|
Article Excerpt
Rear Window has long been recognized for its thematics of watching, connecting the voyeurism of L. B. "Jeff" Jefferies (James Stewart) with the spectator's curiosity about the lives of those one watches on the screen. (2) Examinations of the film's reflexive structure have contributed multiple strands to the interpretation of scopophilia in Hitchcock's film and in the experience of cinema. Feminist psychoanalytic readings of the gendered implications of the gaze have called attention to the ways in which Hitchcock's film screens and reinforces the power of the masculine spectator over the feminine spectacle. (3) More recently, analyses that place this film in its historical period have also detected interesting resonances with respect to the surveillance of McCarthyism. (4) All of this critical interest in the thematics of watching has added a great deal to the appreciation and understanding of Hitchcock's film, and has influenced how we think about the gaze as both an exercise of power and an imposition on those whom it captures. But, too frequently, critics have tended to read the power of the gaze as a unidirectional phenomenon and thus have emphasized how the film positions us with respect to Jeff as a voyeur--one of a "race of Peeping Toms" as his nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), calls him. As much as the film invites us to do so, interpreting it exclusively through the viewer's identification with Jeff fails to recognize that the film's narrative logic also stresses the risk of being seen.
Jeff signals this risk when, fearing that the suspicious neighbor on whom he has been spying may have seen Stella and him, he nervously whispers to her to get back out of sight. She answers, "I'm not shy, I've been looked at before," to which he warns, "That's no ordinary look. That's the kind of look a man gives when he thinks that someone might be watching him." This brief exchange focuses attention on an important--though under-examined--conflict of the narrative, highlighting specifically the role that conditions Jeff's relationships with others, and the danger he attaches to the prospect of being seen, especially but not exclusively by Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr). Jeff is a voyeur who privileges himself as a subject in opposition to those whom he watches as objects. Maintaining these categorical distinctions informs the identity that he has framed for himself. Although most of the people whom Jeff watches from the window of his apartment are oblivious to his gaze, Thorwald, it seems to Jeff, senses that he might be observed. Should he see Jeff watching him, Thorwald's reciprocal look would negate the power of Jeff's voyeurism by converting Jeff from subject to object. Thus Hitchcock's notably reflexive film is as much about scopophobia as it is about scopophilia.
In its tension between looking and being looked at, Rear Window structures its theme within the phenomenological dynamics that Sartre describes in the essay "The Look":
[T]he problem of Others has generally been treated as if the primary relation by which the Other is discovered is object-ness; that is, as if the Other were first revealed--directly or indirectly--to our perception. But since this perception by its very nature refers to something other than to itself ... not to an isolated entity located in principle outside my reach, its essence must be to refer to a primary relation between my consciousness and the Other's. This relation, in which the Other must be given to me directly as a subject although in connection with me, is the fundamental relation, the very type of my being-for-others. (Sartre 1956, 253)
The applicability of Sartre's thought to Hitchcock's film can be measured by the degree of correspondence between the surveillance conditions of Nazi occupation that influenced Sartre's conception of the look and the state scrutiny of anti-communist McCarthyism that roiled Hollywood during the period in which Hitchcock was making Rear Window. Both led to alienating conditions that pit the individual against the state, which permeated individuals' relationships with each other. Within the film itself, we can readily observe that although Jeff implicitly acknowledges his understanding of the condition of "being-for-others," his fear of being seen by Thorwald indicates his uneasiness about the reciprocality it entails. The formation of his identity through the direction of his own gaze, while granting him power, obstructs his relationships with others--relationships that reciprocally acknowledge more than just his own desires, interests, and concerns--and entraps him in the isolated position that Sartre calls "being-for-oneself."
