Rear Window

18/01/2026

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Scopophilic Circumscriptions

There might be many disputes over what constitutes a theory of spectatorship (should it concentrate on quantitative analysis with numerous viewers’ observations, as cognitivism demands, or generalise from the particular as psychoanalysis believed?). But few would surely dispute that Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window is a useful film to explore the subject. How could it not be when the central character in the work is even more bound to his seat than the spectator in the cinema? While in most films the gap between the viewer and the lead character is pronounced, as they often move through numerous locations by foot, cycle and motorbike, in cars, trains or automobiles, while the viewer will at best pop out for a drink or a toilet break, in Rear Window L.B Jefferies (James Stewart) has his leg in a cast and can’t venture beyond his apartment. He is forced into the same role as the viewer: he is a spectator. From there, he begins to believe a murder has been committed across the way.
Films often offer a variation of this spectator role, and some genres more than others: teen comedies and private eye movies, for example. A pervert or a detective, a lusty teen or a lonely voyeur will all have characters mimicking the spectatorial function, and we even have a fancy word like scopophilia to describe this act of looking. This is a worthy term perhaps to describe the observers in A Short Film about Love or Monsieur Blanc, but hardly one that needs to come to mind when thinking of Animal House, Porky’s or There’s Something About Mary. In a detective film, it often takes the form of a stakeout, and sometimes segues into desire, sometimes obsession, as in Stakeout and Vertigo, the latter another Hitchcock film, of course, and with James Stewart again, crippled by heights but at least without a leg in a cast. Most of these films are incidentally scopophilic, and only A Short Film About Love and Monsieur Blanc, like Rear Window, come close to offering a complement to the viewer in showing a character caught in a similarly confined place. There may be other Hitchcock films that play on locational constraint (like Lifeboat and Rope), but neither are films about looking, and Hitchcock could see in Rear Window something that might pass for pure cinema. Speaking to Francois Truffaut, he said, ‘‘It was the possibility of doing a purely cinematic film. You have an immobilised man looking out. That’s one part of the film. The second part shows how he reacts. That is actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea.’’ (Hitchcock)
Hitchcock offers a combination of the complicit and the explicit, with many of the shots seen from the camera’s point of view and some from Jefferies’. Yet to speak of the camera’s point of view can seem too general, since all shots are inevitably from the camera’s perspective in the strict sense, including those from a specific character. However, Hitchcock more than most managed to make the camera’s perspective apparent without making it feel arbitrary. He makes the viewer feel like they are following a story rather than being told one. To bring this aspect out, we can think of another New York film from 1954, On the Waterfront. (And where Eve Marie Saint was given the role opposite Marlon Brando after Grace Kelly, who agreed to work with Hitchcock twice in a row, after appearing in Dial M for Murder, turned down the role in Elia Kazan’s film.) At the beginning, we have a long shot that shows characters exiting a shed at the port, before cutting to a medium shot as a well-dressed figure gets into a chauffer-driven car, and another in a lumberjack shirt leaves the frame. The film offers a dissolve into the latter, and shows our central character, played by Marlon Brando, from an overhead angle, then cuts to him, before we get a point-of-view shot as he looks up at the approximate height we have just seen the high-angle shot from. At no moment would the viewer seem implicated in the scene, as Elia Kazan lets his camera tell the story with efficiency and skill. In contrast, Hitchcock opens with much more complicit camerawork as he pushes the camera through the window and, after, in a single shot, allows it to survey the courtyard in a circular motion before returning to the same apartment. Moments later, it shows our central character and surveys the room to give us an idea of his profession and how he came to break his leg. It isn’t until four minutes into the film that we get a point-of-view shot from Jefferies, and yet the film hasn’t felt objective up until this point either. Hitchcock would even claim, in the interview with Truffaut, that only one scene in the film he believed was completely objective: a dog’s death.
