson’s poem ‘Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam’, so that we hear two voices, Waldo’s ventriloquizing Dowson’s, simultaneously reflecting on love’s ephemerality. As the broadcast is coming to a close, Waldo surreptitiously enters the bedroom—now not just his voice but his body have violated its boundaries—and speaks to Laura. We briefly hear his diegetic voice and the voice of the broadcast in unison, playing together. As the radio program ends, the score, yet another voice, reenters and merges with Waldo’s dialogue. Not unlike the novel’s ending, here voices are collapsed together and occasionally speaking in unison. Ultimately, however, Waldo’s voice gets displaced. After he is shot by a police officer, he delivers his final, dying words—‘Goodbye, Laura. Goodbye, my love’—and the score takes over. While Waldo might deliver the final line of dialogue, the score gets the last word, reminding us that even in his most acousmatic or otherworldly state, Waldo lacks the ability to hold onto Laura, just as his voice lacks the ability to fully determine the film’s discourse. Listening to these Lauras, to the multi-voiced novel and to the sonically complex film that mobilize fugal techniques, provides us with new means of assessing both works, particularly their efforts to undermine hegemonic authority. But this act of listening, while especially pertinent to a novel and film deeply interested in issues of voice and sound, also provides us with template for approaching adaptation studies more generally. Indeed, the fugue—a composition in which different voices simultaneously take up and vary a particular theme—can serve as a model for conceptualizing adaptation itself. It embraces the processes of transposition and recycling and thereby renders the concept of originality or primacy suspect; within the fugue, attention is placed not on which voice started the theme but rather on the ‘conversations’ in which these voices engage. Moreover, the fugue demonstrates that any number of diverse conversations, or in terms that are more fitting for this fugal trope, melodies, can be generated from a particular idea or set of ideas. For instance, works such as Bach’s Art of Fugue, an unfinished series of approximately twenty fugues composed around one melodic subject, exemplifies the multiple exchanges that a single idea can propagate. In these ways, the fugal model frees adaptation studies from the myopic, and frequently misogynistic, rhetoric of fidelity. While dining with Mark at Montagnino’s, Waldo commands a female lounge singer to ‘restrain [her] clumsy efforts at imitation’: ‘spare the eardrums of one who heard Tamara introduce that enchanting song’ (55). The model for studying adaptations that we have put forth in this essay does not liken adaptation to an inferior cover or to an act of violence or violation, but instead defines it as the act of adding one’s voice to an ongoing, fluid, and plural discourse, a discursive exchange that can be by turns constructive, productive, and disruptive. In this regard, adaptation reveals itself to be an act that is as fugal as it is feminist. Footnotes 1 See, for example, Ciocia and Urda. See also Sonnet, who demonstrates how many adaptations of women’s crime novels from the era softened or erased altogether their provocative gender critiques. 2 Later works would be indebted to this network of Lauras. McNamara cites several films, including Preminger’s Fallen Angel (1945) and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) as well as more surprising works, such as a Magnum P.I. episode that contains a remarkably similar plotline (66–68). 3 As Stefania Ciocia observes, ‘the spectacular popularity of domestic noir in recent years has been accompanied by a more muted, interrelated literary phenomenon: the rediscovery of female crime writers of the Second World War era’ (27). Erin A. Smith describes the subversive nature of this recovery work, noting that in general ‘publishers and reviewers treat women writers of detective fiction . . . as second-class citizens’; ‘as a consequence, writing, reading, and advocating for this fiction is, among other things, an act of resistance to the exclusion of women from the literary field and to the devaluation of their contribution to it’ (197). A notable example of this recuperative scholarship is Sarah Weinman’s landmark collection Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s (2015), a work that includes Vera Caspary’s Laura. Through this collection, Weinman attempts to restore a ‘misplaced generation of crime writers’, a group of female authors who deserve ‘to take their place at the literary table’ (Weinman xviii). 4 Here, we use Gérard Genette’s theories of transtextuality, wherein metatextuality refers to one text’s assessment and critique of another. 