Multiple voices 

By Caspary's modernist use of the interior monologue, the voice takes over, obliterating, through multiple perspectives, any true image of the past. While Preminger's Laura does not perform an obvious reproduction of her writing style (Les Girls, another filmed version of a Caspary novel, does a better job), there is a sense of a missing moral center from its outset, accompanied by a proliferation of accounts. The disembodied voice of authority at the beginning of the film turns out to be the voice most untrustworthy. Waldo Lydecker's voice, reminiscent of an earlier Hollywood's fast wit, is duplicitous to the very end, when we literally "see" the duplication of voice into the false sentimental version and the violent murderous version. We also witness the detective's perception and authority saturated by desire (to the point that some have considered the whole second half of the film to be McPherson's dream). At the same time, a variety of dialects and speaking styles strain to be heard in the vacuum of Hollywood homogeneity. Bodies can almost be heard in the grain of the almost Irish, the almost Southern voices. There is the clipped, no-nonsense voice of the detective. There is the wild bitter prose of the old-school critic. There are the false mannerisms of the society dame. Laura's voice is noticeable only by a stunning absence of vocal character or inflection, as if the other voices speak her into existence, and she is a presence onto which their own interior monologues project. As Lydecker says in his flashback, "The way she listened was more eloquent than speech." 

Yet, as I intimated before, this is not just another Galatea myth. It could be, on the one hand, that Caspary is "postmodernizing" Shaw's modernization of Pygmalion. This myth of woman created without reproduction, through the agency of man, evokes the image of bachelor machines. (Galatea is updated precisely as a "bachelor machine" in Shaw's Pygmalion.) But in Laura, instead of one man creating the ideal woman, culture does.