One reason lies in the camera’s mobility against Jefferies’ immobility. While the film does remain restricted to the apartment when at key moments it refuses to change location (as when his girlfriend will later dangerously go into the murderer’s flat and we stay with Jefferies), the camera does suggest a capacity to range further than Jefferies can, even if Hitchcock would be justified in saying the camera stays within the character’s optic range, even if it has a fluidity Jefferies clearly cannot match. Hitchcock’s brilliance rests partly on creating a strong sense of constriction within a stronger sense of cinematic movement, as the camera constantly darts around looking to follow points of potential interest, as though a viewer channel-hopping while they decide which show or film they will watch that evening. Will it be the sex comedy of a dancer with several suitors, or the tragedy of a lonely woman who feigns a lover as she sets two plates for dinner, even if she will remain alone? Or might it be the marital bliss or otherwise of a newly married couple, or a story about artistic struggle as we see a composer at work? Hitchcock said that ’’all the stories have a common denominator in that they involve some aspect of love’’ (Truffaut), and we will later explore how these dramas across the way help Jefferies understand his feelings for his model girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly). But what they initially do is stave off boredom for both the viewer and Jefferies, as we wait to find out which story will take precedence. This, of course, will be the one where Jefferies believes a murder has been committed, and thus a murder mystery becomes the genre Lisa and Jeff choose as their priority.
The chief difference between the insularity of Rope and that of Rear Window rests on Rope’s theatrical staging and Rear Window’s cinematic observation. Theatre is not observational in the same sense, even if one might justifiably claim we observe actors on stage and the gestures they offer and sometimes hide. But the theatrical space is inevitably closed off, while the cinematic one usually opens up as it films streets, crowds, trains, buses and numerous other things that theatre cannot. While both cinematic fiction and theatrical drama suspend disbelief, cinema is less inclined to ask us to suspend this disbelief over the objects that make up the mise en scene. Hitchcock may have had a yen for back projection and didn’t shoot Rear Window in New York, where it was set, but in a huge studio lot at Paramount in LA. Yet it still possesses the observational acuity of cinema, one that makes it a scopophilic form, as theatre isn’t perceived to be. The set was ‘‘one of the largest ever built at Paramount, was very realistic and comprised some 31 apartments, 12 of which were completely furnished. All the apartments surrounded a multilevel courtyard approximately 70 feet wide, and some of the apartment buildings were almost five stories high. The set also included a Manhattan skyline, gardens, trees, fire escapes, smoking chimneys, and an alley leading to a street complete with a bar, pedestrians, and moving traffic.’’ (American Cinematographer) Without stretching the contrast with theatre too far, it made sense that Aristotle would see catharsis as central to the stage, while in cinema, if this may also be an important dimension, so too is the feeling that other lives could play out just as easily as the ones on screen. This perhaps gives cinema an initial narrative arbitrariness, as though the story could be happening to figures other than those the film chooses to focus upon. As the voiceover in Naked City says, ‘‘there are 8 million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.’’ Such a line could hardly end Oedipus Rex or Medea. Hitchcock understood this arbitrariness in the very theme he made his own: the wrong man who finds himself caught up in events that have nothing to do with him, in The 39 Steps, North by Northwest and of course, The Wrong Man.
Here, he offers a variation of this arbitrariness and uses the scopophilic as central to it, as he narrows down the possibilities available in Naked City’s  8 million stories, and reduces them to about half a dozen. When Jefferies’ nurse says he should be careful about his voyeurism, she proposes that he might find himself spending three years in prison for it. Later, when Jefferies is sure that a murder has taken place, he asks his detective friend to go over there and search the apartment while the killer is out. The detective understandably says this is against the law, and once again, it looks like Jefferies is the potential offender, concocting stories that tell us more about his voyeuristic mind rather than his sense of observation. In time, Jefferies’ instinct turns out to be correct, but we might still be left wondering if this is idle and invasive curiosity looking for a story, and any would suffice as long as it gave Jefferies something to concentrate his mind on while he is stuck in the flat. The Killer Thorwald turns out to be a wrong ‘un, rather than a wronged man, but by allowing other stories to become potentially developed around the one that becomes paramount, so to speak, allows the film to contain an element of this arbitrariness. It even possesses a reflexive dimension. Jefferies and Lisa discuss the attractive blonde across the way and her various suitors, and Jefferies supposes it resembles Lisa’s apartment in a posher part of the city. Both are queen bees with the pick of the drones. When Jefferies reckons ‘Miss Torso’ has chosen one of them, Lisa says she isn’t in love with any of these men hovering around her place, and Jefferies asks how Lisa knows this. She says, didn’t he say that the environment resembled her own?
