I never fully realized before, but only just accepted it
on face value, that Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear
Window is one hell of a movie. The two or three times I’d seen it
previously I guess I sort of accepted its status as a classic great movie. This
time I absorbed it fully and saw in it how its technical prowess supports a
great story and ironic commentary on both marriage and on watching other
people’s lives unfold on a screen from a darkened movie house.
Voyeurism as a theme runs throughout much of Hitchcock’s
work, of course, but Rear Window is
the one time he’s thumbing his nose at the audience for being so interested in
the lives of others. The image that plays behind the opening titles is of the
shades going upon on L.B. Jeffries’ windows onto the back courtyard, like the
curtain rising on his personal theatrical stage or movie screen. Jeffries
(James Stewart) spends the next 100 minutes or so observing his neighbors or
thinking about their actions. But what begins as casual observing becomes
obsessive watching and a paranoia about possible dirty deeds committed by Lars
Thorwald (Raymond Burr) across the way. In the end Jeffries ceases to be a
passive audience member and becomes what no member of a movie audience can be:
an actor in the real life (to him) drama playing out.
