How Literature Saved My Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

face has been obliterated by a shotgun blast. Homicide detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) has three suspects: Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), a closeted, high society gossip columnist who virtually “created” Laura; Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price, ludicrously miscast as Laura’s hunky fiancé, a rube from Kentucky); and Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), Laura’s wealthy, soignée aunt who purchases Shelby to serve, essentially, as her gigolo.
    Both as narrator and as actor within the drama, Lydecker overanalyzes the action as it unfolds, often deconstructing the drama before it happens. He’s WriterMan, Language Man, solipsism incarnate. When McPherson arrives and asks him if he’s Lydecker, Lydecker says, “You recognized me. How splendid.” Laura returns. He says to her, in a flashback, “In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I’ve never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention.” (In other words, he’s an essayist.) Though the film’s charm rides heavily on his wit—“I don’t use a pen; I write with a goose quill dipped in venom”—it must finally reject him, as do so many other narratives that feature introverted narrators contemplating more physically prepossessing specimens:
The Great Gatsby
,
The Good Soldier
,
Cat and Mouse
,
A Separate Peace
. I love/hate that I’m a writer rather than an action figure, so I compose works that celebrate and then desecrate my word-trapped half-life.
    Lydecker is too clever, too too. When Laura introduces herself to him, interrupting his lunch in order to ask him to endorse a product her advertising firm represents, he says, “Either you have been raised in some incredibly rustic community where good manners are unknown, or else you suffer from the common feminine delusion that the mere fact of being a woman exempts you from the rules of civilized conduct, or possibly both.” Carpenter is not enough. Prone to waxing rhapsodic over “lunch, beautiful lunch, day after day,” he doesn’t “know a lot about anything, but I know a little about practically everything.” McPherson is just right, a regular Joe who is both smart and handsome, heterosexual yet clever, verbalbut physical, the smallest man in the movie but the only one who lands a punch. It’s 1944: there’s a war on, and the hero can’t be an artist or a playboy. He needs to be someone who can get the job done.
    There is, I swear, more smoking in
Laura
than in any other movie ever made. In Laura’s apartment, perusing her journals and diaries, McPherson builds a veritable pyre of butts. The most interesting thing that happens to the cigarettes in this hilariously Freudian movie (why do you suppose McPherson’s second in command is named McEveety—pronounced “McAvity”?) is that in the last twenty minutes the cigarettes disappear and become guns: the fireworks get bigger. And when Laura inspects with admiration the long shotgun McPherson is holding in his lap, she doesn’t need to ask if he’s happy to see her. Lydecker, of course, can’t control his gun: he kills the wrong girl earlier in the movie (Diane Redfern rather than Laura), and when he later tries to complete the act, even Laura can outmuscle him, causing him to misfire. He’s quickly mowed down by McPherson’s boys. There’s control (verbal), then there’s control (physical). There’s language, then there’s blood.
    The people I’ve met who most closely resemble Carpenter are my jock friends from high school: dense galoots unaware that there’s anything to say about anything other than truistic bullshit. In my experience, the Mark McPhersons of the world don’t hide irrationalities beneath their controlled exteriors. Their interiorsare equally logic-based (I’m thinking here of Laurie). Lydecker, on the other hand,
c’est moi
, trapped in his own wildly subjective invention of reality. In this movie, though, I get to banish him, exorcise him, tell myself I’m not him, tell myself a