This essay examines the ways in which Hitchcock's film narrative screens the danger of personal isolation that stems from voyeuristic detachment, and how it violently resolves the obstacles to Jeff's developing identity, enabling him to move beyond the separation from others that he attempts to maintain. In particular, his relationship with Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), his girlfriend, is renegotiated and ultimately fulfilled by a reciprocal exchange of subject and object positions conceptually and spatially in the film's narrative. Although the film's framing technique functions to define the subjectivity of the gaze, the camera is freed at crucial moments from the dedicated perspective it attains by its nearly consistent positioning within Jeff's apartment. These crucial instances in which the camera travels outside of Jeff's apartment identify its point of view as spatially rather than characterologically defined throughout the film, which produces a counter-objectification that radically alters how we understand the dynamics of the gaze. The film's effect and meaning depend upon the narrative's reversing the direction of power that Jeff exerts, and thus leads the way to achieving the reciprocality involved in intersubjective relationships. In other words, in addition to critiquing the objectifying power of Jeff's voyeurism, the reciprocity of the look provides the opportunity for closure not just to the Thorwald murder mystery but also to the heterosexual romance between Jeff and Lisa that tips the narrative balance. Finally, the emphasis on the dynamics of the gaze will suggest a critique of the inherent limitations in the analyses of cinematic reflexivity.
My analysis will unfold in four sections. The first examines the foundation and implications of Jeff's voyeuristic identity; the second addresses Lisa's expectations of power from being looked at, and the strategies she adopts when this typical avenue of control is closed off by Jeff's dogged grasp on his subjectivity; the third analyzes the cinematic shifts that effect a break in the audience's identification with Jeff's subjectivity and the implications for Jeff's discovery of the fulfillment of reciprocality; and the last briefly considers the implications of Jeff's diegetic transformation on the meaning of the film's reflexivity and what the spectator is to understand about one's own position with regard to watching.
1. Doing "something drastic"
Hitchcock announces the reflexive allegory that connects Jeff's rear window to the cinematic screen on which the film narrative is projected during the opening titles, when the three bamboo curtains on Jeff's apartment window rise as a visual echo of the rising curtain in a theater. The frame that this window presents to us is an appropriate establishing shot because nearly all of the images in Rear Window, especially our first sight of the people and objects we see, come to us through this frame or analogous ones. We glimpse the different stories in the apartments that surround the courtyard through the frames of their windows: the frustrated composer, the grim salesman and his invalid wife, the coquettish dancer, the desperate spinster, the intimate newlyweds--each inspire narratives that have been likened to the kinds of stories one finds in film, on television, or in tabloid journalism. (5) Our first look around the interior of Jeff's apartment gives us a complementary establishing shot. By comparison to the brief and distanced views of the pan around the courtyard, the long take and proximity of this interior mise-en-scene signal the pre-eminence of this character, a man trapped in a plaster cast from his waist to the toes of his left foot, and the story that will unfold within this apartment. The decor of his apartment includes a series of images juxtaposed to convey expository content, confirmed later by dialogue: from the broken camera juxtaposed to the action shot of a racing-car accident, we surmise not only the cause of Jeff's broken leg but also his profession as a photojournalist, which is confirmed by other action photographs of a fire and an atomic-bomb test. In drawing these inferences, we engage in the same process through which Jeff constructs the stories of his neighbors' lives.
As it completes the pan of Jeff's apartment, the camera rests on one pair of images--a framed negative of a cover model and its positive image on the magazine lying adjacent to the photo-negative--that comments more ironically. The framed negative is a provocative image both because of its visual counter-statement to the magazine cover and because it foretells the misgivings Jeff will later admit about fashion photography, professionally, and about glamorous women, personally. His resistance to romance defines his troubled relationship with Lisa, who makes her entrance in the fourth scene of the film. Her arrival is swathed in mystery as Hitchcock reveals her presence first as a shadow gradually looming over the sleeping Jefferies. When he detects her presence, the smile on his face converts what might be an ominous image to a more gratifying one, and then the continuity crosscut to a frontal close-up of Lisa followed by a profile view of the slow-motion kiss between the couple fulfill that expectation. This lingering over the erotic moment frames the intimacy while still maintaining the audience's curiosity about the identity of Jeff's paramour. And...
|
