Rear Window

“We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms. What people oughta do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.” - Stella, Rear Window

Rear Window is considered by many to be Alfred Hitchcock’s most accomplished film. I can certainly see why people would argue that. Personally, I would trump for the deepness of Vertigo, the genre bending of Psycho, the thrilling entertainment of North by Northwest and the wickedness of Shadow of a Doubt as being more inspirational and more rewarding on multiple viewings, but there’s little doubt that Rear Window is a true masterpiece.

The movie stars Hitch’s favourite thesp James Stewart as Jeffries, a guy who frequently dodges death living as an award winning photographer who puts his work before his own well-being in dangerous situations. Of course that kind of lifestyle can only lead to one conclusion and it’s soon that he finds himself confined to a wheelchair with one of his legs castrated. In an attempt to overcome the tedious boredom of being stuck in the claustrophobic space of his apartment, Jefferies spies on his neighbours by looking out of his window into the apartments of others and taking keen interest in their lives.

Much has been said about Rear Window being a metaphor for the movie spectator and I believe there’s enough evidence to support such a case. As Rear Window is entirely from Jefferies point of view, we are confined to our own chairs, forced to see whatever it is Jefferies sees when he looks through his binoculars into the window to other people’s apartments. His voyeuristic behavior is a way for him to forget his own problems and focus on the pitfalls of others as a means to escape what is going on with his own life.

As Jefferies uses the binoculars for most of his spying, the effect is a darkened rim around the frame of the windows and with our lead character always lurking in the shadows, the effect this projects is of sitting in a darkened theatre voyeuristically watching what’s on screen.

So Hitch’s rather macabre suggestion is that unconsciously we are voyeurs like Jefferies too, and whether it’s in our own daily lives or as a paying film spectator we too take pleasure in watching the plights of others, instead of addressing our own. Just as Jefferies watches out of his window to escape dealing with his beautiful girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) who is intent on marrying him, we as an audience find pleasure in hunting down movies from certain genre’s and attaching ourselves to characters who we can metaphorically dump our problems onto, to see how they deal with any given situation in a hope that it can give us an answer to resolving the problems in our own lives.

What’s real interesting about Rear Window is what Jefferies chooses to watch and discard when he looks out of his window, or what it’s really suggesting… the different movie screens and genre’s in a cinema. He is not interested in viewing the apartment of the young happy couple, so he discards them for the rest of the film because they have no resonance with him. The romantic genre is not what he needs right now so he doesn’t buy a ticket for there from the brief trailer of love-making he witnesses.

He is much more interested in the murder mystery film that is taking place directly across from his apartment, interestingly depicting a man who murders his nagging wife. It’s something he can relate too and that takes up the most time of his window shopping.

Hitchcock does suggest a problem with taking pleasure in watching the lives of others and dumping your problems onto them and that’s the truth that we have no control on the images that come back to us. If we are aligned with a certain character and we are looking for a way for them to resolve their problem but they are killed off mid-way through the film, then the total shock and jolting effect soon turns our pleasurable desire into a nightmare. This can be seen in the film when Lisa is in Thorwald’s apartment, he can only watch as a useless spectator, and is not able to save her from his grasp as he is confined to the wheelchair of his apartment.

Hitchcock depicts Jefferies as being a man who is constantly worried about his own sexual performance and as a man who believes he may not be able to live up to the high expectations of his girlfriend who beams with confidence. In Rear Window, Jefferies’s only sexual confidence comes when he is holding his binoculars, a metaphorical image of a phallus. Throughout the film his equipment gets larger and larger until he is holding a large camera at the height of his excitement. The image of the binoculars I’ve always believed relates to Hitchcock’s own idea of the film camera and his shooting of the fictional lives of his characters through this visual medium, usually by sitting in a director’s chair which in the film has been replaced by Jefferies wheelchair. His phallus, regularly the proponent for Hitchcock in shooting exceptionally beautiful actresses. With Rear Window the director is projecting his own male fantasies as he watches through his little window of the world, the cinema screen, at life that he creates.

It’s certainly interesting that the only sexual pleasure that Jefferies receives apart from his own looking outside of his apartment window, is when he can watch Lisa get excited about his voyeurism and when she joins him in his dark obsession. The only excitement that Jefferies can stimulate for Lisa throughout the film is when he can voyeuristic spy on her as a pawn of his obsession as she wanders over into Thorwald’s apartment. I would argue this as being a defining message of Hitchcock’s whole cinema, as later in the director’s work he would famously put his actresses’ such as Tippi Hedren and Janet Leigh in horrific and deadly situations for him to “spy” on with his film camera and then re-watch on the screen.

Of course, one aspect of voyeurism is that a certain pleasure comes with the constant looking at an object of pleasure that is out of your reach and something you can never have. Although I’m certainly not arguing that Hitchcock’s desire for Hedren, Leigh or Grace Kelly came from a desire for an affair from his personal marriage, I would argue that they were objects of desire for him that he knew were out of his reach and the pleasure he gained from filming them was that he could watch them behind his camera and screen.

The evidence is clearly their in the film. The song “To See You Is To Love You” and the role of Miss. Torso are acting as the women that he could never have and Jimmy Stewart is the image of the ordinary guy who will take pleasure from watching and fantasizing about being with them. Remarkably, he himself is trying to fend off the extraordinary beautiful Grace Kelly, who loves him dearly and would do anything for him.

Is the point then of Rear Window then that the fantasy of watching never results in the reality of what you end up with? Dreaming about being with a beautiful women is not quite as exciting as actually being in a relationship with one? When we got to the movies, is it the image of what we can’t have that we fall in love with? Those beautiful women, those men that a larger than life, those cars they drive, those homes they live in, the places they travel too? Is it fun because we are watching a fantasy and once that fantasy is broken, we have no fulfillment left in our lives?

A cinematic masterpiece which on paper should have been a disaster. Handled by the genius that is Alfred Hitchcock, he elevates a simple story into a complex tale of masculinity, relationships and fantasy whilst also playing around with innovative cinematic techniques and storytelling. A movie that is so finely tuned, it’s impossible to pick faults with it.

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