beautiful work, wonderful work, day after day after day

The importance of work to Laura should not be overlooked when thinking about the sonic ideologies of Hollywood--those which Altman and Doane describe as the professionalism of sound specialists to erase any material traces of work in the soundtrack. Is it serendipitous that a film that thematizes the disruption implicit in the fantasms of sound would also, regardless of the supernatural longings of the male characters, have a heroine that praises the merits of "work, beautiful work [, d]ay after day after day"? She is almost a double of the composer himself, entangled in the requirements of the system, overworked, perhaps underpaid, but paradoxically producing effects that are completely antithetical to working conditions (love, the mystical, the fantastic). Both have to disappear for a weekend in order to continue to function properly. It's almost as if, rather than erasure of work, there is a certain amount of encryption of work in a Hollywood text that can be deciphered even from the beginning words of the film: "I shall never forget the weekend that Laura died." Because women, newly earning wages during wartime because of the absence of men, composed the main audience of a film like Laura, this emphasis on women's work in the context gothic fantasy is not surprising. Many have written on this trend in wartime films. Laura brings the question of what happens when women work to a crisis that is both violent and surreal, less a cautionary tale urging women back into the home, and more a commentary on the absurdity of the men that would have it that way. Why is it that everything goes awry because Laura takes a weekend vacation? Is the supernatural just a male delusion conjured up at the point of woman's absence from her accustomed place? Again, the acousmetric might explain this dialectic between supernatural and sexual explanation, since the acousmetre at times blurs the boundaries of the two. Yet the radiophonic extends these concerns outside the film, into the popular forms of the romance/mystery novel (from whence the film came) and the radio (where its melodic aura went). This network of reformulations extends the voice into multiple terrains, and breaks down the separate spheres of production and consumption in a kind of delirium, perhaps only possible when one thinks less of bodies or works and more of interconnections.  By presenting characters who work within popular culture, Vera Caspary highlights the schizophrenic condition of blurred lines between production and consumption.