Some notes on Rear Window[The first section of these notes re-prints the entry on Rear Window from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story'.1  The next section provides some additional commentary.  (I have kept footnotes to a minimum.)  In addition, I print here my answers to four questions sent to me recently - February 2003 - by a film student in England about aspects of 'voyeurism' in Rear Window.  KM]

First screening July 1954

Production company Paramount/Patron, Inc.

Duration 112 mins

Technicolor

[During a heat wave, normally itinerant news photographer L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) finds himself confined by a broken leg to a wheelchair in his Greenwich Village apartment.  Each day, and often into the night, he has little to do but gaze out his rear window at the activities of his neighbours in the surrounding apartments.  Jeff’s main visitors are his fiancée Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), a high-fashion model, and Stella (Thelma Ritter), a wiry insurance company nurse.  When Jeff says he suspects that his neighbour directly opposite, costume jewellery salesman Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), has murdered his wife, no one pays much attention at first.  Lisa is mainly concerned to overcome Jeff’s reluctance to get married.  But Jeff intensifies his window-gazing, using binoculars and even a telephoto lens.  After Lisa volunteers to cross the courtyard and obtain evidence against Thorwald, trouble erupts.  Thorwald catches her in his apartment.  Jeff frantically calls the police, who come and arrest Lisa.  Meanwhile, having learnt that Jeff has been spying on him, Thorwald decides to pay a visit.  Only last-minute intervention by Jeff’s detective friend Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey) saves him from the enraged killer.]

Rear Window takes place during a New York heat wave.  More than a plot device explaining why everyone has their windows open, the heat intensifies a crisis for which it also serves as a metaphor.  Photographer Jeff not only suddenly finds himself immobilised by a broken leg, but his beautiful fiancée Lisa wants to ‘immobilise’ him in another way by making him give up his top job with 'Life' magazine and settle down with her.  Thus the film, like Notorious, depicts a personality conflict of two people who love each other.  The heat wave functions like the sultry Rio climate in the earlier

film, adding both realism and ‘tone’. Rear Window has tone aplenty, as well as classic suspense.  Hitchcock noted modestly that his batteries were well charged when he was making it.

A key figure behind the film was Hitchcock’s agent at MCA, Lew Wasserman.  In the spring of 1953, Wasserman bought on Hitchcock’s instructions a screen treatment of Cornell Woolrich’s 1942 short story ‘Rear Window’ (originally called ‘It Had To Be Murder’).  The treatment was by leading stage director Joshua Logan.  Shortly afterwards, Wasserman arranged a deal with Paramount Pictures for Hitchcock to make a total of nine films.  (In the event, he only made six.)  The first of these was Rear Window, and Hitchcock had a screenwriter already lined up.  A regular listener to radio shows like 'Suspense', the director had asked MCA if they knew of John Michael Hayes.  Not only had Hayes adapted many of the 'Suspense' shows, he had recently started writing film scripts, including one for the James Stewart picture Thunder Bay (1953).  A delighted MCA replied that Hayes was another of their clients.

Hitchcock and Hayes met together twice at Warner Brothers during production of Dial M for Murder.  Woolrich’s original story, Hitchcock noted, contained many good ideas, such as the moment when hero Hal Jeffries sends the suspected wife-killer Thorwald a note asking ‘What have you done with her?’ and studies Thorwald’s reaction through a spyglass.  However, the story had no love interest.  Logan’s treatment overcame that basic problem by giving Jeffries an actress girlfriend named ‘Trink’, but Hitchcock wanted a part for Grace Kelly that would bring out the fire in her.  He asked Hayes to write a new treatment.  After spending a week with Kelly on the set of Dial M for Murder, and noting her sly humour and sexiness that hadn’t been apparent in her previous pictures, Hayes obliged.  It was on the basis of Hayes’ treatment that James Stewart agreed to star in the picture.

When the present author interviewed Hayes in 1975, we spoke about what Hayes thought he had given Hitchcock.  He singled out the quality of ‘warmth’.  He had always felt that a film like The Paradine Case was too cold.  For Rear Window he invented the down-to-earth character Stella, and as early as possible had her speak several comic lines.  A related idea was to break down the unconscious ‘hostility’ that members of an audience invariably feel towards both each other and the film.  Stella’s opening remark from the doorway, ticking Jeff off for being a Peeping Tom, rivets our attention.  Moments later, she recalls the time she’d predicted the

stock market crash of ’29: ‘When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go.’  That’s the sort of line that makes an audience laugh out loud and prepare to enjoy themselves, Hayes said.