If the murder is the story that concentrates the narrative’s attention, Hitchcock had more than a point when he proposed that all the stories are about love. It allows them to reflect on Jefferies and Lisa’s relationship as it offers a manifold awareness on Jefferies part that this really is the woman for him. He can see in all the other relationships he witnesses that none quite have what he has with Lisa, that she is as focused on the murder as he is, creating complicity between them, and that when she is at risk across the way as the murderer catches her in his apartment, how badly he doesn’t want to lose her. It isn’t just that Lisa reveals how much she loves him when saying Miss Torso isn’t in love with any of the suitors, and, by implication, neither is she, as she loves Jefferies. It is also there when they witness Miss Lonelyhearts, and Lisa implies that she is as lonely in her apartment as this woman is in hers. It is also evident in the financial worries the newlyweds have, which the wealthy Lisa and the comfortable Jefferies needn’t worry about. A viewer might wonder whether Lisa should hang around for a man who is cutting and cruel on occasion, evident when Lisa says the enchanting music by the composer across the way was as if written for them, and Jefferies says, ‘No wonder he’s having so much trouble with it.’ The film cuts to Lisa’s face, absorbing yet another discouraging remark.
But hang around she does, and what Jefferies may see as her superficiality also happens to be a strength when it comes to understanding that Mrs Thorwald has almost certainly been murdered. While on the first night Lisa turns up, he mockingly asks her about what people were wearing earlier in the evening at the event she attended, the details seem to Jefferies to be proof of her shallowness. When she offers the same observational acuity the next evening, he sees that she possesses very useful insights about women’s fashion accessories, as she believes there is no way a woman who is supposed to be off on a trip (as the detective believes Mrs Thorwald is) would leave behind her handbag. Jefferies sees there is no such thing as a trivial observation, just as Hitchcock might insist that voyeurism is merely acute attention, and would a murder have been solved without it? Observation links to reasoning, and a crime can be solved.
Perhaps no filmmaker has worked harder to justify the perverse within the rationalistic than Hitchcock, and if his most famous disciple, Brian De Palma, seemed so much more voyeuristic than the master, it wasn’t only because there was plenty of nudity in the latter director’s work. It was also that De Palma’s plots were less tight, as though they were flimsy premises for the prurient, rather than the mastery of logical thought, and a brief comparison between the rings in Rear Window and Dressed to Kill will suffice. In Rear Window, Lisa notes that Thorwald is in possession of his wife’s wedding ring and, if his wife really had gone on a trip, as the police assume, then she would be unlikely to have left her wedding ring at home. In Dressed to Kill, the film’s initial leading lady has a sexual assignation after seeing someone in a museum, and leaves behind her wedding ring. She realises this in the lift and returns to the 7th floor to the apartment, where the killer stabs her to death. We might wonder what she was doing taking her wedding ring off during an encounter with a man who would well-know she was married, as the film surely implies that she doesn’t usually take it off, otherwise why would she forget it when she makes sure to put on all her other jewellery? But to think like this would be to think like Lisa, or rather any Hitchcock character who has been credited with carrying the rational relations of the plot. In Hitchcock, the ring is a plot point; in De Palma, it is closer to a plot hole. De Palma is interested chiefly in the set piece and offers many brilliant examples in his work, including Carrie’s horrible humiliation in the film of that name, the scene with the chainsaw in Scarface, and the disk sequence in Mission Impossible. Hitchcock likes a set piece too, of course, but it usually comes from the strength of the narrative and not the weakness of the story, with logic topping logistics. With De Palma, it is more the other way round, as we can’t help but admire the ingenuity in many of his sequences, even if we might believe they are poorly premised. The story in Carrie is almost non-existent: a plain girl with nobody to go to the prom ends up going with a sympathetic girl’s hot boyfriend. Carrie’s night is ruined by a cruel trick, and she uses her telekinetic powers to generate mayhem.
