Rear Window: A Classic Film’s View of Our Time - Covid-19, Climate and all..

Alfred Hitchock’s Rear Window, with Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly is a classic.  If you haven’t seen it, do.  If you haven’t seen it recently, watch it again.  Hitchcock is the master of suspense, and this provides tons of it.

I showed this film recently in the Freud class with my friend, the Retiring Co-teacher.  We were a little concerned that the students would object to the slow pace, but they actually reveled in it.  One of the students commented that, if it were a contemporary film, there would have been all kinds of shockers happening and she kept expecting the tension to be relieved by one of the characters being killed.  Others commented that letting the tension build without a release was a much more effective means of engaging the viewer.  They were surprised to discover how rewarding a slow burn can be.

Hitchcock is rumored to have come by the desire to create suspense in others by an incident that occurred when he was young.  In one version of the story, a five year old Hitchcock committed some infraction at home and his father punished him by walking him down to the local police station, where he knew the Sergeant in charge and had him locked up.  Poor little Alfred didn't know how long he was going to be left there.  Even though it may not have been long (though in at least one version he was there overnight) it left an imprint.

Whether we label the feeling that Hitchcock felt at the hoosegow suspense or terror, he explored various versions of what he felt as a boy in a long series of excellent films.  In psychoanalytic parlance, he uses projective identification (meaning that he manipulates us into feeling his feelings - the way a baby crying helps us to feel the urgent need to do something) to communicate to us what he felt then.  And he is a master at doing that.

In Rear Window, we find Jimmy Stewart’s character, L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies, a daring photographer who is always on the road shooting wars and sporting events, laid up in his Greenwich Village apartment after he broke his leg getting the most dramatic shot at a race car accident.  He had to stand there and take the shot when any sensible person would have ducked and headed for cover.  Now confined to a wheelchair with a cast from hip to toe, by day he is waited on by his wisecracking insurance company nurse, Stella, (Thelma Ritter)  and by night by his beautiful, uptown girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Kelly).

In discussing the film, we noted that Jeff is considerably older than Lisa and holding her at arm’s length.  We wondered about the ways his broken leg is symbolic of a broken ability to move from being a little boy to being the kind of person who could sustain a romantic relationship with a beautiful and engaging woman.  My Retiring Co-Teacher noted that the scratching of the itch under the cast was very clearly an expression of masturbatory pleasure – the kind of pleasure that doesn’t involve others.  Jeff uses his derring-do lifestyle to distance himself from Lisa; offering it as evidence that they are not meant for each other.  She can take care of him as a maternal figure, but he maintains that she isn’t cut out for the dangers of the kind of life he leads.

Since we watched the film a couple of weeks ago, the world has imploded.  Our own derring-do and sense of autonomy has caused us to realize the Covid-19 threat, too late, we fear, to effectively socially isolate.  This also parallels our denial about the threats that our attacks on the environment have caused – and our lagging behind in addressing that complicated issue until, perhaps, it, too, is too late.  Holed up in our own apartments and homes, we are casting about for something to do. 

The view by day (above) and night (below)

Miss Torso

Jeff chooses to spend his newfound idle time looking out the rear window (hence the title).  There he discovers a panorama of wonders.  Directly across the courtyard is a woman he nicknames “Miss Torso”.  She is a dancer and has a bevy of men who, in Lisa’s eyes, are wolves to be fended off.  We wonder if Lisa’s attachment to Jeff is maybe not in spite of but because of his little boyness; his inability to step up to the plate may fit her desire to remain untouched.  A sculptress lives under Miss Torso, working on a modern piece with a hole in the middle she calls loneliness. To the right of Miss Torso is Thorwald (Raymond Burr) who, along with his invalid wife, will become the focus of Jeff’s interest.  Beneath them lives Miss Lonelyhearts, who goes on imaginary dates and one very scary real one with a man who tries to rape her.  At the top of the next apartment to the right a couple and their dog escape the heat by sleeping on the fire escape, and further around, we discover a tormented musician who is writing and playing lovely music.  For a bit of comic relief, to the left, we see a pair of honeymooners and the poor husband keeps getting called back for more long after he has been worn out.

 

The newlyweds get to work.

