Noir films’ preoccupation with sex and death seems antithetical to the rules laid down by the Hays Code, but the framework of crime drama ultimately characterizes these things as immoral. Take, for instance, perhaps its most referenced and remixed figure: the femme fatale. Despite her reclamation in certain parts of culture, she was not meant to be aspirational. She is a threat to the protagonist’s own masculinity. He may not be able to live without her, but she can very well carry on without him, preying on the next man to cross her path. Her sexual liberation leaves a trail of blood, and sometimes, by the end of the film, she is punished for her (implied) salacious behavior.
“When you were unattainable, when he thought you were dead, that’s when he wanted you most.”
Laura (1940)
Though not quite a femme fatale, the titular Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) in Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) grapples with this fear of the modern woman and her ability to shape her destiny. At first, an apparition with whom Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) develops an obsession, Laura’s figurative resurrection allows her to reclaim the narrative for herself.
In the first part of the film, we only hear about Laura through other people: her mentor Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), her fiance Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), and her aunt Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson). Even the portrait where McPherson first sees her face was painted by someone else. She becomes a pawn in their testimonies. Lydecker paints their relationship as edging on more than mentor and student until she was stolen away by Carpenter’s wiles. Carpenter portrays himself as nothing but a loving fiance, despite his wandering eye. Treadwell is the doting aunt, though with a strange affection for Laura’s fiance. Laura’s fierce independence makes these characters try to claim ownership, and even though she is presumed dead at the time, McPherson starts to do the same.
As his obsession grows, he begins to pillage her private writing in the name of his investigation. He practically lives in her old apartment, sleeping under the very portrait of Laura he covets: “Murder victims have no claim to privacy.” Questions he was posing to others began throwing back at him: “Have you ever been in love?” “Have you ever dreamed of Laura as your wife?” Except for McPherson, there’s no chance that Laura could love him back. The Laura of his mind is an outlet for his sexual repression, built off the hazy memories of others, denied of her full personhood, and reduced to the intrigue of her death.
The turning point of the film is when Laura, thought to be dead, has actually been alive the whole time. The woman shot in the face was actually one of the models who worked for Laura, and Laura simply took the weekend to contemplate her own marriage to Shelby. When the dead can talk back, we are confronted with the veracity of our own narratives. Did McPherson have a right to read her diaries and letters? Alive or dead, why did he, a total stranger, feel entitled to her as much as her own associates?
The parasocial relationship McPherson harbors for Laura in the first part of the film brings to mind the way dead women’s lives are frequently pillaged by true crime and its ilk. Their romance is a strange one, bordering on a similar obsession that Lydecker had with her, yet Laura is drawn to him. “For a charming, intelligent girl, you certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes,” remarks McPherson. Perhaps it is their pragmatism that brings them together, as they forgo any romantic rituals in favor of finding who the true murderer is. Or maybe, despite it all, McPherson is the closest thing to a normal person Laura can get. If there’s anyone who wouldn’t stand in her way, it’s McPherson.
Noir as a genre tends to sidestep any overt references to sex, opting instead for eyebrow-raising dialogue to appease the censors. Laura’s preoccupation with who truly “loves” Laura, for instance, emphasizes the psychosexual dynamics underlying the investigation. Double Indemnity focuses on the intense relationship between the leads, and the chemistry between Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck leaves us to fill in the blanks. The continued fascination with noir, even as the Hays Code ended, brought us the erotic thriller of the 80s and 90s (among other things). These erotic thrillers take the implicit sexuality of noir films and bring it to the surface. Though Body Heat, a Double Indemnity homage, kickstarted the genre, Niko Nikolaidas’s Singapore Sling (1990) wears its penchant for Laura on its sleeve and spins it into a surreal trip through the subconscious.
“I want to cry, but that will only make things worse.”
Singapore Sling (1990)
Singapore Sling is a film that defies categorization, though if I were to try, it’s a mishmash of various artistic proclivities wrapped up as an unauthorized quasi-sequel to Otto Preminger’s Laura. Its subtitle – The Man Who Loved a Corpse – is a reference to Lydecker’s line in Laura: “I don’t think they’ve ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse.” It’s sort of like Valley of the Dolls and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but Singapore Sling is edgier and more avant-garde than that. Taking elements of sexploitation and pornography, Greek theater, gothic fiction, and, of course, noir films, it has both the over-the-top sense of humor and the surreal atmosphere that the amalgamation of these heightened genres brings. Singapore Sling probably reveals more about the viewer than any of its characters. However, if I were to try –
Singapore Sling takes place a few years after Laura, with a detective (Panos Thanassoulis) hunting down a lead on Laura’s murder. With a mysterious bullet in his shoulder (reminiscent of Double Indemnity), he returns to Laura’s guesthouse. This time, Laura is really dead, as the mother (Michele Valley) and daughter (Meredyth Herold) living in the guesthouse murdered her as part of their sick games. We learn that the family is rife with incest and abuse, and the mother-daughter pair seem to share a strange sexual telepathy with each other. Succumbing to his injuries, the detective (dubbed Singapore Sling due to a cocktail recipe in his pocket) becomes their captive as they begin to play their games with him.
The emasculation of Singapore Sling is central to the horror of this story. We first see him at his lowest point, only to discover just how much lower it can get as the film progresses. Part of their torture includes force-feeding, electrocution, and various other sadomasochist rituals. We learn that the daughter bears an uncanny resemblance to Laura (though this may just be a hallucination of his fading subconscious), and his endurance may be due to his belief that Laura came back. Throughout the film, the theme from Laura echoes, “that was Laura, but she’s only a dream.”
Singapore Sling further echoes this obsession with Laura by sprinkling plot elements from it into its own. The broken radio at the guesthouse, the murder by gun-to-the-face, the portrait, the revenge and death of a lover. The daughter even pleads with Singapore Sling, “You don’t have to love a corpse!” By the end, he has entirely given in to their desires, engaging in a hazy threesome with them. In this moment, he has either totally lost his mind or gained complete lucidity.
Subordination of dubious consent to two women of dubious relation engendered hatred in Singapore Sling. The final minutes turn into a slasher, with the detective looking the most resolute he has ever been. Acting out his own frustration with Laura leaving him and his captivity, he stalks the halls of their guesthouse, seeking revenge on the daughter. His final mission is to destroy every memory of Laura. This memory includes himself, and the film ends with Singapore Sling burying himself alive.
Surely, we can all see ourselves in McPherson, as we have all fallen deeply in love with someone or something that is long gone (and sometimes they do figuratively “come back from the dead”). His successor in Singapore Sling has fallen so deep into the obsession that he even endures torture and rape, and murder in order to feed it. Singapore Sling is an exercise in excess and aesthetics, questioning why we wouldn’t want to bathe in the raw erotic energy that bubbles underneath the ugliness. Taken together, Laura and Singapore Sling are about how our obsessions can both cage us and set us free.
