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A Critical Analysis of Voyeurism in Rear Window
By Alex Segal
As is the case with almost any art form, cinema, as a medium, has a self-reflective tendency. It is not uncommon for a filmmaker to deliver a work that wholly or partially comments on the medium itself. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 feature film Rear Window thematically addresses issues of voyeurism by artfully and tacitly comparing the movie’s characters to its own audience. This symbolic comparison is accomplished through the film’s specific characterization and stylistic elements.
The plot of the film centers on a news photographer, L.B. Jefferies, as portrayed by James Stewart. Wheelchair-bound due to a work-related injury, Jefferies is forced into a house-arrest situation wherein he resorts to spying on his neighbors as a source of entertainment. The plot heightens when Jeffries becomes convinced that one of his neighbors has committed a murder, which he becomes determined to solve.
In the film, Hitchcock uses his characters, especially Mr. Stewart’s, as a primary vehicle by which he makes a thematic statement about an audience’s inherent voyeuristic sympathies. As the epitomic everyman protagonist, L.B. Jefferies is charming, bold, and worthy of the romantic interest of Grace Kelly’s fashion-savvy character, Lisa Fremont, whom he references as being “too perfect.” These redemptive qualities absolve Jefferies of the negative connotations associated with being a “peeping tom.” The audience perceives the character as identifiable-and likeable-and, therefore, embraces his guilty pleasure rather than cast moral judgment. His “window shopping” does not brew contempt in the audience members, but rather legitimizes their own overzealous mechanism for curiosity-after all, they are voyeurs too. The characters of Lisa Fremont and the hardboiled insurance company nurse, Stella (portrayed by Thelma Ritter), serve as foils to the audience-whom Hitchcock immerses into the film-and reflect the hasty transition from wrist-slapping condemnation to enthusiastically obsessive curiosity as a reaction to the hobby Jefferies has adopted while his leg is in its “plaster cocoon.”
To further emphasize the symbolic implications of the rear window, Hitchcock makes Jefferies’ voyeuristic experience distinctly resemble the moviegoer experience. The courtyard windows of Jefferies’ apartment complex, frequented by his gaze, bare similarity to television channels. Jeffries is free, as a spectator, to choose from multiple casts of characters: “Miss Torso” (a full-figured dancer with an even fuller dance card), “Miss Lonelyheart,” the songwriter, the sculptor, the couple with the dog, the newlyweds, or the salesman, Mr. Thorwald, and his ailing wife. He watches the lives of these various people much in the same way as members of an audience would watch a movie or television.
The visual presentation of Jefferies’ voyeuristic habits enhances the act’s resemblance to the cinematic medium. Jefferies sitting in the dark transfixed on the neatly framed outside world mimics the experience of a theatergoer. Moreover, the film’s opening image of the apartment window’s curtain rising can be seen as a direct allusion to the rising curtain of a movie theatre.
Hitchcock’s successful iteration of the movie’s rich thematic subtext relies heavily on the film’s stylistic elements and editing vernacular. The film employs classical Hollywood cinema’s strict continuity editing style-obeying classical standards pertaining to use of establishing shots, the 180 degree rule, shot/reverse shot, and eye-line match-to instill an uninterrupted sense of normalcy and comfort in the audience. Though based on fragmentation, continuity editing conceals the cinematic artifice and makes the audience practically unaware that they are watching a movie. Since nearly every one of the film’s shots is from within the apartment (either for interior scenes or point-of-view shots out the window), audience members experience the film’s events from the same spatial perspective as the main characters. Eye-line match is featured as a tool to make clear to the audience what the characters in Jefferies’ apartment are observing outside the apartment’s titular glass panes.
The film’s well-defined sense of space and time further provides clarity and comfort to the audience. The entire film takes place within Jefferies’ apartment and the finite surrounding apartment complex courtyard and, since each day and night is distinctly accounted for, the course of the plot is presented clearly as three days. The finite nature of this space and time allows for very clear diegetic coherence.
The film, Rear Window, makes a dramatic statement about the voyeuristic nature of audiences, but it also posses an ethical question. Since the success of the theme relies on our sympathies for the characters, it may be suggestive of the movie-going audience’s flexible respect for privacy. Furthermore, if Jefferies’ viewing of his neighbors is comparable to our viewing of his life on the screen, is there transitively something morally questionable about the viewing of cinema itself? Perhaps we should be disturbed that, just like Jefferies and his friends, we, the audience, anxiously fantasize about the gruesome murder of poor, faceless Mrs. Thorwald for the sake of our own entertainment; our own thrills without involvement. At a point in the movie, Detective Tom Doyle, played by Wendell Corey, interrupts a private moment between Jefferies and Ms. Fremont, but we as the viewer were already there, already in the room, already within the rear window. However, we do not consider ourselves to be extraneous to the world of the story because of the filmmaker’s use of stylistic techniques that seamlessly incorporate us into its organic sphere-much as I have switched to the use of the plural first-person for this essay’s concluding paragraph.