Hayes also noted that the part of Lisa was written as a combination of Grace Kelly and his own wife, who was a high-fashion photographer’s model.  Also drawn from the Hayes’ own experience was the suggestive business with Lisa’s Mark Cross overnight case that spills open revealing its fluffy and very feminine contents.  Recently, Donald SpotoFN has claimed that Lisa and Jeff’s relationship was based by the film-makers on the affair between Ingrid Bergman and photographer Robert Capa in 1946, but reportedly Hayes has never confirmed this.  (Jeff’s reluctance to forgo his globe-trotting career in order to settle down in a conventional marriage may not be so rare in real life.  For example, the film-maker David Lean comes to mind.)

The script of Rear Window does have real warmth.  What’s also clear is that Hitchcock responded in kind.  Running through the film is a marvellous sensuousness, starting with the two initial pans around the courtyard, each coming to rest on Jeff’s perspiring face as he sleeps beside his open window.  The film was shot entirely on one gigantic set whose construction was supervised by Hitchcock personally.  It comprised thirty-one apartments, a Manhattan skyline, gardens, trees, smoking chimneys and an alley leading to a street complete with a bar, pedestrians and moving traffic.  The entire area was required to be lit for both day and night settings, and to be capable of withstanding a heavy rainstorm (provided by special ‘rain birds’ installed above the set).  The rain scene is another sensuous highlight.  When the rain comes in the early hours of the morning, it has a summery quality.  It’s heavy enough to drive the couple sleeping on their fire escape back indoors in an undignified scramble, yet gentle enough not to dissuade Thorwald from his several mysterious trips to and from his apartment, carrying a suitcase.

Principal photography was completed by January 1954, having taken approximately eight weeks.  The overall budget scarcely exceeded $1,000,000.  Following its world premiere at New York’s Rivoli Theater on 4 August 1954, the film and its performances were hailed by critics and public alike.  'Time' thought it ‘[p]ossibly the second most entertaining picture (after The 39 Steps) ever made by ... Hitchcock.’  By May 1956, it had grossed $10,000,000.

Rear Window draws on subject matter related to the crime-thriller format with which Hitchcock would have felt fully at home.  Three important literary influences would all have been on his shelves: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s classic tale of the uncanny ‘The Sandman’ (Hitchcock owned several editions of Hoffmann), H.G. Wells’s 1894 short story ‘Through a Window’ (Hitchcock owned a set of Wells’s complete works), and Aldous Huxley’s famous 1922 short story loosely based on the then-current Armstrong murder case, ‘The Gioconda Smile’.  The relevance of Hoffmann’s tale may be seen from even a partial synopsis.  The student Nathanael becomes fixated on a house opposite his own occupied by Professor Spallanzani and his beautiful ‘daughter’ called Olympia.  Watching the house through binoculars, the student quite loses interest in his regular girlfriend, Klara.  One day, he goes to the house and at last encounters Olympia - who turns out to be just a life-size doll ...

This is of course the basis of the ballet 'Coppélia' (1870).  The tale is also the main subject of Freud’s famous essay ‘The Uncanny’, in which he alludes to Spallanzani as a potentialy ‘castrating’ father-figure.  As for Olympia, Freud writes: ‘She can be nothing else than a materialisation of Nathanael’s feminine attitude towards his father in infancy’.  Freud adds that Nathanael’s ‘enslavement’ to Olympia shows a purely ‘narcissistic’ kind of love.  In short, Nathanael has Oedipal problems - all of which recur, with variations, in Rear Window.  For example, Jeff confined to his wheelchair feels himself ‘infantilised’ and  rendered ‘impotent’ because of his broken leg, and is forced into a state of passive looking.  (Hitchcock here implies a parallel with the cinema spectator, whose ‘relative narcissism’ has been remarked by critics Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson.)FN  Over the way, he sees a quarrelling couple whose relationship reflects some of his own current feelings towards Lisa.  And when the wife disappears, Jeff sends his note asking ‘What have you done with her?’, whose wording represents the classic question of a child who observes the ‘primal scene’ (the parents’ love-making).  Finally, Jeff confronts the father-figure himself, Thorwald, and engages with him in a life-death struggle.

Wells’s ‘Through a Window’ begins: ‘After his legs were set, they carried Bayley into the study and put him on a couch before the open window.’  The story patently influenced Woolrich’s 'Rear Window', and ends in similar fashion with an outsider invading the apartment to attack the hero.2  In Bayley’s case, he defends himself by throwing medicine bottles at his assailant.  The logic here recalls the film’s, in which Jeff, a photographer, defends himself with flash bulbs which he fires at Thorwald.  However, the film’s symbolism is

richer, for the assault on a person’s eyes constitutes a further reference to ‘castration’ (cf discussion of Spellbound in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story').