De Palma’s purpose was to create a spectator out of spectacle, but Hitchcock’s was chiefly to create complicity rather than awe. He wanted the viewer to think of the film as readily as watch it, but do so by cinematic means. When he insisted ‘‘dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms’’ (Hitchcock), this meant he wanted the viewers to think, but think visually. It creates a specific kind of spectatorship that returns us to the notion of showing the story. Hitchcock may exaggerate his case, but he often anticipates aspects of the narrative visually. We can work out what Jefferies does and what has happened to him before the conversation on the phone with his editor, and we might be well aware that while everyone else has looked out their windows after the dog has been killed and its owner rails at the neighbours, Thorwald hasn’t. Only after does Jefferies note that he didn’t, and all we can now see from his apartment is the tip of his cigarette apparent in the dark.
Hitchcock wants the spectator to feel  that they are in on the story, and the best way to do so is to believe they are in the process of discovering its unravelling. In this, Rear Window may be the greatest example of it, as everyone who passes through the apartment becomes interested in the case. It isn’t just Jefferies who muses over what is happening across the way, nor even Lisa who becomes equally curious, but the nurse too. Everybody wants to set to work their rational faculties. When Lisa wonders why Thorwald would want to kill a dog, it suddenly occurs to her that it knew too much. This works as a reference to Hitchcock’s 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much, and anticipates his remake a couple of years later. But it also makes sense of an inexplicable deed. It might be viewed as the ultimate cruelty to the woman who owned it, but for Lisa, Jefferies and the viewer, it is an important development in the story. This is a garden plot indeed, as Thorwald has used it to hide certain things there, and clearly a dog sniffing around would be unwelcome. The film brilliantly conveys the woman’s loss and the community at a loss.  They all hardly know how to react as the dog-owner accuses them all of indifference at best, of a terrible deed at worst. This is the scene Hitchcock and Truffaut describe as the only one that ‘‘becomes purely objective’’ (Hitchcock), and it proves a good example of implication over complicity. The entire neighbourhood is drawn together as bemused bystanders to an act they don’t understand, but in which all are implicated. In complicity, the deed is usually between two people and known (as we often find in Hitchcock’s fascination with the transference of guilt, as a murderer involves another in their crime, evident in Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, or I Confess), or not yet known, but where the pieces of the plot become discernible. This is the complicity Jefferies and Lisa share here as they muse over the dog’s death, and how it fits into the broader crime involving the murder of Thorwald’s wife.
Hitchcock may of course famously have been know as the master of suspense, but from the spectatorial perspective, what interested him more than suspense were the reasoning procedures we have invoked, and yet with tension a constant, all the better to acknowledge the cinematic. In some ways, Rear Window draws from a literary tradition called the armchair detective: Gerald H Strauss says, ‘They succeed by using their intellect, intuition, and logical reasoning powers which [Edgar Allan] Poe called ratiocination to deduce solutions. Sedentary observers, armchair detectives rarely visit crime scenes or interview witnesses and suspects themselves.’’ (‘Armchair Detectives’) Jefferies is a variation of it, a wheelchair detective, and one long before Ironside on TV, played of course by Raymond Burr – who is Thorwald here. But Jefferies is also a wheelchair detective in a temporary predicament. He has broken his leg, and the film registers far more his frustration than his resignation. He is aware he only has another week in the cast, and Hitchcock registers well a man who is usually a figure of action. When Lisa climbs the ladder to Thorwald’s apartment, we sense his impotence and witness his fret. She is doing what he might be doing himself if he had two good legs to stand on and clamber with. This isn’t quite the armchair detective as Strauss defines it, but one reliant on others to help solve a case that might be predicated on ratiocination, yet can’t quite be solved without a bit of legwork that is temporarily beyond Jefferies capabilities.
