The Voyeur in Each of Us: Rear Window

..for five years, in my opinion, [Alfred Hitchcock] really was the master of the universe. More than Hitler, more than Napoleon. He had a control of the public that no one else had. Because Hitchcock was a poet. The public was under the control of poetry. And Hitchcock was a poet on a universal level, not like Rilke.

                                                                                                                                        -Jean Luc Godard

(Spoilers Ahead! Watch the film first, and after reading the article,watch it again.)

Among all directors, no one required the public to actively participate in their films as much as Alfred Hitchcock. All his films would be inconceivable without a large audience, for Hitchcock works like a scientist, with his audience being the guinea pigs. He loves to manipulate our emotions, keep us trembling with suspense and slyly solicit the audience’s involvement into his story, by bringing out the voyeurs in us. Rear Window is probably the best of the films in a mightily impressive oeuvre, with the possible exception of Vertigo.

Consider the opening scene in Rear Window, where the camera slowly scans the courtyard and the apartments, and then shifts to show the sleeping hero, L.B Jefferies (James Stewart), with a drop of sweat trickling down his forehead. This gives an indication of the weather in the area. The camera then pans across some of the ‘objects’ of interest, a composer who is shaving and then switches the radio channel, a middle aged couple sleeping on their fire escape, possibly because of the heat, a curvaceous ballet dancer who exercises as she is getting dressed and then the camera returns to show Jeff with a cast on his leg. The windows seem to be permanently open, indicative of a sweltering summer at Greenwich Village. Then it slowly moves towards Jeff’s room, succinctly establishing his accident and profession, by showing a broken camera in front of a photograph of a racing car accident and the stacks of the magazine Jeff works for. Without a word of dialogue, Hitchcock quickly establishes the milieu and the character through the elegant tracking of the camera alone.

Through Jeff, we quickly learn about the other characters inhabiting the closed, sheltered neighbourhood by shifting across the window frames. There is a lonely and desperate woman who throws imaginary parties for gentlemen, whom Jeff dubs as ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’, an avant-garde artist who is sculpting a strangely shaped feature with a hole in the middle and a honeymooned couple with a sexually dissatisfied wife. The ballet dancer, labelled as ‘Miss Torso’, throws parties for several guys at the same time and the composer is distressed as his career is going nowhere. Then there is Lars Thorvald( Raymond Burr), a grumpy middle aged man who constantly bickers with his wife as her illness has made her bed ridden. Jeff observes the wife to be missing and fervently believes that she has been murdered.

Jeff is visited only by two people- his fiancée, Lisa Fremont (a glamorous and attractive Grace Kelly), a chic, wealthy fashionista and model, and Stella (a remarkable Thelma Ritter), his insurance company’s nurse. Lisa is in love with him and wants to get married soon, but Jeff is rather apathetic to that idea. He believes that Lisa will find it uncomfortable to travel with him and finds her to be too ‘perfect’. These frail excuses seemingly arise from his frustrations with his lack of action, and possibly because of his sexual repression due to his cast.

Hitchcock professes his love for the Kuleshov experiment throughout the film. In the 1920s, Russian director Kuleshov juxtaposed an identical close up of a man’s face with food, a coffin and a little girl, where the audiences automatically passed judgements about the man’s character. Similarly, Hitchcock quickly cuts from Jeff’s face to the neighbour he is staring at, making us aware of his character.

As film goers, all of us are voyeurs as we ogle at the lives of others from the safe distance of our seats. But Hitchcock scrutinizes this moral question from every angle, extending not just to voyeurism in movies, but also in our everyday lives. In Rear Window, we are limited only to Jeff’s point of view, and the restrictions imposed on Jeff are imposed on us as well. As Jeff shamelessly gazes at the neighbours, we are eagerly peering over his shoulders and observing their quirks, keen to find out more.

