NEVER CURSED VOL 6: Eyes of Laura Mars
"I Saw It Happen!" : POV and provocation in Irvin Kershner’s should-be classic
Under the yoke of a mid-June heatwave, New York robs me of the desire to choose. I order whichever little iced drink will come out the fastest, see whichever film is playing at the closest theater, agree to whichever plan is guaranteed to be air-conditioned. I disassociate on a date in a humid thunderstorm and end up riding the subway in the wrong direction from home, happy to let the city choose the course of my night in exchange for a couple extra minutes in an ice-cold railcar. By the fourth day over 90 degrees I am hermetically sealed in my apartment and glued to my phone, a voyeur to an algorithm-guided stream of images alternating between unchecked violence and studied self-promotion.
Irvin Kershner’s iconic New York giallo-noir Eyes of Laura Mars(1978) hums with the same feverish, out-of-body passivity. In its most successful and prescient scenes, the film deliberately dulls its “shocking” subject matter under a thick smear of artifice: lovers mediate a scene of romantic confession through a bulky camcorder; models strike poses, even in “candid” moments; crimes of passion are revealed to be meticulous recreations of staged photographs. While typically referred to as an American answer to the Italian giallocraze, Eyes of Laura Mars is also indebted to the disaffected, tragic determinism of classic film noir. Our heroine bears witness to crimes she’s unable to stop; a killer easily evades the police to find his inevitable mark; a shoehorned-in love story chugs along predictably between a femme fatale and a cynical detective, though their innocence may be reversed. While it doesn’t quite stick the landing, I am always more than happy to submit to the film’s stylish twists and turns. Eyes of Laura Mars’ exploration of subjectivity, culpability, and provocation in an age of mounting desensitization make it especially resonant now, and it’s long been at the top of my list of films that I think deserve a (more tightly-plotted) remake.
Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is a controversial fashion photographer whose feminist objectors seem to have only fanned the flames of her success. Her photographs are hyper-sexualized and sensationally violent, defended by Laura as an “account of the times in which I’m living.” Laura is surrounded by a retinue of men of varying degrees of usefulness: photo agent Donald (Rene Auberjonois) sets literal fires on set and puts out professional ones behind the scenes, ex-con Tommy (Brad Dourif aka the voice of Chucky) chauffeurs and lends her entourage a bit of street cred, louche ex-husband Michael (Raul Julia) glowers and begs for cash to finish his unremarkable novel. After Laura’s collaborators begin to be picked off one by one by a violent killer, detective John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones, startlingly young and groovy) begins to suspect Laura of the sensationalized violence that she stages in her fashion spreads. The cinematic twist: after a career metabolizing and mediating the male gaze, Laura has begun to have visions where she literally sees through the eyes of the man killing her loved ones. Her cries of “I saw it happen!” get misinterpreted by the police as a witness statement, but the audience knows something more supernatural is afoot.
The pet project of celebrity-hairdresser-turned-producer Jon Peters, Eyes of Laura Mars was initially developed as a vehicle for Peters’ then-girlfriend Barbra Streisand, who ultimately passed on the project but agreed to record the ballad “Prisoner” which opens the movie. Based on how incongruous the song feels compared to the rest of the film’s tone and disco-inflected soundtrack, it’s hard to imagine how Peters could’ve ever imagined Babs in the role, but then again it’s clear that his primary desire for the project was to recreate the multimedia blockbuster formula of his and Barbra’s A Star Is Born remake & tie-in soundtrack LP, creative coherence be damned. Eyes of Laura Mars was originally based on John Carpenter’s spec script Eyes, which underwent extensive and invasive rewrites (including a shift from LA to New York, and trading in an everywoman protagonist for a glam female photographer). It was Carpenter’s first major studio credit, but ended up being eclipsed by his independently-produced, record-breaking hit Halloween, which was released in the same year as Laura Mars and also played with voyeuristic POV sequences that placed audiences in the eyes and mind of a killer. Eyes of Laura Mars’ gritty, realist lens on its New York locations was designed by DP Victor J Kemper, who had just come off Mikey and Nicky and Dog Day Afternoon. Faye Dunaway, fresh off her Network Oscar, and photographers Helmut Newton and Rebecca Blake rounded off the all star team assembled by Peters to shock and awe audiences with an “authentic” look at the dangers and excesses of ‘70s New York and the fashion world partying at its center.
Critical and commercial response to the film was muted. A contemporary review of Laura Mars in the Washington Post even dared to call it a “would-be-chic whodunit,” but if there’s anything objectively true about this subjectivity-obsessed film, it’s that Eyes of Laura Mars is extremely chic. Costume designer Theoni Aldredge (who designed looks for Network, Moonstruck, Ghostbusters, & more) turned out hilarious high fashion looks for Laura’s campy shoots as well as grounded, muted wardrobes for the film’s characters that serve as a master class in late ‘70s beige. Dunaway’s go-to taupe-on-brown look on set appears to be a conservative at first glance, before she crouches to find her shot and reveals a flash of thigh underneath cleverly disguised slits up the legs of her baggy culottes. (I am formally requesting – begging – that someone recreate these pants for me.)