Stella is, at the beginning, no fan of Jeff’s voyeurism.  She tells him, "What people ought to do is get outside and look in for a change."  She thinks that Jeff is missing the boat by not being more attentive to Lisa and, I think, to his own internal state.  Lisa, too, is concerned.  It is uncomfortable to watch Lisa passionately kiss Jeff while he distractedly muses about what is going on outside the window. If we didn’t have a sense that he wasn’t mature enough to engage in a relationship, this image seems to starkly expose it.  We, the voyeurs at the moment, are left to wonder about his inability to connect with someone who so clearly is trying to connect with him.

The sleuthing team

It is only after Jeff’s theory that Thorwald has killed his invalid wife has enticed them that both Stella and Lisa are drawn into the voyeuristic thrill.  And this sets up the central conflict in the plot.  Jeff calls his buddy on the police force, a detective, to tell the cop about the strange goings-on that he is observing through his rear window.  His buddy comes over and checks it out – and does the gumshoe work to “prove” that everything over at Thorwald’s is on the up and up.  The evidence that the detective uses has to do with “checking out” the story of Thorwald’s missing wife.  She has left town – gone back to the family home, and her clothes have been sent up to her – and she signed for them when they were dropped off.

The Thorwalds across the way.

So, they should drop the matter.  I was convinced (and I had seen the film before).  But not Jeff – and most importantly, not the women.  Their intuition tells them that a woman would never leave without her jewels, and certainly not her wedding ring.  So Jeff joins the women – but I think as a little boy – in spying on Thorwald and learning more and more about them.  They are now all involved in Jeff's game – hiding behind the jumbo binoculars and the jumbo camera, watching the goings on across the way.

One thing that the whole neighborhood notices is when the couple who sleep on the fire escape find their dog, whom they lower in a basket to do his stuff, has had his neck broken.  The wife cries out to the neighborhood, questioning whether they actually care for each other or not.  She is distraught that someone must know what happened to her dog.  And everyone in the neighborhood that we know is visible from the rear window, hearing her, except for Thorwald – he is hiding in his apartment – with just the glow of his cigar letting us know that he is in there, listening.

Guilty – he must be.  But the girls need evidence.  They surmise that Thorwald didn’t like the dog sniffing around his flowers.  Yes, there is photographic evidence that one of his flowers got shorter!  He must have hidden something under the flower that the dog threatened to expose and so he must have killed the dog to keep his secret.

Who is going to go find out?  Jeff certainly can’t – so Lisa does.  She sneaks across and goes digging around, first with Stella, but when she climbs up the fire escape to Thorwald’s apartment, Jeff is in a panic.  He, perhaps for the first time, realizes, as Thorwald returns to the apartment and Lisa is trapped inside, that he cares for her.  He is deathly concerned for her well-being and he calls the cops so that they can come and arrest her for trespassing, which will get her out of there.

As we wait for the police to arrive, Stella notices that Miss Lonely Hearts is about to commit suicide.  Jeff, concerned about Lisa, cannot tear his eyes away from the now darkened apartment where Lisa, a woman of derring-do, not just a pretty face, is at the mercy of the murderer.  Jeff is now as scared for her as she would be for him were he in a war torn world.

In the essay where she coined the “Male Gaze”, Laura Mulvey used Rear Window and Freudian Theory to decode the phallocentric world that the movies – especially the movies of Hitchcock in the 1950s – reflected.  She states that we are invited into the male vision of the world and that looking at a woman is an interruption in that vision – it interrupts the diegesis, or narrative flow, of the film. 

I agree with a great deal of what Mulvey says, but think she doesn’t take two things into account.  One is the perspective of this particular viewer – this particular male gazer.  The other is the evolution of analytic thought – influenced in part by female analysts and critics who have helped us realize that the phallocentric view of Freud was (which would come as no surprise to the rational Freud) partly a defense and partly a culturally determined lacuna – a hole in the fabric of our understanding of human nature.  We - regardless of gender - are driven by the need to connect – to attach and to care and be cared for – as much or more than by a phallic need to dominate.  But when connection is seen as a weakness, when we feel emasculated by passivity, we blind ourselves to the strength of connection – and seek it only when we are in a passive, childlike state – a state like Jeff in a cast, or the state, Mulvey points out, we are in when we are viewing a movie in a theater.

Through the female lens (and in reality), the male is dominating.  His world is the one that is filled with bright, shiny and desirable objects and the way to join that world is to become one of those objects.  From the male lens, on the other hand, women are able to be in touch – with each other and with men.  And this is an unconsciously deeply desired state, but one that the male, in this case Jeff, cannot imagine having access to from what he imagines a mature masculine state to be – one that is filled with all of its derring-do and glorious autonomy.