‘Castration’ is also implicit in Huxley’s ‘The Gioconda Smile’, but this time it’s castration by a woman.  The story is about a man suspected of murdering his nagging wife, and about his mistress, whom he finally jilts.  The latter becomes a Fatal Woman, much like the figure evoked in Walter Pater’s celebrated essay on the ‘Mona Lisa’.  Camille Paglia calls such a figure ‘the castrating and castrated mother’, a description which rather well fits Lisa in Rear Window.  For example, the nagging Mrs Thorwald, who even looks like Lisa, is certainly a castrating woman; and we’re invited to draw parallels.  (Hitchcock’s own comment on Lisa, to Peter Bogdanovich, was that New York has many such ‘active’ women, ‘more like men, some of them’.)  Equally, once Mrs Thorwald disappears, Jeff’s interest is piqued all the more: has her husband really killed her?  That is, has she been castrated in her turn?

A turning point in Jeff’s attitude to Lisa comes when she makes him an offer he can’t refuse: ‘I’ll trade you - my feminine intuition for a bed for the night.’  (About here the soundtrack plays the hit song, ‘Mona Lisa’.)  Until now, feminine intuition has been faintly ridiculed, as when Stella claims that she’d predicted the crash of ’29.  Indeed, femininity itself has been mocked by ‘macho’ Jeff, feigning interest in what Slim Hayward wore at cocktails.  But now the film takes both femininity and ‘motherliness’ on board with a vengeance.  When Lisa encounters danger by crossing the courtyard and entering Thorwald’s apartment, Jeff finally becomes anxious for her.  In Hitchcock’s words, ‘the mother instinct comes out in him’.  And when Jeff himself is injured at the end, Lisa rushes to cradle his head in her lap.  Her simple floral dress, one which isn’t high-fashion, signals her own emerging femininity (cf Constance in Spellbound), and Hitchcock lets the image fill the screen almost like a field of flowers.  Or a nursery picture!

Sure enough, we learn in a coda that Jeff has broken his other leg (ie he’s now doubly castrated!).  This is  in line with Camille Paglia’s remark apropos Pater’s ‘Mona Lisa’ that the Great Mother - rather than anything done by men - ultimately prevails.  (To Catch a Thief ends with a grim mother-in-law joke to similar effect.)  But the film itself exists to perhaps contest that point, and in any case leaves just about any viewer more than satisfied.

Rear Window on ‘neighbourliness’

Things like intuition and creativity - in effect, heightened life - can give us direct experience of ‘freedom’.  This idea of the philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) helps illuminate several Hitchcock films, including Rear Window.  In the film’s coda, as we listen to the song ‘Lisa’, freedom seems almost palpable for a moment, though the song’s lyrics hint that it may be just a dream.  Significantly, the moment coincides with the meeting of Miss Lonely Hearts (Judith Evelyn) and The Composer (Ross Bagdasarian), the first time we’ve seen any such neighbourly interaction.  Earlier, for just two or three shots, the film had attempted to raise our consciousness in another way.  The episode of the strangled dog provokes the dog’s distraught owner to cry out to the other apartment dwellers, ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word “neighbour”.’  Here, the camera momentarily frees itself from Jeff’s apartment to show a wide view of the entire courtyard.  Then, with separate close-ups, we get to meet Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy) and Miss Lonely Hearts - who suddenly are no longer just figures in Jeff’s (and our) fantasies.  Instead, they appear to be perfectly normal, even rather plain, individuals.  

Further notes on Rear Window

Rear Window is one of  Alfred Hitchcock’s best and most suspenseful pictures.  Of course, my essay on it in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' constitutes no more than an introduction.  So here are some further comments, mainly expanding on what was said above.  (Please forgive some repetition.)

Reading that essay, you will notice that I have spent some time on the literary and other inspirations for the film’s storyline.  I was trying to show how the latter is ‘archetypal’ and has a universal appeal.  A few years ago I watched on television a modern-dress production of 'Coppélia', and was struck by how closely it resembled  Rear Window - or perhaps the other way about.  Anyway, it set me thinking.  I remembered not only that the original story had been written by one of Hitchcock’s favourite authors, the brilliant German fantasist E.T.A. Hoffmann, but that it had been famously discussed by Sigmund Freud in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’.  The young man in the story resembles Hamlet in his seeming reluctance to overthrow a father-figure and to marry a fiancée who feels increasingly spurned.  Furthermore, a similar ‘Oedipal’ theme was pronounced in Hitchcock’s work from about the time of his overtly Freudian Spellbound (1945) in which the woman does most of the chasing of both the villain and the hero!   Freud explained the young man’s procrastination in Hoffmann’s tale (and

