“I noticed that his attention was fixed upon my clock:” masculinity and the queer film interior

Abstract

Depression-era Hollywood’s on-screen representations of queer and gender-non-conforming characters went beyond costume, gesture, and plot lines to include interior décor and carefully-chosen objects as assembled and arranged by art directors and set decorators in service to character development and narrative richness. A close look at Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) and at the visual codes surrounding its queer protagonist Waldo Lydecker, suggests that everything from the cut of his suits, to his flowery language, and especially his lavish New York penthouse filled with exotic bibelots and antiques combined to create an image of the effete, narcissistic, yet powerful “homosexual” widely feared at the time. In film noir productions, like the classic Laura, ornate interiors were often used not simply to suggest wealth and power but also moral corruption of the sort associated in some viewers minds with wealth in the decades following the Depression. Moreover, with the gradual spread of Modern architecture and design in the US, together with the notion that transparent glass walls, clean lines and smooth white surfaces conveyed objective, masculine and morally superior values, applied ornament and gilded surfaces of the sort we see in Lydecker’s home frequently came to encode messages of weakness and self-indulgence associated with femininity and, especially, effeminacy. All of these underlying messages are present in the set decoration of Laura, and especially in the material and visual representation of the evil Waldo Lydecker, whose obsession with his former protegée Laura Hunt drives him to murder.