The Engendering of Gender Fantasy
Laura Hunt is a fantasy; her true personality as ephemeral and mysterious as the two-dimension portrait that haunts Det. McPherson. What McPherson and the audience know about Laura for most of the movie is only what he can learn from talking to the predominantly male circle of admirers that flitted around her. And what they know about Laura is the fantasy each of them have constructed, like the artist responsible for painting the portrait. Tellingly, even when Laura returns from the grave, what the audience learns about Laura that they didn’t know before is all part of the elaborate fantasy figure that McPherson has stitched together from a beautiful corpse brought back to life. The real Laura is never really given a chance to be revealed like the "real" Waldo or the "real" Shelby or even the McPherson himself. She is still a fantasy of what other men want her to be.
Investigative Necrophilia
Detectives that spend hours upon hours doing the footwork of piecing together what a murder victim was like can probably be forgiven for occasionally falling in love with an idealized portrait of that person, so McPherson can certainly be forgiven in light of that enormous haunting presence of Laura Hunt captured in oil on canvas. The real issue with McPherson’s increasing sexual attraction to a woman the world believes is a corpse, of course, is that she’s not. So when she comes back, he manages to sidestep the admittedly creepy quality of his desire. It is bound to come up at some point after the closing credits, however, and that is not going to be anything less than an awkward conversation.
The Subjectivity of Truth
Somewhat as in Citizen Kane, the narrative takes the shape of interconnected interviews in the present that become flashbacks to the past, which act as different pieces of a puzzle being put into place on the board in an attempt to solve a mystery. The big difference is that halfway through his film, Orson Welles did not bring Charles Foster Kane back to life. No, wait, the BIG difference is that even with key witness to mystery trying to be solved now resurrected, “Rosebud” still lacks any clear meaning. If Citizen Kane suggests that truth is an entirely subjective thing dependent upon perception, Laura implies that even subjective perception may all be a great big lie.
