I Would Like to See It: Eyes of Laura Mars

“It could be a person who, in his own loony way,” says police lieutenant-cum-serial killer John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones) to photographer of the glamorous obscene Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway), “feels your work is promoting porno and decadence… and he has a mission to clean up the world.” Eyes of Laura Mars may whiff its last at-bat with the sudden introduction of a cheesy split personality twist, but for the rest of its runtime it reflects with admirable clarity on the ever-popular debate about the connection between a culture’s popular art and its behavior. Laura’s dramatized images of violence, her photography of highly staged catastrophes and lurid murders, form the tissue of her inexplicable connection to the minds of killers, her involuntary episodes during which she sees through the eyes of a murderer targeting her friends and colleagues. Wisely, the film never explains this phenomenon, leaving the viewer to puzzle over the precise nature of that sympathetic bond.

Director Irvin Kirshner executes and dissects his own conceit with lethal precision. In one sequence Laura, paradoxically blinded by her vision of the killer approaching two of her models in their apartment, fumbles her way through her office in an attempt to find a telephone, knocking things off shelves and bumping into furniture as she sobs in fear. By witnessing the murders of these two young women she is both made complicit in them and rendered helpless to intercede, trapped within the experience of watching as we the audience are “trapped” by the nature of the medium of film itself as these terrible events befall Laura and those around her. When she explains the nature of her visions to Neville using a live feed between a camera and television positioned close together, she relegates the viewer to that same voyeuristic position. “Turn that off,” says Neville, who we see ruthlessly interrogating suspects on multiple occasions, when Laura, adopting a reporter’s brusque affect, asks him questions on the feed. “It makes me uncomfortable.”

It’s this act of seeing around which the film revolves. The social role and moral responsibilities of the witness to atrocity are toyed with in a dozen clever ways, but ultimately the message is clear: violence stems from real-world traumas and systems, not the artists who engage those things. No matter how hackneyed the film’s final twist is, Neville’s monologue about his childhood as the baby of a neglectful prostitute and a violent, absent father is the well from which his vicious crimes are drawn. He recalls sitting alone in a locked room for days on end, wearing the same diaper the entire time while his mother worked the street, and his voice fairly crackles with rage. That this man grew up to crave the power and control offered by the police force can hardly be considered a surprise, as foreshadowed by his early ramblings about morality in art and, more pointedly, by his exasperated acceptance of his partner’s lethal shooting of a young mentally ill man. To men like Neville, immorality is daring to remind them of their own pain and powerlessness, and it deserves to be punished with real, actual violence.