Unlike the callused, glam photographer at the center of the similarly fashionable thriller Blow-Up, Laura positions herself as the buttoned-up opposite of the cruel, lurid world created in her photographs. As we watch Laura struggle to balance her grief over the death of her friends, the ongoing police investigation, and her professional responsibilities, we see that she’s a decisive creative leader and generous collaborator, checking in emotionally with her models and praising her team. Her clear artistic vision is literally obscured in the middle of a shoot by an intrusive vision of yet another murder, shot by Kershner in an inventive montage juxtaposing the killer’s blurred POV and Laura’s view through her camera lens. In another complex, thrilling sequence, Laura flees her studio after receiving visions of the unseen killer reaching for Laura’s warehouse door. Kershner cuts between wide shots of Laura running through the cavernous, post-industrial hall (the movie is, among other things, a fantasia of covetable, affordable NY real estate) and POV shots of Laura from behind as the killer chases her. As the body count climbs, Laura and Lt. Neville begin to investigate her closest friends. The vise of paranoia tightens and Laura’s hardened veneer (understandably) begins to crack. Violence staged to stimulate gives way to the numbness of grief; real blood replaces fake.
Just as Antonioni’s Blow-Up lensed the amoral disaffection of swinging London a decade earlier, Kershner’s film reflected, magnified, and attempted to complicate anxieties about “Fear City” (as New York was referred to in leaflets distributed in the ‘70s by striking policemen to intimidate potential tourists). Watching it now, Eyes of Laura Mars feels like both an essential document of pre-digital, pre-Giuliani New York and an unreachable fantasy of a fashion industry untouched by AIDS, the magazine-torching 2008 recession, or the internet.
While the film was undoubtedly influenced by Mario Bava’s 1960s fashion world giallo Blood and Black Lace, Kershner is at his best when playfully updating the nihilistic tropes of post-WWII film noir – bedroom-eyed femme fatales, renegade detectives, unseen killers plaguing seedy societal underbellies, etc – for similarly rattled post-Vietnam audiences. In Kershner’s neo-noir, the audience is forced to watch as the killer stalks his victims, the titillating voyeurism of Psycho taken to a disorienting extreme. Cops are bumbling and lecherous, lingering on fetishistic shoe adverts in the paper and harassing the beautiful women they’re ostensibly charged to protect. Just as many film noirs center male protagonists attempting to survive and adapt to a newly cynical world, Kershner’s film is a troubled portrait of a woman attempting in vain to harness the indiscriminate violence and frank sexuality of the world around her.
Though it positions itself as being more complex than a moralistic knee-jerk reaction to increasingly violent and sexed up portrayals of women in the media, in a 1999 director’s commentary Kershner admitted that he sees the film as a cautionary tale about “what fashion does to women.”1 More accurately, it’s a film about what men do to women, both in terms of graphic, obsessive violence and pious moralizing. Women heighten and aesthetically interpret the violence and sexuality of the world around them, and men blame them when that violence does, in fact, erupt. In this way, Eyes of Laura Mars is also a film about the narrow creative lanes through which women are allowed to reflect a violent world back to itself.
Eyes of Laura Mars was released to a public both numbed and agitated by the violent images of the Vietnam War, like a knot of misfiring nerves under a barely-healed wound. In his essay “Photographs of Agony,” John Berger wrote about the “double violence” of graphic war photography, which ultimately numbs rather than activates. To break through this societal numbness, cinematic spectacle would have to up its game. Laura Mars’ POV sequences force the viewer to witness murder up close, the cinematic camera becoming a ruthless “eye we cannot shut.2” But they, along with similar sequences from Halloween in the same year, also mark the beginning of the modern slasher, a genre which is largely predicated on graphic depictions of violence against sexualized women. From our stance 30 odd years later, it’s clear that the leering “double violence” of the genre had more to do with titillation than Kershner’s vague gestures at political activation.
With the team assembled around Eyes of Laura Mars, Kershner’s film could have — should have — been an era-defining classic, making him an iconic provocateur rather than a consummate studio man (his next film as a director would be The Empire Strikes Back). But while the film’s images might aspire to provocation, in the hands of Kershner, Carpenter, and Peters, they don’t really point to anything subversive or new. The women of Laura Mars find themselves in positions of physical precarity and assumed amorality that are the generic, gendered hallmarks of American film noir, which would soon be exaggerated to shocking degrees in the slasher. Eyes of Laura Mars is an almost-insightful near-classic that would benefit from a contemporary, diverse generation of collaborators molding a new narrative from its archetypal building blocks. After all, fashion and serial murder are both ultimately about lust, compulsion, and acquisition. You could say the same of the doom scroll.
READING LIST
Variety’s contemporary review of the film
N+1’s John Berger obit
Celluloid Sorceress
Berger, again