in 'Hamlet') as a fear of ‘castration’ by the father-figure, a situation in which looking and speculation (in various senses) substitutes for the sexual act and for the defeat of the tyrannical-seeming patriarch.  In Rear Window, Jeff has wielded his camera with its ‘phallic’ telephoto lens almost like a token in a childish game (from Lisa's viewpoint, he has behaved like an irresponsible 'tourist on an endless vacation’) - until, finally, he is forced to use it to fight off the father-figure and to claim the ‘daughter’ (who, as archetypal woman, is also 'wife', 'mother', and even 'sister' - 'incest' is a common theme in Hitchcock, from The Lodger [1926] onwards).  Of course, Hitchcock follows Freud and implies that the now 'civilised' Jeff has only been castrated all over again - this time by the woman!

A second text mentioned in my essay is ‘Through a Window’ by another of Hitchcock’s favourite writers, H.G. Wells.  Hitchcock knew Wells personally and claimed to have once travelled with him on a train from London to Brighton when Wells spent most of the trip trying to chat up the women passengers!  If, as seems likely, Hitchcock had previously read Wells’s story before he agreed to make Rear Window, it would almost certainly have helped pre-dispose him favourably towards Cornell Woolrich’s re-working of similar material.

Equally, Woolrich’s ‘Rear Window’, about a man who murders his burdensome wife, would have reminded Hitchcock of similar true-life crimes.  One case in particular would have come to his mind: that of Major Herbert Armstrong who lived at Hay-on-Wye in Wales and who was eventually driven by a nagging wife to poison her with arsenic.  Tried and found guilty, the Major was hanged at Gloucester Prison on 31 May, 1922.  The case was celebrated and provided the basis for several short stories, including Aldous Huxley’s ‘The Gioconda Smile’, and at least one novel, 'Malice Aforethought', by yet another of Hitchcock’s favourite authors, ‘Francis Iles’ (A.B. Cox), who also wrote 'Before the Fact' on which Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) was based.  The title of Huxley’s story seems a probable inspiration for Rear Window’s several references to the ‘Mona Lisa’, including, of course, the very name of Jeff’s fiancée, Lisa, played by Grace Kelly.

Numerous other influences on - or parallels with - specific content in Rear Window might be cited: other British murder cases such as that of Patrick Mahon and Hawley Harvey Crippen; other works of fiction such as Woolrich’s own ‘The Window’ (filmed in 1949 with Bobby Driscoll) and Nathanael West’s ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ (1933);

several paintings by Edward Hopper (whose work Hitchcock is known to have admired), including his classic ‘Nighthawks’ (1942).  Speaking of classics ...  there’s a minor classic of British detective fiction, 'The Daughter of Time' (1951), by Josephine Tey, the author of the novel from which Hitchcock’s Young and Innocent (1937) was adapted.  The investigator-hero, Inspector Grant, must spend several weeks laid up in a hospital bed from which he is inspired by boredom to solve a murder - though not exactly one committed under his nose.  Rather, it took place several hundred years earlier when the two young ‘Princes in the Tower’ were reputedly ordered to death by their uncle, Richard III.  Whole passages in Tey’s novel anticipate the mood and characters of Rear Window.  Grant’s actress girlfriend, Marta Hallard, shares traits in common with Lisa in Hitchcock’s film, plus parallel bits of business (e.g., both women initially enter the hero’s darkened room and bend over his sleeping form, whereupon he awakens).  Likewise, Grant’s no-nonsense charlady, Mrs Tinker, regularly visits him in hospital, providing a striking resemblance to the nurse/masseuse, Stella McCaffery, in Rear Window.  Here’s how we first meet Mrs Tinker:  

The door opened and Mrs Tinker’s homely face appeared in the aperture surmounted by her still more homely and historic hat.  Mrs Tinker had worn the same hat since first she began to ‘do’ for Grant, and he could not imagine her in any other.  That she did possess another one he knew, because it went with something she referred to as ‘me blue’.This lady’s ‘homely’ face and hat anticipate Stella McCaffery’s.  Recall, or watch out for, the latter’s unstylish headpiece!  Also, the script of the film describes Stella as a ‘husky, unhandsome, dark-haired woman’ (Hitchcock and screenwriter John Michael Hayes always had Thelma Ritter in mind to play her) and makes a feature of her black bag (in the film, puce) which ‘is worn, and looks as if it belongs more to a fighter than a nurse’.  Then, too, in 'The Daughter of Time', Mrs Tinker’s friendliness with Marta Hallard, centred on their common charge, Grant, matches the bond that in Rear Window quickly grows between Stella and Lisa.3

