Rear Window: Watching as Dangerous Activity - Essay Example

? Rear Window: Watching as Dangerous Activity: The 1954 film Rear Window is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thrillers that have retained their popularity over the years. Based on Cornell Woolrich’s short story of 1942 called ‘It Had to be Murder’, the film explores various contemporary issues like gender roles and the increasing anxiety over loss of masculinity; urban squalor and rising crimes that go unreported and even undetected in the urban setting; voyeurism and the audience’s fetishistic attachment to the screen, and so on. This paper will focus in particular on the theme of ‘watching’ and explore how Hitchcock makes his point on this effectively through his use of the ‘language’ of film – namely structural elements like mise-en-scene, music, cinematography and so on. The plot revolves around L. B. Jeffries, a photographer, who has his leg in a cast and is therefore, temporarily wheelchair-bound. Jeffries takes to spying on his neighbors to entertain himself at first, and increasingly gets more and more involved in what he suspects is a murder plot. The sub-plots in the film include Lisa Fremont, Jeffries’s beautiful and sophisticated girlfriend whose ideas of marrying him he insistently rejects; and Stella, his insurance company nurse who offers Jeff a lot of commonsense advice and later helps him and Lisa in investigating the mysterious occurrences in the Thorwald household. One of the many neighbors that Jeffries spies on is a salesman called Lars Thorwald whose nagging wife is an invalid. Jeffries observes them quarrel often till on one rainy night, he sees Thorwald leave his house a few times and in the morning, finds Mrs. Thorwald gone. Seeing him pack her things up and send them away, and on another occasion, wrapping up a set of knives, Jeffries assumes that Thorwald has killed his wife and calls his friend in the police, Lieutenant Doyle to tell him of his suspicions. Doyle does not take the story too seriously but promises to look into it nonetheless. He finds that Thorwald and his wife left for the station on the day she went ‘missing’ and Mrs. Thorwald got on a train to the countryside from where she sends a postcard to her husband to let him know she has arrived safely. Jeffries finds it hard to believe that there is such a simple explanation for the events. At this point, Lisa, who has been trying to prove to Jeffries that she is not merely a socialite, agrees with Jeffries that something is wrong as they find that Mrs. Thorwald has left her jewelry behind which, according to Lisa, no woman ever does. Using Lisa and Stella for the mobility that he himself lacks, Jeffries digs deeper into the case till, after a very frenetic sequence when Thorwald catches wind of Jeffries’s interference and tries to kill him, the three are finally able to get Thorwald caught red-handed. The story is a classic thriller but Hitchcock uses it as a backdrop to highlight several other issues, most notably the issue of ‘watching’ itself. For instance, at the beginning, the audience is warned repeatedly by Stella about the dangers of becoming a society of ‘peeping Toms’. She tells Jeffries about how in medieval days ‘they used to put your eyes out with a red-hot poker’ for spying. Stella also insists that she can ‘smell’ trouble and that Jeffries’s habit of watching his neighbors will surely cause some mishap. Her admonition of Jeffries works in a meta-filmic (i.e. beyond the film’s world and addressing the audience directly) way on the audience as well. The viewer to is watching something without being detected, acting essentially as a voyeur. This theme of watching unobserved and what Freud would call ‘scopophilia’ – which literally translates to mean ‘love of watching’ (‘Scopophilia’) – is established in the film on a structural level right from the start. The opening scene frames the same window, out of which Jeffries will be making all his observations, with the blinds slowly being drawn up to reveal the neighbors’ houses. In effect, the audience’s perspective at this point is the same as Jeffries’s perspective later in the film. This choice of mise-en-scene closely identifies the viewer with Jeffries right from the beginning and sets up viewership as an important concern. But apart from the opening sequence, the symbol of the window and the various implications of watching are notable throughout the film. As Guy Peters points out in his review of Rear Window, the windows that Jeffries sees act as projections of the many ways in which his own life may turn out: The windows are held up as mirrors, and the people inside could become, or already are, their doppelgangers. For example, in Mr. and Mrs. Thorwald, Jeff sees a man who is stuck with an invalid and nagging wife. In the case of Jeff and Lisa’s relationship, Jeff is the invalid, and Lisa is the nagging wife. […] Lisa and Jeff are reflected in Miss Lonelyhearts and the lonely composer. Miss