By Alex Segal
As is the case with almost any art form, cinema, as a medium, has a self-reflective tendency. It is not uncommon for a filmmaker to deliver a work that wholly or partially comments on the medium itself. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 feature film Rear Window thematically addresses issues of voyeurism by artfully and tacitly comparing the movie’s characters to its own audience. This symbolic comparison is accomplished through the film’s specific characterization and stylistic elements.
The plot of the film centers on a news photographer, L.B. Jefferies, as portrayed by James Stewart. Wheelchair-bound due to a work-related injury, Jefferies is forced into a house-arrest situation wherein he resorts to spying on his neighbors as a source of entertainment. The plot heightens when Jeffries becomes convinced that one of his neighbors has committed a murder, which he becomes determined to solve.
In the film, Hitchcock uses his characters, especially Mr. Stewart’s, as a primary vehicle by which he makes a thematic statement about an audience’s inherent voyeuristic sympathies. As the epitomic everyman protagonist, L.B. Jefferies is charming, bold, and worthy of the romantic interest of Grace Kelly’s fashion-savvy character, Lisa Fremont, whom he references as being “too perfect.” These redemptive qualities absolve Jefferies of the negative connotations associated with being a “peeping tom.” The audience perceives the character as identifiable-and likeable-and, therefore, embraces his guilty pleasure rather than cast moral judgment. His “window shopping” does not brew contempt in the audience members, but rather legitimizes their own overzealous mechanism for curiosity-after all, they are voyeurs too. The characters of Lisa Fremont and the hardboiled insurance company nurse, Stella (portrayed by Thelma Ritter), serve as foils to the audience-whom Hitchcock immerses into the film-and reflect the hasty transition from wrist-slapping condemnation to enthusiastically obsessive curiosity as a reaction to the hobby Jefferies has adopted while his leg is in its “plaster cocoon.”
To further emphasize the symbolic implications of the rear window, Hitchcock makes Jefferies’ voyeuristic experience distinctly resemble the moviegoer experience. The courtyard windows of Jefferies’ apartment complex, frequented by his gaze, bare similarity to television channels. Jeffries is free, as a spectator, to choose from multiple casts of characters: “Miss Torso” (a full-figured dancer with an even fuller dance card), “Miss Lonelyheart,” the songwriter, the sculptor, the couple with the dog, the newlyweds, or the salesman, Mr. Thorwald, and his ailing wife. He watches the lives of these various people much in the same way as members of an audience would watch a movie or television.
The visual presentation of Jefferies’ voyeuristic habits enhances the act’s resemblance to the cinematic medium. Jefferies sitting in the dark transfixed on the neatly framed outside world mimics the experience of a theatergoer. Moreover, the film’s opening image of the apartment window’s curtain rising can be seen as a direct allusion to the rising curtain of a movie theatre.
Hitchcock’s successful iteration of the movie’s rich thematic subtext relies heavily on the film’s stylistic elements and editing vernacular. The film employs classical Hollywood cinema’s strict continuity editing style-obeying classical standards pertaining to use of establishing shots, the 180 degree rule, shot/reverse shot, and eye-line match-to instill an uninterrupted sense of normalcy and comfort in the audience. Though based on fragmentation, continuity editing conceals the cinematic artifice and makes the audience practically unaware that they are watching a movie. Since nearly every one of the film’s shots is from within the apartment (either for interior scenes or point-of-view shots out the window), audience members experience the film’s events from the same spatial perspective as the main characters. Eye-line match is featured as a tool to make clear to the audience what the characters in Jefferies’ apartment are observing outside the apartment’s titular glass panes.
The film’s well-defined sense of space and time further provides clarity and comfort to the audience. The entire film takes place within Jefferies’ apartment and the finite surrounding apartment complex courtyard and, since each day and night is distinctly accounted for, the course of the plot is presented clearly as three days. The finite nature of this space and time allows for very clear diegetic coherence.
The film, Rear Window, makes a dramatic statement about the voyeuristic nature of audiences, but it also posses an ethical question. Since the success of the theme relies on our sympathies for the characters, it may be suggestive of the movie-going audience’s flexible respect for privacy. Furthermore, if Jefferies’ viewing of his neighbors is comparable to our viewing of his life on the screen, is there transitively something morally questionable about the viewing of cinema itself? Perhaps we should be disturbed that, just like Jefferies and his friends, we, the audience, anxiously fantasize about the gruesome murder of poor, faceless Mrs. Thorwald for the sake of our own entertainment; our own thrills without involvement. At a point in the movie, Detective Tom Doyle, played by Wendell Corey, interrupts a private moment between Jefferies and Ms. Fremont, but we as the viewer were already there, already in the room, already within the rear window. However, we do not consider ourselves to be extraneous to the world of the story because of the filmmaker’s use of stylistic techniques that seamlessly incorporate us into its organic sphere-much as I have switched to the use of the plural first-person for this essay’s concluding paragraph.