It is likely that Hitchcock would have read, if not 'The Daughter of Time' itself, at least reviews and synopses of Tey’s novel.  Each week, similar material crossed his desk.  Tey’s book received exceptional notices in both the UK and the US (its US publication was by Macmillan, New York, in 1952).  In any case, the sort of parallels with Rear Window that I’ve just noted surely support my contention concerning the film’s archetypal nature.  Hayes claimed that he ‘invented’ Lisa and Stella for the film, but perhaps his

invention was, to a degree, a matter of rediscovering and tapping into the archetypes.  How apt Lisa’s name is in such a context!  The film includes songs called both ‘Mona Lisa’ (originally composed by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans for the 1950 film Captain Carey, USA, when the song won an Academy Award) and ‘Lisa’ (specialy written for Rear Window by Harold Rome and Franz Waxman).  In similar apt manner, the ‘ambient sound’ of  Rear Window incorporates songs referring to ‘seeing’ and/or ‘dreaming’, subtly underpinning the atmosphere of the Freudian ‘uncanny’.

In my essay on Rear Window I refer to a particularly striking  archetype, that of the ambiguous Great Mother.  I show in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' how that figure first appeared in Hitchcock’s work in Rebecca (1940) where she is represented - principally in her hostile aspects - by both the dead Rebecca and by the creepy Mrs (not Miss) Danvers.  The idea animating the archetype appears to be that man is born of woman, and therefore is always finally subservient to her in her biological and chthonic (dark and mysterious) aspects.  Matriarchy opposes patriarchy.  Therefore, in a patriarchal world (such as Rebecca’s and that of most other Hitchcock films), woman-in-general, whether motherly or sensual, is seen by the male as a potential threat.  Of course, in saying that matriarchy (finally) opposes patriarchy, I am basically talking ‘realpolitik’ - for some people, there will always be hope that a ‘transcendent’ or ideal realm can be realised in which male-female relations (and much else) are optimised and/or attain a ‘golden mean’.  'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' shows that a search for a ‘lost paradise’ was present in Hitchcock’s films from the start (The Pleasure Garden, 1925) and runs like a thread through most of his work, including the penultimate film, Frenzy (1972), with its imagery of the corrupted garden.

Significantly , there is no sign of the Great Mother in Hitchcock’s Arcadian comedy, The Trouble With Harry (1955).  But in his tragic ‘lost paradise’ masterpiece, Vertigo (1958), she literally arises at the end to defeat the hero’s chance of happiness; she is cloaked in black because she is a nun, or mother superior (!), but also because her anti-life and forbidding aspects ally her with both Mrs Danvers and such figures as ‘the Mothers’ in Goethe’s ‘Faust’ (Part II) who similarly frustrate that play’s hero.

My understanding of the Great Mother is indebted to Camille Paglia’s brilliant work, 'Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson' (1990), though many others have written of the same archetype (among them, Carl Jung and Joseph

Campbell).  My book has simply applied a few of Paglia’s findings to Hitchcock - and found them both relevant and illuminating.  The coda of Rear Window, with its motif of ‘life goes on’, really only makes full sense if we bring to it the outlook of someone like Paglia.  Jeff now seemingly accepts the prospect of marriage, but at what cost to his career ambitions?  And what is the significance of his second broken leg (apart perhaps from its memento mori aspect, which is not inconsiderable in this context) if not that he is now doubly castrated?  The nagging Mrs Thorwald had effectively castrated her husband until he took exasperated revenge; the wilful Lisa, surreptitiously reading ‘Harper’s Bazaar’, may yet turn out to be a second Mrs Thorwald or what Paglia calls ‘the castrating and castrated mother’ (castrated in the male’s fearful fantasies about her power).

Momentarily, some sort of ‘golden mean’ is indeed achieved at the end of Rear Window.  Lisa and Jeff appear more human and 'civilised' (both have begun to accept the feminine side of themselves), and a new ‘neighbourliness’ has brought several hitherto lonely people together (always an incipient theme in Hitchcock, but here realised perhaps for the first time).  But for how long?  And, to repeat, at what cost?  This is the famed ambiguity of Hitchcock endings, or what Father Neil Hurley ('Soul in Suspense: Hitchcock's Fright and Delight', 1993, pp. xiii-xiv) calls the films' ‘open-ended pessimism’.