Torso displays a similar exhibitionism as Lisa. In the future, they could be the newlyweds, or the sterile childless couple whose only joy in life is their little dog (Peters). In addition to the ‘mirror’ function that Peters attributes to these windows, they also serve as the only real connection that Jeffries makes at this point. For instance, when Jeffries realizes that ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ is sitting down to dinner with an imaginary guest, he feels empathy for her and raises his glass along with hers, even though in his own home, his real girlfriend is only too eager to make sure he has a good time. Slavoj Zizek, in his book, Looking Awry, speaks of how Jeffries’s perch at his window reverses the idea of the ‘Panopticon’. Whereas Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon induces fear in the observed because they do not know if they are being watched, in Jeffries’s case the neighbors seem to be completely heedless of the fact that they are being observed. In fact, it is Jeffries himself who is ‘terrorized’ and has to compulsively watch to make sure he missed nothing (Zizek 73). This is reflected in the mise-en-scene when Jeffries catches himself watching the newlyweds. When they step out of their house, he cannot help feeling curious and strains to see why. And then when they begin to kiss, Jeffries looks visibly embarrassed, but is compelled to keep looking nonetheless till the husband draws the blinds. ‘Scopophilia’ is described by Laura Mulvey in her article, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ as: ‘[when] looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at (59). Mulvey identifies it as one of the pleasures offered by cinema. This can be extended to the pleasure the Jeffries himself derives from observing his neighbors, something that becomes an obsession in itself till the point he hits upon the Thorwald case. But this scopophilia is repeatedly criticized and punished in Rear Window, as we have seen. Not only does it exert a powerful compulsive hold on the watcher, the watcher also suddenly gets drawn into the action himself, as reflected in the mise-en-scene where Lars Thorwald suddenly spots Lisa signaling to Jeffries and comes to attack him. Apart from the visual role of mise-en-scene in Rear Window to emphasize its themes, the music also has a significant role to play. The opening and concluding pieces of music are cheerful and light and belie the sinister turn that the movie is about to take, adding to its suspense. The music in the film is also cleverly used. The lonely musician at one of the windows often plays a theme that becomes associated with Lisa, and is evoked at various times to tie the narrative together. The choice of songs also reflects the narrative. For instance the song ‘To See You is to Love You’ is a humorous reminder of Jeffries’s obsession with watching his neighbors, while ‘Waiting for My True Love to Appear’ underlines the sad fate of Miss Lonelyhearts, and the innocent, peppy ‘That’s Amore’ complements the love of the newlyweds (Fawell). The music apart from emphasizing various facets of the film is a reminder to the audience that they are watching a film as most of this works on a meta-filmic level. In this way, the music, as well as the mise-en-scene, serves to repeatedly emphasize the voyeuristic nature of both the film and the act of film-watching itself. The final sequence in the film is perhaps the most effective warning against this habit of watching. When Thorwald catches on to Jeffries’s intentions, he suddenly stops being the passive ‘viewed’ and instead becomes the ‘viewer’. He enters Jeffries’s apartment, and the only weapon that Jeffries now has against this aggressive viewer is to literally blind him with the flashlight. In a slowed-down, extremely stylistic sequence, Thorwald slowly closes in to punish his audience while the terrified Jeffries is almost paralyzed in fear except for the symbolic power of his flashlight. In this manner, Hitchcock takes on the medium of film itself in Rear Window and without compromising on the quality of entertainment and dramatic suspense in the film, uses its language to provide to the audience a symbolic mirror to view themselves in. The one lesson that the audience can really draw from Rear Window is to be warned about the dangers of the act of watching itself. The viewer and the viewed can often get exchanged and this reverses the power equation between them. Works Cited: Fawell, John. ‘The sound of loneliness: Rear Window's soundtrack.’ Studies in the Humanities 27.1 (2000): 62+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 28 Nov. 2012. Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ ASU.edu. PDF File. Peters, Guy. ‘Film and Psychoanalysis: Rear Window.’ GuyPeterReviews.com. Web. 28 Nov. 2012. ‘Scopophilia.’ Hitchcock and Psychoanalysis. Web. 3 Dec. 2012. Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Bristol: October Books, 1998. Print. Read More