The viewer is very much put in Jefferies shoes or rather his cast, aware of their own spectatorial impotence which most films hide from us, all the better to give the impression that we have access to spaces and places that the director will invite us to explore when good and ready, even if when we think about it we are going nowhere, stuck in our cinema seat and reliant on the goodwill of the filmmaker to give us a virtual sense of mobility. If psychoanalytical film theorists of the 70s were interested in false consciousness and the spectator’s inability to see how limited their purview really was, as films gave the impression of a dubious omnipotence, Hitchcock made one aware of this, yet didn’t quite want to ruin the pleasure of this circumscription. Regarding Christian Metz’s perspective, Rob White says that ‘‘the spectator settles into immobility, as if once again harnessed like an infant, steadily oblivious to this immobility, [and] allows any conscious check on fantasy to slip away.’’ (The Cinema Book) Hitchcock might reply that he wanted less false consciousness than higher consciousness, by putting the character and viewer into a correlatively contained position: one that allows us to feel the limitations of movement, and yet the mind’s capacity nevertheless to roam freely as it determines to work through a murder that may have gone unnoticed were it not for the constraints placed upon Jefferies. This fixity also perhaps gives Jefferies a new perspective on love, and one that eventually allows him to offer greater commitment. When Lisa says he seemed to understand what was going on in her apartment by viewing what has been going on in Miss Torso’s, it is by extension the range of stories that he observes, and the one that he and Lisa solve, as he finally realises that Lisa is indeed a keeper.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Rear Window

Scopophilic Circumscriptions

There might be many disputes over what constitutes a theory of spectatorship (should it concentrate on quantitative analysis with numerous viewers’ observations, as cognitivism demands, or generalise from the particular as psychoanalysis believed?). But few would surely dispute that Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window is a useful film to explore the subject. How could it not be when the central character in the work is even more bound to his seat than the spectator in the cinema? While in most films the gap between the viewer and the lead character is pronounced, as they often move through numerous locations by foot, cycle and motorbike, in cars, trains or automobiles, while the viewer will at best pop out for a drink or a toilet break, in Rear Window L.B Jefferies (James Stewart) has his leg in a cast and can’t venture beyond his apartment. He is forced into the same role as the viewer: he is a spectator. From there, he begins to believe a murder has been committed across the way.
Films often offer a variation of this spectator role, and some genres more than others: teen comedies and private eye movies, for example. A pervert or a detective, a lusty teen or a lonely voyeur will all have characters mimicking the spectatorial function, and we even have a fancy word like scopophilia to describe this act of looking. This is a worthy term perhaps to describe the observers in A Short Film about Love or Monsieur Blanc, but hardly one that needs to come to mind when thinking of Animal House, Porky’s or There’s Something About Mary. In a detective film, it often takes the form of a stakeout, and sometimes segues into desire, sometimes obsession, as in Stakeout and Vertigo, the latter another Hitchcock film, of course, and with James Stewart again, crippled by heights but at least without a leg in a cast. Most of these films are incidentally scopophilic, and only A Short Film About Love and Monsieur Blanc, like Rear Window, come close to offering a complement to the viewer in showing a character caught in a similarly confined place. There may be other Hitchcock films that play on locational constraint (like Lifeboat and Rope), but neither are films about looking, and Hitchcock could see in Rear Window something that might pass for pure cinema. Speaking to Francois Truffaut, he said, ‘‘It was the possibility of doing a purely cinematic film. You have an immobilised man looking out. That’s one part of the film. The second part shows how he reacts. That is actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea.’’ (Hitchcock)
Hitchcock offers a combination of the complicit and the explicit, with many of the shots seen from the camera’s point of view and some from Jefferies’. Yet to speak of the camera’s point of view can seem too general, since all shots are inevitably from the camera’s perspective in the strict sense, including those from a specific character. However, Hitchcock more than most managed to make the camera’s perspective apparent without making it feel arbitrary. He makes the viewer feel like they are following a story rather than being told one. To bring this aspect out, we can think of another New York film from 1954, On the Waterfront. (And where Eve Marie Saint was given the role opposite Marlon Brando after Grace Kelly, who agreed to work with Hitchcock twice in a row, after appearing in Dial M for Murder, turned down the role in Elia Kazan’s film.) At the beginning, we have a long shot that shows characters exiting a shed at the port, before cutting to a medium shot as a well-dressed figure gets into a chauffer-driven car, and another in a lumberjack shirt leaves the frame. The film offers a dissolve into the latter, and shows our central character, played by Marlon Brando, from an overhead angle, then cuts to him, before we get a point-of-view shot as he looks up at the approximate height we have just seen the high-angle shot from. At no moment would the viewer seem implicated in the scene, as Elia Kazan lets his camera tell the story with efficiency and skill. In contrast, Hitchcock opens with much more complicit camerawork as he pushes the camera through the window and, after, in a single shot, allows it to survey the courtyard in a circular motion before returning to the same apartment. Moments later, it shows our central character and surveys the room to give us an idea of his profession and how he came to break his leg. It isn’t until four minutes into the film that we get a point-of-view shot from Jefferies, and yet the film hasn’t felt objective up until this point either. Hitchcock would even claim, in the interview with Truffaut, that only one scene in the film he believed was completely objective: a dog’s death.