Related to this is Rear Window’s message about ‘reality’.  The director once told a BBC interviewer that ‘reality is something that none of us can stand, at any time’.  In Rear Window, reality is represented minimally by the courtyard, where a few people potter about, or sun themselves, but generally stay indoors, dreaming and fantasising.  Stella offers sage advice (albeit culled from the ‘Reader’s Digest’) when she remarks, ‘What people should do is stand outside their own houses and look in once in a while.’  Even the normally itinerant Jeff has had his own way of fending off reality - by juxtaposing his camera.  Eventually, though, at a motor speedway, ‘reality came too close’,4 and he suffered his salutary broken leg.  Then, at the film’s climax, in the struggle with Thorwald, who represents the inner reality of Jeff’s Oedipal fears and his retreat into ‘uncanny’ fantasies, he plunges into the courtyard - an ambiguous moment of self-overcoming (like Scottie’s final ascent of the tower in Vertigo).  The coda returns him to his apartment while the lyrics of the saccharin-sweet ‘Lisa’ suggest that another round of dreaming has begun.  Then again, it’s just possible that a new awareness and ‘neighbourliness’ will see everything turn

out all right ...

• In all the years that I have been reading reviews and analysis of Rear Window, I have never seen mention of the obvious (female) sexual symbol that hangs on Jeff’s wall like a trophy, no doubt one more souvenir of his travels.  (It looks vaguely African.)  What it does, of course, is nicely complement the symbolism of Jeff’s camera with its telephoto lens.  

Answers to four questions from a film student about Rear Window

A student, Chris, from Carlisle, England, recently sent me these questions pertaining to 'voyeurism' in Rear Window.  My outspoken answers (minus some preamble) follow.

1.By how much do you think the content of Rear Window is influenced by the conditions in America at the time it was filmed?

2. Do you think that the power of the gaze in Rear WIndow is determined by gender? Is it fair to say that the male gaze is dominant whilst the female is passive?

3. Do you think that it is possible that what L.B Jeffries sees from his window could be described as a projection of his own desires and fantasies? Jeff is clearly cynical about marriage. Do you think this represents Hitchcock's view? Do you think Hitchcock was happily married to Alma Reville?

4. Rear Window is a film about being a spectator. Jeff is a voyeur but are we, as an audience, voyeurs too? Do you think Hitchcock intended the film as a critique of our film watching habits?

KM replies:

[...] Before attempting to answer your questions, I will say this: Hitchcock's films are highly-crafted artifacts that are finally 'Rorschach blots'.  That is, audiences may respond to them in many different ways, at many different levels.  There is no one way of reading those films.  On the other hand, there is a traceable structure and content in the films, and it is here that much film art resides.  Unfortunately, the nature of such art (and craft) is what much academic 'method' and 'theory' is poorly equipped to come to grips with.  Read on!

1.By how much do you think the content of Rear Window is influenced by the conditions in America at the time it was filmed?

Some.  H would not have made a film he didn't think audiences were in the mood for.  I stress mood because H made films that were laden with mood and emotion, rather than intellectual or political ideas.  (Of politics he told Richard Schickel that it represented 'man's meanest attitudes to man', i.e., H wasn't really a political person!)  On the other hand, he often stressed in interviews that what moved or affected an audience in one time or place might be expected to also move another audience in another time or place, i.e., H made 'universal' or universally-appealing films.  I have read, and quite enjoyed, Robert Corber's book 'In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America' (1993).  But I think that Corber puts the cart where the horse should be - and vice versa.  That is, I don't think H analysed the social and political scene and then made a film to suit; rather, he made an excitingly cinematic film, with an intriguing situation and glamorous stars, knowing that it stood a very good chance of wowing audiences wherever (and whenever) it was shown.  Example: Corber (p. 84 in my copy) quotes the fine scholar and essayist Leslie Fiedler on how history itself was like the Freudian uncanny, i.e., a recurring, rather queasy mood associated with 'the return of the repressed'.  Which is interesting!  If you have read the brief chapter on Rear Window from my book that is up on the Web, you will know that I trace the film's basic situation back to, precisely, the 'uncanny' stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), one of H's favourite authors.  Hoffmann's 'The Sandman' became the basis of Delibes's ballet 'Coppelia' (1870) - whose situation closely resembles Rear Window's.  Of course, another source of the American story 'Rear Window' (1942) by Cornell Woolrich was 'Through a Window' (1894) by Englishman H.G. Wells.  You get the picture, I'm sure.  H did put into Rear Window intimations of 'conditions in America' (e.g., what we see of the 'typical' apartments over the way, revealing a certain basic affluence but also much unhappiness) but this was as much 'timeless' (and 'placeless') as 'topical'.  Schopenhauer (1788-1860), i..e., a contemporary of Hoffmann's, had stressed that 'suffering' is basic in this world but that it had always been so and would likely continue to be so!  Equally, Jeff's 'voyeurism' is as much a universal condition of unhappy, bored people at any time (such a person is the student in 'The Sandman') as someone who has been empowered by current Cold War distrust of one's neighbours to spy on them!

