Queer Villain Spotlight: Waldo Lydecker (Laura)
Clifton Webb's Waldo Lydecker is the epitome of the effete and deadly homosexual, and therein lies his great appeal as a character .
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I distinctly remember when I first watched the film Laura, Otto Preminger’s sleek and exquisitely crafted film noir. I was taking a graduate seminar on the genre, and this was one of our very first screenings. I also remember my exact response when I first saw Clifton Webb’s Waldo Lydecker: “Oh my GOD,” I thought. “This character is queer.” Yes, yes, I know how hopelessly naive that must sound to you, but you must remember that at this point I was but a fledgling scholar and writer, and I was still a little untutored when it came to the great works of classical Hollywood cinema, still less with the dictates of the Hays Code. To me it was still something of a revelation to see such a deliciously queer character, one who can’t be mistaken, except perhaps by the hopelessly naive, as anything other than a flaming villain.
Of course, as with so many films of classic Hollywood, it’s never explicitly stated that Waldo Lydecker is queer. However, in an era when so much queerness was relegated to subtext, Laura is remarkable for the extent to which it comes so close to saying the quiet part out loud. Waldo has all of the characteristics one associates with the queer villain: a sumptuously appointed apartment; an ability to deliver a withering putdown with a raised eyebrow; and, of course, an obsession with a woman, the Laura of the title. It is precisely his obsession with Laura that leads him to try to murder her when it looks as if she will marry someone else (though, in a lovely twist, it turns out that he had actually shot someone else, a young woman with whom Laura’s soon-to-be-fiance was carrying on an affair).
However, it’s important to point out that Waldo’s obsession with Laura is not of an erotic nature. Much like Ballin Mundson in Gilda–another classic Hollywood queer villain if there ever was one–Waldo desires Laura for what she says about him. Given her beauty and her own naive grace, Tierney is aptly cast as the character, and even when she is still just a young woman selling advertisements she has the unmistakable aura of glamour around her. More importantly for Waldo, she is the sort of malleable young ingenue that he can mold to his own tastes, and it is remarkable the extent to which he utterly disregards anything that Laura might feel.
What interests me more, however, is the extent to which we, in the audience, are led to revel in Lydecker’s sumptuous villainy. This is a man, after all, who has a rapier-sharp sense of humor and wit, which he is willing to use on any and all who stand in his way, whether that’s Dana Andrews’ rather boring and laconic Mark McPherson, who has been assigned to investigate Laura’s “murder,” or Vincent Price’s Shelby Carpenter, a kept playboy who is, in his own way, as effete and Waldo. He repeatedly runs circles around each of them, and he always seems to know just what to say or do to keep them slightly off-kilter. Whether it’s greeting McPherson while writing a column in the bathtub or delivering a withering putdown, Waldo knows more than everyone around him.
It soon becomes very clear that, as Les Fabian Brathwaite observes, “You almost root for him despite his imperious snobbery because he’s still the most interesting person in the room.” This much is clear from the opening scenes of the film which, like so many films noirs, is related in a voiceover, in this case from Lydecker himself. This immediately sutures us into his perspective, allowing us to inhabit, at least for a while, the mind and viewpoint of a murderous sophisticate. Laura, like so many other famous noirs, dispenses with the usual moral platitudes so common in classic Hollywood films (at least on the surface) and asks instead to inhibit the same sort of moral darkness as the characters.
In some important ways, as Brathwaite also observes, Waldo is as much, or more, the femme fatale (another fixture of classic film noir) than Laura herself, particularly since she doesn’t appear for a significant portion of the film and even then she seems more of a motivator of other’s actions than dangerous in herself. This is in marked contrast to Waldo, who is very much his own agent, forcing himself into the investigation of Laura’s murder despite not being asked to do so and even, in the end, going so far as to try to kill her again. And, however much McPherson might like to pretend that he finds Waldo dismaying and or disgusting, there’s also no doubt that he finds him compelling in the way that we often associate with the femme fatale.
The fact that Waldo is never explicitly referred to as a homosexual (or by any of the other epithets that were then in common circulation) also renders him into a fascinatingly obscure enigma. In the decades since the film’s release many people have grappled with just how to categorize Waldo, if indeed he can be categorized. He’s been seen as a gay man, as being asexual, and a little bit of everything else in-between. How one chooses to understand him depends a great deal on how one chooses to read the codes of classic Hollywood narrative and whether one tries to use contemporary categories of sexual identity to understand characters from a different period of cultural history.
Therein, I think, lies the reason that Waldo Lydecker is the most fascinating creature in Laura. A being of artifice and surface and delectable violence, he constantly eludes us, challenging us to constantly try to pin him down, even though such efforts are almost always doomed to failure. Because the dictates of the Production Code meant that Waldo’s identity, whatever it might have been, must remain in the realm of the unspoken, this allows him to constantly tease us and for us to take pleasure in his ultimate unknowability. As with so many of the great queer villains of classic Hollywood–whether it be the murderers of Rope or the sinister and manipulative Eve of All About Eve–we can simply enjoy the fact that he is deadly and alluring in equal measure. His death at the end of the film is far more than just narrative punishment; it is also a reminder of the power of the queer villain to escape the strictures of the heteronormative world.
Waldo Lydecker reminds us that, no matter what the world around us might say, sometimes it’s good to be bad.