As the purported evidence against Thorvald piles up, Stella and Lisa are drawn into the case as well. The film takes care to display their reactions towards the case. Lisa, who was initially sceptical of the murder, is attracted towards the case when her eyes suddenly twitched towards the window. She starts to take notice of the other neighbours as well and develops a sympathetic attitude towards the composer. Stella, who is the closest thing to a conscience in the film, initially chides Jeff for spying on his neighbours. “We have become a race of Peeping Toms”, she rightly comments and warns Jeff of the six month Jail term for voyeurs. But even she inevitably falls prey to the powerful allures of voyeurism once the case becomes stronger. In this sense, she represents the audience, as although we question the morality behind voyeurism, we ourselves are guilty of it unknowingly. Jeff, in his obsession for spying others, manages to transfer his curiosity to ‘normal’ people like Stella, Lisa and us, for we are keen to know how the case proceeds from here. I was totally engrossed in the story when I watched it the first time that I nearly forgot about the ethical questions Hitchcock was trying to raise here. We are deeply involved in the sleuthing, unable to detach ourselves from the guilt, which is somewhat disturbing in this case.

The sleuthing methods adopted by the trio are amateurish. One would hardly believe that a murder case would be solved based on speculation and intuition alone. Jeff pieces together the clues based on the tumultuous relationship between the husband and wife and the strange suitcase possessed by Thorvald, coming up with a hasty conclusion without verifying the other details. Lisa extends her ‘feminine’ intuition to every woman on this planet, without focusing on the specifics and the private matters unknown to her. But regardless of their ineptness, they manage to solve the case by snooping further and further into Thorvald’s apartment. Even when the police convicted Thorvald for his murder, no case is registered against Jeff despite his snoopiness, which serves as a profound statement about the American society.

Once her curiosity had reached it’s zenith, Lisa decides to be more intrepid and dig Thorvald’s garden. Jeff asks her to slip a letter blackmailing Thorvald under his door. Thorvald’s reactions have confirmed their suspicions. Once Lisa enters Jeff’s apartment triumphantly, she is greeted by Jeff’s ecstatic smile, smitten with love for her. The love which was absent throughout the movie has finally emerged from Jeff, although Lisa was more concerned with Thorvald’s reactions. After finding nothing buried under the garden, Lisa decides to break into Thorvald’s home. A role reversal is happening here, with Lisa performing the daring, ‘macho’ tasks while Jeff is powerlessly confined to the walls of his apartment. While his powerlessness was the source of his anger at Lisa at the start, it has blossomed into love after seeing her being courageous. Once Lisa was caught, he immediately reports to his detective friend, but his voice soars with excitement when he mentions how Lisa slipped the wedding ring onto her finger. With this act of bravado, he might have found his ideal partner. But Lisa seemed to have broken into Thorvald’s apartment only out of good old fashioned curiosity rather than out of any sacrificial love for Jeff. In a sense, this is a form of objectification, for his love for her escalated only by her intrepidness in a situation that mattered to him, rather than by her enduring love for him or her personality. Hitchcock charts this objectification to a greater extent in Vertigo, where Scottie’s (James Stewart again! Did Hitchcock groom him for this role?) insouciance towards Judy made him recreate the image of the ‘Madeleine’ he loved.

Looking at Rear Window again, I found that I had remembered every bit of the plot, where the man buried his wife and how he was caught. But the film still manages to hold me in suspense every time. I learn something new about the characters each time and the moral questions the film poses still puzzles me. Martin Scorsese once said that there is a difference between a story and a plot, with the story concerning more with the characters. Many of the plot driven modern day thrillers fizzles out the second time because their story, characters are positively dry, hardly aspiring to pose questions which Hitchcock dares to ask. It’s no wonder that Rear Window, or as a matter of fact, many of Hitchcock’s films, still retains their freshness after so many years, continuing to hold us in awe of his poetry.

Directed By Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay by John Michael Hayes

Photographed by Robert Burks

Starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter