oh, you recognize me! 

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The first scene of Laura activates the acousmetric voice, only to deactivate its power immediately. The film starts without image, then, when the image appears, it is empty-- pure mise-en-scene which includes an image of a bodhisattva. The Buddhist presence encourages viewers to distrust the image, and at the same time gives us important unconscious information about Laura's character. 

In this empty scene ("I felt as if I were the only human being left in New York"), viewers are left to trust in the voice that pulls them along, but this voice is gradually revealed to be emerging from a ridiculous narrator--priggish, yet charming. The acousmatic voice of Waldo that narrates the remarkable opening sequence is immediately undercut in three stages--moving through Waldo's private sanctum to his very privates: first, when he interrupts the disembodied narration to scold the detective, "Don't touch that, that stuff's priceless!;" second, when the camera swings to reveal the skinny, naked body of Waldo in the bathtub; and third, when, upon hearing the sounds of Waldo arising from the bathtub, Mark is suddenly smug and at ease.  His reaction in reverse shot signifies that the detective has seen the critic's penis and is no longer intimidated by the illusions of power that Lydecker radiates. By the end of this film, when Lydecker's power is on the verge of evaporation, he is wielding the phallic double-barreled shotgun. While Waldo's physique, or at least his obsession with its inadequacy, is the overt motivation for his crimes in all versions of Laura, Preminger quite plainly makes the phallic power of the voice stand in for his penis. 

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The radiophonic narration that ends the film is completely unlike the narrative prosthetic that begins the film. Instead of using the voice to create a more powerful being, the radiophonic voice creates the dreamlike environment in which there is no being, or transformed being--thus allowing Waldo perhaps to convince himself that it is not murder he is committing, but a return to some state of harmony with Laura (Webb plays the scene as in a trance). Allen Weiss describes the radiophonic "in terms of another articulatory--or rather disarticulatory--site of the symbolic, not representing the body but rather transforming or annihilating it" (92). This state of transformation/annihilation is Lydecker's ideal of transcendence. The vehicle of this transcendence is their song, which, in Caspary's novel, is "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes": "But I swear to you, McPherson, in this simple sharing of melody we had attained something which few achieve in the more conventional attitudes of affection"(72).  While this "transcendence" might provide a convenient cover for the fetishist, I get a sense that there is something about these little songs that fall outside psychoanalytic narratives (although not outside signification), and exist within a different site of the symbolic.  Could it be that the song does not activate the logic of lack and castration, but rather an inhuman plenitude?