Jeff’s solution is to become feminine.  Or more precisely, to become pre-masculine.  To become a child, who is cared for by others.  What unfolds in this scene is something entirely unexpected to Jeff - outside of his ken.  The maternal figure – the object of desire – is not just a passive critter, but someone who can take action – someone who is mature, autonomous – and able to connect with others.  Oh, my, what he had but didn’t know!

When she is arrested and the lights have come on, Lisa signals from across the way that she has the wedding ring, proving that the feminine hypothesis was right.  Unfortunately, Thorwald sees her give the signal, and figures out where she is sending it.  Stella heads out to bail out Lisa, and Jeff is left alone to face Thorwald. 

The last bit of the film is, then, a bit disappointing.  The effects that are used are dated at best.  But more centrally, this is not a coming of age film, but more like a tragedy.  Oh, (spoiler alert, as if I hadn’t spoiled it already…) it has a happy enough ending, but Jeff, instead of being liberated, becomes even more deeply crippled.

Miss Lonely Hearts

In so far as a film is a dream, it is the dream of the director first and foremost.  And in a dream, the dreamer's wishes are met.  The musician’s song, lovely thing that it is, saves Miss Lonely Hearts.  Miss Torso’s husband, short, goofy and much more interested in food that sex, comes home from the army to save her from the pack of wolves, the heavily exercised newlywed husband gets a much needed break from his labors, the fire escape sleepers get a new dog, and the sculptress takes a break from her work to lie in the sun, but Jeff is still holed up in his apartment, being cared for by doting women.

The musician and the director.

Hitchcock can’t figure out, even with all of his narrative skills and his talent, how to grow up.  He treats us – the audience – as kids, and we, passively and compliantly and with a great deal of pleasure, collude with him.  We sit, suspense-fully waiting, to see whether we are going to spend the night in jail.  And we are reassured, in the end, when we find out that everything will be OK.  When we, as we identify with Jeff, end up still cozy in our cared for position - safe in the cocoon we have come to call home.  Not out there in the scary world where you do bad things and go to prison.  We, too, are OK with Hitchcock’s dream – one in which the wish that is fulfilled is the wish to end up being a child again and still, safely because nominally phallically impotent, but because part of the larger culture, able to dominate and maintain the care of the watchful mommies.  

I think it is worth noting one of the reluctant students’ observations at this point.  Thorwald was a travelling salesman who sold costume jewelry – not the real thing.  This artist’s enclave in Greenwich village is filled with people spinning dreams – whether in music, by twirling in front of men, or in their own heads.  Thorwald, like the rest of the neighbors (and Hitchcock and the actors) deals in ephemera.  He also engages in a very real action – he kills his wife and distributes her body up and down the shores of the East River.  To become a man – to move out of the world of ephemera – is, in this universe, something that involves violence.  Thorwald’s position in essence is: Men make the tough decisions.  The invalid wife is not going to get any better and her constant needs and demands are unbearable.  I will find someone else (we discover after the fact that he did this), a woman who can be my accomplice, and we, together can execute a plan.

Thorwald, in the telling I'm proposing, represents authority.  This week, he represents the authorities who were, ironically, so slow to act that Covid-19 is now a pandemic.  The ones who didn’t recognize that the health of the herd comes before the profits of individuals.  And we, the masses, stay stuck to our screens, watching a terrible sequence of events unfold, powerless to do anything about it. 

Internationally, interestingly, it is a female voice, Greta Thunberg's, who has had the greatest impact in helping us realize that the health of the herd depends more on our climate than on corporate bottom lines.  In our state, it has been a female head of medicine who has helped a republican governor set the tone for the nation in taking the pandemic seriously.  We can be mature, capable of action, and engaged with each other.  Even when we are, we can also enjoy becoming children and being entertained – and when we do that, we are likely to be pulled back into a variety of infantile experiences – including being afraid and wanting to figure out what is going on out there – and it is up to as, as we leave and regain ourselves – to wake and think about what it has meant to be in that dream space – as Mulvey helped us do, but also, across time, we can become woke in new and more and more enriched ways.

For two other posts on Covid-19, link to Covid-19 despair and Midnight in Paris through the eyes of Covid-19.

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