2. Do you think that the power of the gaze in Rear WIndow is determined by gender? Is it fair to say that the male gaze is dominant whilst the female is passive?

Even Laura Mulvey, who wrote the classic text on this topic (using films of Sternberg and Hitchcock as her main examples), later back-pedalled by admitting that there is more than one way to look at a film!  As a yoga student, I was always taught to try and see the world detachedly, not with the unthinking, imperialistic male gaze that Mulvey would attribute to me.  Also, I would sometimes watch films in a decidely anti-Establishment mood, and would not easily go along with a film that felt like it was endorsing a status-quo way of seeing.  No, I never readily accepted what Mulvey was saying, because my inner being told me that it was much too simple.  Further, here's something Prof. Richard Allen wrote to me (on 22 June last year): 'What Mulvey gets wrong about the male gaze of course is that as Zizek says, this gaze is dis-empowering not empowering.'  I think Prof. Allen is referring here to how a heterosexual male viewer may feel himself held in thrall by (women in general and) the goddess-status accorded an actress like Grace Kelly in a film.  Of course, Mulvey may say that such a response (and maybe those others I've already mentioned) is neither here nor there: the general idea is that a way of regarding women - endorsed by society - is inscribed in the shot set-ups themselves.  But I regard that as dubious and unprovable.  Read on.

Essentially, I think, any given H sequence uses point-of-view according to the needs of the scene/sequence, not of ideology.  Sure, Jeff in Rear Window is the main 'gazer'.  But he is still only a character in a movie that is made by an intelligence that allows other ways-of-seeing to register when required.  For instance, Lisa seizes his camera from him at one point and we see what she sees, through its lens.  More importantly, my analysis of the film has specifically referred to the key moment when H's camera first leaves the apartment and shows us things relatively objectively, not as Jeff has been seeing them.  [By 'my analysis', I refer to Rear Window on ‘neighbourliness’, above.].  So Jeff may want to dominate others with his interpretation, and eventually, in a sense, he does: Thorwald is shown to be the killer that Jeff had fantasised him to be. But meanwhile, we have seen, with him, other people's feelings and needs.  Jeff gets only normal human satisfaction from being proved right, and meanwhile has been made to suffer - and suffer with others' suffering (from that of Miss Lonely Hearts to that of Lisa) - along the way.  All very life-like and, I would have thought, non-ideological.  A rough parallel comes to mind.  For 2-3 centuries

(if not millenia), since the so-called Age of Enlightenment (at least), oh-so-clever thinkers have essayed the opinion that language independent of thought is not possible; also, that animals couldn't possibly 'think' the way we do.  All, er, crap!  (Animals are often very good 'thinkers' - just spend a day watching the Animal Channel on cable-TV; also, as Iris Murdoch, for one, has said, it's likely that the bulk of our thinking is non-verbal.)  So beware of all prescriptive and/or normative theory.  The truth is often the exact opposite.  Laura Mulvey can congratulate herself on her elegant theory which, though, is dubious at best.  (Well, you asked me!)5

3. Do you think that it is possible that what L.B Jeffries sees from his window could be described as a projection of his own desires and fantasies? Jeff is clearly cynical about marriage. Do you think this represents Hitchcock's view? Do you think Hitchcock was happily married to Alma Reville?

Clearly, I'd say, following Jean Douchet ("Hitch and His Public"), Rear Window can be read as an allegory of how film audiences watch a film.  (So, too, can Vertigo, though in a much more dimensional way.)  In this sense, Jeff represents us, the audience, and his 'projections' are representatative of both ours and those of the filmmakers who try to give us what we want (our 'desires and fantasies', as you put it).  So 'projection' can even refer to the literal projection of the finished film in a cinema.  And those people Jeff watches over the way are representative of people-in-general, because film-going is at some level a communal experience and we want to re-establish contact with 'peopleness'.  So, traditionally, we go out to the movies to be less isolated.  It's therefore fitting that Stella [the masseuse] says that we should get outside our homes once in a while and look in.  But such lines are basically Hitchcockian rhetoric, designed to settle us into our cinema seats and prepare us to enjoy the show ('Hitch knows what we want - he'll give us a good time').  In effect, H then involves us in the life-force at work.  (Rear Window gives us 'peopleness'; Vertigo gives us 'colour, excitement, power, freedom'; North by Northwest makes Thornhill say, 'I never felt more alive!').  A lot of this is libido and its fantasies; but, to adopt another phrase of Stella's, these need 'something to fight'.  Which is all to the good: again the film becomes more life-like as a result.  (But cf H: 'It should look real but it must never be real. Reality is something that none of us can stand, at any time.')  This is where Jeff's antipathy to marriage comes in.  It is dramatic.  Also, it allows non-heterosexual males, for example, to feel themselves a part of the action, at least for now. (Critics like Theodore Price readily discern 'gayness' in James

Stewart's characters in H films, with the possible exception of Ben McKenna in The Man Who Knew Too Much.)