5 To be clear, Bakhtin’s analysis makes no mention of the more familiar definition of polyvocal or polyphonic writing—novels that are narrated by multiple characters. Rather, his arguments are centred upon a specific definition of polyphony, one in which a novel imparts the impression of having been written by multiple authors not through perspective shifting but as a result of a ‘non-participating’ third-person narrator, an authorial consciousness who observes, but does not impact, the novel’s independent voices. As Kathryn Lachman observes, ‘literary critics today invoke polyphony in order to characterize virtually any text that employs multiple narrators, voices, languages, or storylines’ (29). By doing so, they not only ignore the term’s Bakhtinian origins but also its musical ones (35). Aware of the limits and overuse of the terms ‘polyphonic’ and ‘polyvocal’, we nonetheless contend that Laura warrants this classification. In his assessments of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, Bakhtin makes the compelling claim that the polyphonic novel grants its characters freedom through its ‘very structure’, a claim we find applies to Caspary’s own multi-voiced endeavour (13). 6 This is a misguided approach for another reason, namely, that Caspary also explores—and occasionally reinscribes—patriarchal constructions of masculinity and heteronormativity. Several characters position Mark against the other men in Laura’s life—particularly Shelby and Waldo—seeing him as a ‘true’ man. Laura’s maid Bessie is the first to make such a distinction, stating that Mark is ‘A man. . . . Most of them that comes here are big babies or old women. For once, even if he’s a dick, you’ve met a man’ (136). This becomes a motif, with Laura remobilizing similar language in her arguments with Waldo. ‘Mark’s a man’ (148), she states simply, or, later, ‘You’re trying to destroy him, too. You hate him. You’re jealous. He’s a man. Mark’s a man. That’s why you’ve got to destroy him’ (155). Bessie’s observation about men who, unlike Mark, are ‘big babies and old women’—words Laura later echoes when she says ‘there had been too many fussy old maids and grown-up babies’ (154) in her life—also points to problematic slippages between gender, sexuality, and the male body in the novel, wherein what Caspary describes as non-normative bodies and non-normative masculinity get aligned with non-normative sexuality. Waldo, whose effeteness carries sexual connotations in places, seems aware of this, compelling the reader to consider whether Caspary is reinforcing or attempting to dismantle this logic. When Laura confesses her desire for Mark, Caspary calls attention to Waldo’s body—described as grotesque—while also pointing to patriarchal definitions of masculinity: ‘Waldo’s pale eyes took color; on his forehead the veins rose fat and blue; the waxen color of the skin deepened to an umber flush. . . . “Always the same pattern, isn’t it? A lean, lithe body is the measure of masculinity”’ (148). Preminger’s film reinforces these ideas by casting Clifton Webb, who lived openly as a gay man, to play Waldo. For a seminal essay on representations of homosexuality in film noir that discusses Waldo’s queerness and how it gets aligned with deviance, see Richard Dyer. 7 Raksin recalls the episode: ‘At our first conference Preminger announced that he was going to use “Sophisticated Lady.” I suggested right away that it was wrong for the picture, whereupon Preminger said, “What do you mean, dear boy, the wrong piece? Don’t you like it?” I assured him that I liked the piece and its composer, but that did not make it the right theme for his film. He wanted to know why not, so I said, “Because it already has so many associations in the minds of people that it will arouse feelings that are outside the frame of this picture. I also think that you have made some connection between the title, ‘Sophisticated Lady’, and your conception of this girl.” At this, he blew a fuse and almost shouted, “The girl is a whore—she’s a whore.” I said, innocently like a child tormenting a parent, “By whose standards. Mr. Preminger?”’ (qtd. in Kalinak 167). 8 Mark Osteen, David Butler, and others demonstrate that while we might also associate classical noir films with jazz music, this is a false reconstruction: ‘not a single 1940s noir and only a few from the 1950s actually featured a jazz soundtrack’ (Osteen 154). Interestingly, Caspary and Sklar’s stage play introduces jazz as a central feature in the plot. Laura possesses a jazz record collection that Danny, a young and aspiring musician in her apartment building, covets; he also desires Laura, and Danny’s mother accuses her of leading him astray from both his classical training and his sexual purity. 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TI - ‘Their Voices Ring in My Ears’: Laura, the Fugue, and Adaptation
JF - Adaptation
DO - 10.1093/adaptation/apaa040
DA - 2021-03-05
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/their-voices-ring-in-my-ears-laura-the-fugue-and-adaptation-oDoGNJRFcJ
SP - 136
EP - 156
VL - 14
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -