Claustrophobic. Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" is about nothing but claustrophobia. Not the clinical and scientific of it, but the Americanism of it. We, as a society, are claustrophobic. It was only beginning to be true in 1954 when Hitchcock made the film. But it has grown into an American phenomenon since that time. Who of us today even knows our neighbors? We are isolated, even in our subdivisions, urban landscapes and multi-tennant apartment complexes. We don't know our neighbors. We only see them.

Voyeurism. That is the most obvious by-product of isolation, of claustrophobia. Trapped in our crackerbox living quarters, afraid of the outside world, seemingly happy to be left alone, we look outside for "event." We want to see something. Hitchcock captures it here with the rear window James Stewart looks through. Notice how Hitch films some of the early shots as Stewart, the invalid trapped in a wheelchair, views his surroundings, as he becomes a voyeur. The scenes are brick walls with windows. The brick walls fill up far more of the film frame. We see the action through tiny windows, through a frame within the film frame. It acts as a wicked and beautiful and insightful metaphor for our lives as viewers, of films, and soon - of television. The frames within our own lives. We have become voyeurs of life who do not live it, but simply watch it. Hitch insinuates the inherent problems (i.e. the evil) of television as it is on the cusp of becoming popular. The frame within the frame of our lives.

Misogyny. Stewart becomes a woman in the film. Like the thousands of females who thronged to movie theaters and gathered around radios (and now televisions) for daily "stories," for soaps, Hitch's protagonist gathers at his window to see the continuing story of his neighbors. Stewart is a man taken out of life, therefore taken out of being a man, by an injury. He is sidelines from life. He has more "free time," more leisure time. He is not "working." Stewart becomes "feminine" by allowing himself to be drawn into the story, the mystery of his neighbors. It's no accident that the other women in the film, Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter (both "working" women), become his only confidants and supporters. By the end of the film, they are gathered in his boxed apartment, back in the dark, like a coffee clutch. They spy and gossip like women who all love the same soap opera. The allow another life to take over theirs. They put many of their personal problems aside to deal with this other story, and some of the subplots that run with it. The neighbors with their own small problems: a lonely woman who considers suicide, a songwriter with block, a newlywed couple.

Sex. Hitch makes great and startling comments about sex for a film so deeply entrenched in 50's sensibilities. The film's most sharp moment comes when a friend of Stewart's visits and sees Kelly's belongings in his apartment. Stewart warns him to "be careful" about what he is thinking. This punctuates so deeply the main text of the film where, by spying on his neighbors, Stewart becomes a detective and begins to make "assumptions" of his own. Looks can be deceiving, the film suggests. And yet, at the same time, it tells us that what appears as truth probably is truth. Kelly's belongings are there, after all, because she is staying the night. And while exposition has led us to believe that she is doing this to prove to Stewart that she can "survive in unfamiliar territory," she is also proving her that she can survive in the unfamiliar territory that is her boyfriend's apartment and "bedroom." Pretty heady stuff for 1954. As are the constant reminders of sex, and of male/female relationships. The newlyweds are constantly, it is implied, "at it." The lonely neighbor woman finally gets a date only to be physically assaulted and forced to defend herself from an almost "rape." Stewart and Kelly also struggle through their relationship, their sexuality, trying to find a path to happiness. It is no accident that the main story of the murder involves a man who has, apparently, murdered his wife.

Privacy. The film again punches this notion with much enlightened and important speech about our "rights" as Americans. We are looking into people's bedrooms here. And almost all that we see is disconcerting. Wavering between an ideal of privacy and the notion that things must be exposed for the truth to come out, the film opens up our minds to what is right and what is wrong. When do our rights become secondary. Sexuality is just on the borderline of being openly discussed. Times are changing. As voyeurs, as we become more "exposed" to the world, the world opens to us. With knowledge comes the knowledges of things we'd rather not know. This is, again, a film right on the threshold of a changing world. Time here is in gentle flux. all hell is about to break lose.

"Rear Window" is a film on the cusp of an important moment in American history, the onset of the television age, the voyeur age, the information age. With film, television and the arts, America has become voyeur. We have leapt from the age of "storyteller/listener" (a seemingly more active relationship) to the age of performer/viewer. The days of neighbors with shades up, windows open, doors unlocked, sleeping on the fire escape were becoming much more of a thing of the past by 1954. "Rear Window" sees this. It sees the future.

Like Stewart, we are crippled in our confinements, his wheelchair is our recliner. We are slipping ever increasingly into the darkness, we have become viewers of life as well. The lights are off and the movie is on. Must Raymond Burr (life, and the taker of it) trod slowly up our staircases, slip eerily into our apartments and force us into the story as well? Must he almost kill us to make us live again?

Note:

Review written in 2000

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