One reason lies in the camera’s mobility against Jefferies’ immobility. While the film does remain restricted to the apartment when at key moments it refuses to change location (as when his girlfriend will later dangerously go into the murderer’s flat and we stay with Jefferies), the camera does suggest a capacity to range further than Jefferies can, even if Hitchcock would be justified in saying the camera stays within the character’s optic range, even if it has a fluidity Jefferies clearly cannot match. Hitchcock’s brilliance rests partly on creating a strong sense of constriction within a stronger sense of cinematic movement, as the camera constantly darts around looking to follow points of potential interest, as though a viewer channel-hopping while they decide which show or film they will watch that evening. Will it be the sex comedy of a dancer with several suitors, or the tragedy of a lonely woman who feigns a lover as she sets two plates for dinner, even if she will remain alone? Or might it be the marital bliss or otherwise of a newly married couple, or a story about artistic struggle as we see a composer at work? Hitchcock said that ’’all the stories have a common denominator in that they involve some aspect of love’’ (Truffaut), and we will later explore how these dramas across the way help Jefferies understand his feelings for his model girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly). But what they initially do is stave off boredom for both the viewer and Jefferies, as we wait to find out which story will take precedence. This, of course, will be the one where Jefferies believes a murder has been committed, and thus a murder mystery becomes the genre Lisa and Jeff choose as their priority.
The chief difference between the insularity of Rope and that of Rear Window rests on Rope’s theatrical staging and Rear Window’s cinematic observation. Theatre is not observational in the same sense, even if one might justifiably claim we observe actors on stage and the gestures they offer and sometimes hide. But the theatrical space is inevitably closed off, while the cinematic one usually opens up as it films streets, crowds, trains, buses and numerous other things that theatre cannot. While both cinematic fiction and theatrical drama suspend disbelief, cinema is less inclined to ask us to suspend this disbelief over the objects that make up the mise en scene. Hitchcock may have had a yen for back projection and didn’t shoot Rear Window in New York, where it was set, but in a huge studio lot at Paramount in LA. Yet it still possesses the observational acuity of cinema, one that makes it a scopophilic form, as theatre isn’t perceived to be. The set was ‘‘one of the largest ever built at Paramount, was very realistic and comprised some 31 apartments, 12 of which were completely furnished. All the apartments surrounded a multilevel courtyard approximately 70 feet wide, and some of the apartment buildings were almost five stories high. The set also included a Manhattan skyline, gardens, trees, fire escapes, smoking chimneys, and an alley leading to a street complete with a bar, pedestrians, and moving traffic.’’ (American Cinematographer) Without stretching the contrast with theatre too far, it made sense that Aristotle would see catharsis as central to the stage, while in cinema, if this may also be an important dimension, so too is the feeling that other lives could play out just as easily as the ones on screen. This perhaps gives cinema an initial narrative arbitrariness, as though the story could be happening to figures other than those the film chooses to focus upon. As the voiceover in Naked City says, ‘‘there are 8 million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.’’ Such a line could hardly end Oedipus Rex or Medea. Hitchcock understood this arbitrariness in the very theme he made his own: the wrong man who finds himself caught up in events that have nothing to do with him, in The 39 Steps, North by Northwest and of course, The Wrong Man.
