Rear Window

It makes a strange sort of sense that the hero of Rear Window is confined to a wheelchair in his apartment. His immobilization only highlights his character’s obsession and fascination with voyeurism, hinted at with the opening crawl through his apartment that slowly caresses a broken camera and the framed photograph of a car crash. James Stewart’s  L. B. Jeffries is a man more interested in watching what’s going on “out there” then what’s going on in his own life.

The cinema is frequently an exercise in voyeuristic displays, but Rear Window takes that concept to its zenith. Over the course of nearly two hours, Alfred Hitchcock traps us inside of L. B.’s point-of-view, slowly but surely transitioning us away from mere audience and into his accomplice. Not only do we spy in on his various neighbors, but we’re introduced to his lovely girlfriend (Grace Kelly, giving one hell of a performance) in a hazy, sleepy close-up as she leans into him for a kiss. We are L. B., and when his visiting nurse (Thelma Ritter, ever-reliable supporting player) chastises him with “what people ought to do is get outside their own home and look in for a change,” we are just as much the intended targets for her diatribe.

The bulk of Rear Window is spent with a quietly coiling tension and suspicion. Unlike many other tales of suspense from the master, we’re only privy to the small tidbits the characters learn as they learn them, no more and no less. When L. B. awakes in the middle of the night to strange activities and notices a missing wife across the way, we simultaneously mental grasp at the same conclusions and ideas. The neighbor (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wife and done something with the body, but what? When a different neighbor’s dog dies after digging around some flowers, then tension and fears only escalate with no proper outlet. We’re trapped in a hothouse of paranoia and suspicion with only a vague montage of images and odd behaviors as our clues.

Of course, Hitchcock doesn’t throw head-first into this boiler plate environment, oh no, he’s too smart of an artist for that. Instead, we begin with cutesy miniature portraits of various neighbors who have been given various nicknames and narratives. There’s Miss Lonelyhearts, Miss Torso, the Newlyweds, the couple who owns the dog, a struggling composer, and an artist are but a few of the characters we view. Each of their windows a rectangle reflecting the cinema’s screen, becoming something of a screen-within-a-screen as time goes on. Then the rainy night scene changes everything, and Kelly’s character becomes an amateur sleuth and the leg-woman for Stewart’s investigation.

This was the second of three films that Kelly and Hitchcock made together, and she’s positively sublime here. She wafts through the screen as vision of elegance, putting Stewart’s indifference towards her presence in the earliest scenes as an unfathomable event. He only sparks an interest in her when she transitions from flesh-and-blood WASP-y goddess to player in the various channels across the way. There’s a self-descriptive element to Kelly’s character here. She was never convincing as a real human being on screen, but she was most alive and charming in roles that required a certain bit of play acting and posing from her.

For his part, Stewart is a model of neutral acting sometimes being the best choice to get the widest amount of readings. His work here is very good, even if it’s nowhere near the amount of difficulty in Vertigo, there’s still a pleasing amount of perversity in watching the lovable everyman quality of Stewart’s used for such kinky means. Emotionally distant and cold aren’t phrases that typically come to mind with Stewart, but Hitchcock managed to find those in his screen presence, complicating what a “James Stewart” role looked and felt like. His passivity in life is almost an act of repeated cruelty to Kelly, who merely begs him to love her and to pry himself away from the cameras and peeping tom behavior.

After flirting with us for a large chunk of the film, Hitchcock finally causes the players in the apartment to strike back at the voyeur. Well, only one really, but he’s the one they suspect of killing his wife. Turns out they’re right, and the idle peeping turns back violently on the voyeur forcing him to become active in his life. What saves him? Why the flashbulbs from a camera, of course, yet another example of Hitchcock’s mordant humor adding an extra zing to the ending of his films. The violent twisting of that which is being viewed into an aggressor feels preordained, the inevitable tragedy of a passive life spent looking into places and at things that we shouldn’t.