Another Paramount film was being made at about the same time as Rear Window: Byron Haskin's The Naked Jungle (1954). Charlton Heston plays a plantation-owner in South America, Eleanor Parker is his mail-order bride.  Heston is initially impotent, poor Parker wonders what she must do!  But then comes an eruptive invasion by killer ants (symbolism worthy of Salvador Dali!).  After these have been repelled, conjugal matters are okay!  So the climactic invasion by the ants somewhat parallels the climactic invasion of Jeff's apartment by Thorwald.  Interestingly, though, H puts emphasis on the need of individual feats of salvation (first there was Lisa's, when she went after the ring, and then comes Jeff's, in his battle with Thorwald); also the end of Rear Window is much less clear-cut than that of The Naked Jungle.  I would take this as evidence of the fallacy of Laura Mulvey's reading of H's film: her theory may work better with Haskin's film.  That is, the latter is more clearly upholding 'the patriarchal way' and conventional marriage at the end.  But what I'm mainly saying here is that the relevance of Rear Window to H's own views of marriage, and the state of his marriage to Alma, is pretty dubious.  Nonetheless, I don't think that his was a perfect marriage!  (Also, I think that a part of him may have sympathised with professional, itinerant 'lensmen' like Robert Kapa and David Lean.  The idea that marriage puts an end to 'freedom' was prevalent in several of H's pictures at this time: e.g., The Trouble With Harry, Vertigo.)  Alma was reportedly a peppery little lady, and I wonder if some of that wasn't the result of sexual frustration.  On the other hand, there was clearly much love in the H family, and a modus vivendi that is admirable.  Okay?!

4. Rear Window is a film about being a spectator. Jeff is a voyeur but are we, as an audience, voyeurs too? Do you think Hitchcock intended the film as a critique of our film watching habits?

Sure!  He knew what he could get away with, and that audiences would actually appreciate his doing it.  Again a rough parallel: H in his TV shows regularly mocked both his audiences and, more obviously, his sponsors.  The mockery of the sponsors nicely distracted from how we were being mocked too - by H's polite, confiding disdain.  But he was sympathetic, too.  Cf what I said above, about the need to get outside ourselves, to get 'unrepressed', for a time.  But ultimately we all need to face our individual selves 'before God', if I may put it that way.  (We can hardly know, but did Robert Capa and David Lean examine their

motivations and their ultimate, prone-to-physical-decay natures?  The lives inter-dependent on theirs?  What they ultimately stood for?)  This is the Kierkegaardian/Nietschean side of H, so much more active than Laura Mulvey probably took into account. In effect, it is also H reminding us that even going to the cinema, or watching TV, may be a culpable act.

That's as I see it, as of today, and as best as I can get the words out, also as of today, Chris.

Hope it doesn't disrupt your own study of these issues.  Hope it actually helps.  

Notes for this page: 1. Unfortunately, only the English edition can be recommended.  (It’s available from www.amazon.co.uk.)   The American version has been ‘simplified’ and in every way ‘cheapened’.

2. Wells’s story was brought to my attention several years ago by my friend Leslie Shepard, an associate of Irish film historian Liam O’Leary.

3. Further, Grant has a couple of male buddies who, between them, provide a counterpart of Rear Window’s Tom Doyle ...

4. I have borrowed this phrase from the psychiatrist in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).

5. In defence of Laura Mulvey, and her influential article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), I print here a note sent to me by Bill Krohn, author of 'Hitchcock au travail'/ 'Hitchcock at Work' (1999/2000): 'A few comments on Mulvey: The phrase "passive object of the male gaze" appears nowhere in her much-cited article, for good reason. I don't know where she recanted, but her use of Vertigo in that article is quite lucid: She sees it as critical of male spectatorship (much more visible in a pure form in Charlton Heston films, I would [agree]) , and she sees Scottie as the dupe of his own gaze. Madeleine is leading him all over San Francisco by the nose; she is always behind the wheel of a car (a trait which [Raymond] Bellour says connotes "active" in his brief analysis of a scene from The Big Sleep [1946]); Scottie sees really very little of her, mostly her hair - we see a lot more of him in all those endless closeups, for heaven's sake! How such a fine, insightful article ever got turned into a tool to bludgeon male chauvinist pigs for drooling over non-existent closeups of Kim Novak is beyond me.'

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