Here, he offers a variation of this arbitrariness and uses the scopophilic as central to it, as he narrows down the possibilities available in Naked City’s  8 million stories, and reduces them to about half a dozen. When Jefferies’ nurse says he should be careful about his voyeurism, she proposes that he might find himself spending three years in prison for it. Later, when Jefferies is sure that a murder has taken place, he asks his detective friend to go over there and search the apartment while the killer is out. The detective understandably says this is against the law, and once again, it looks like Jefferies is the potential offender, concocting stories that tell us more about his voyeuristic mind rather than his sense of observation. In time, Jefferies’ instinct turns out to be correct, but we might still be left wondering if this is idle and invasive curiosity looking for a story, and any would suffice as long as it gave Jefferies something to concentrate his mind on while he is stuck in the flat. The Killer Thorwald turns out to be a wrong ‘un, rather than a wronged man, but by allowing other stories to become potentially developed around the one that becomes paramount, so to speak, allows the film to contain an element of this arbitrariness. It even possesses a reflexive dimension. Jefferies and Lisa discuss the attractive blonde across the way and her various suitors, and Jefferies supposes it resembles Lisa’s apartment in a posher part of the city. Both are queen bees with the pick of the drones. When Jefferies reckons ‘Miss Torso’ has chosen one of them, Lisa says she isn’t in love with any of these men hovering around her place, and Jefferies asks how Lisa knows this. She says, didn’t he say that the environment resembled her own?
If the murder is the story that concentrates the narrative’s attention, Hitchcock had more than a point when he proposed that all the stories are about love. It allows them to reflect on Jefferies and Lisa’s relationship as it offers a manifold awareness on Jefferies part that this really is the woman for him. He can see in all the other relationships he witnesses that none quite have what he has with Lisa, that she is as focused on the murder as he is, creating complicity between them, and that when she is at risk across the way as the murderer catches her in his apartment, how badly he doesn’t want to lose her. It isn’t just that Lisa reveals how much she loves him when saying Miss Torso isn’t in love with any of the suitors, and, by implication, neither is she, as she loves Jefferies. It is also there when they witness Miss Lonelyhearts, and Lisa implies that she is as lonely in her apartment as this woman is in hers. It is also evident in the financial worries the newlyweds have, which the wealthy Lisa and the comfortable Jefferies needn’t worry about. A viewer might wonder whether Lisa should hang around for a man who is cutting and cruel on occasion, evident when Lisa says the enchanting music by the composer across the way was as if written for them, and Jefferies says, ‘No wonder he’s having so much trouble with it.’ The film cuts to Lisa’s face, absorbing yet another discouraging remark.
But hang around she does, and what Jefferies may see as her superficiality also happens to be a strength when it comes to understanding that Mrs Thorwald has almost certainly been murdered. While on the first night Lisa turns up, he mockingly asks her about what people were wearing earlier in the evening at the event she attended, the details seem to Jefferies to be proof of her shallowness. When she offers the same observational acuity the next evening, he sees that she possesses very useful insights about women’s fashion accessories, as she believes there is no way a woman who is supposed to be off on a trip (as the detective believes Mrs Thorwald is) would leave behind her handbag. Jefferies sees there is no such thing as a trivial observation, just as Hitchcock might insist that voyeurism is merely acute attention, and would a murder have been solved without it? Observation links to reasoning, and a crime can be solved.
Perhaps no filmmaker has worked harder to justify the perverse within the rationalistic than Hitchcock, and if his most famous disciple, Brian De Palma, seemed so much more voyeuristic than the master, it wasn’t only because there was plenty of nudity in the latter director’s work. It was also that De Palma’s plots were less tight, as though they were flimsy premises for the prurient, rather than the mastery of logical thought, and a brief comparison between the rings in Rear Window and Dressed to Kill will suffice. In Rear Window, Lisa notes that Thorwald is in possession of his wife’s wedding ring and, if his wife really had gone on a trip, as the police assume, then she would be unlikely to have left her wedding ring at home. In Dressed to Kill, the film’s initial leading lady has a sexual assignation after seeing someone in a museum, and leaves behind her wedding ring. She realises this in the lift and returns to the 7th floor to the apartment, where the killer stabs her to death. We might wonder what she was doing taking her wedding ring off during an encounter with a man who would well-know she was married, as the film surely implies that she doesn’t usually take it off, otherwise why would she forget it when she makes sure to put on all her other jewellery? But to think like this would be to think like Lisa, or rather any Hitchcock character who has been credited with carrying the rational relations of the plot. In Hitchcock, the ring is a plot point; in De Palma, it is closer to a plot hole. De Palma is interested chiefly in the set piece and offers many brilliant examples in his work, including Carrie’s horrible humiliation in the film of that name, the scene with the chainsaw in Scarface, and the disk sequence in Mission Impossible. Hitchcock likes a set piece too, of course, but it usually comes from the strength of the narrative and not the weakness of the story, with logic topping logistics. With De Palma, it is more the other way round, as we can’t help but admire the ingenuity in many of his sequences, even if we might believe they are poorly premised. The story in Carrie is almost non-existent: a plain girl with nobody to go to the prom ends up going with a sympathetic girl’s hot boyfriend. Carrie’s night is ruined by a cruel trick, and she uses her telekinetic powers to generate mayhem.
De Palma’s purpose was to create a spectator out of spectacle, but Hitchcock’s was chiefly to create complicity rather than awe. He wanted the viewer to think of the film as readily as watch it, but do so by cinematic means. When he insisted ‘‘dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms’’ (Hitchcock), this meant he wanted the viewers to think, but think visually. It creates a specific kind of spectatorship that returns us to the notion of showing the story. Hitchcock may exaggerate his case, but he often anticipates aspects of the narrative visually. We can work out what Jefferies does and what has happened to him before the conversation on the phone with his editor, and we might be well aware that while everyone else has looked out their windows after the dog has been killed and its owner rails at the neighbours, Thorwald hasn’t. Only after does Jefferies note that he didn’t, and all we can now see from his apartment is the tip of his cigarette apparent in the dark.
Hitchcock wants the spectator to feel  that they are in on the story, and the best way to do so is to believe they are in the process of discovering its unravelling. In this, Rear Window may be the greatest example of it, as everyone who passes through the apartment becomes interested in the case. It isn’t just Jefferies who muses over what is happening across the way, nor even Lisa who becomes equally curious, but the nurse too. Everybody wants to set to work their rational faculties. When Lisa wonders why Thorwald would want to kill a dog, it suddenly occurs to her that it knew too much. This works as a reference to Hitchcock’s 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much, and anticipates his remake a couple of years later. But it also makes sense of an inexplicable deed. It might be viewed as the ultimate cruelty to the woman who owned it, but for Lisa, Jefferies and the viewer, it is an important development in the story. This is a garden plot indeed, as Thorwald has used it to hide certain things there, and clearly a dog sniffing around would be unwelcome. The film brilliantly conveys the woman’s loss and the community at a loss.  They all hardly know how to react as the dog-owner accuses them all of indifference at best, of a terrible deed at worst. This is the scene Hitchcock and Truffaut describe as the only one that ‘‘becomes purely objective’’ (Hitchcock), and it proves a good example of implication over complicity. The entire neighbourhood is drawn together as bemused bystanders to an act they don’t understand, but in which all are implicated. In complicity, the deed is usually between two people and known (as we often find in Hitchcock’s fascination with the transference of guilt, as a murderer involves another in their crime, evident in Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, or I Confess), or not yet known, but where the pieces of the plot become discernible. This is the complicity Jefferies and Lisa share here as they muse over the dog’s death, and how it fits into the broader crime involving the murder of Thorwald’s wife.
Hitchcock may of course famously have been know as the master of suspense, but from the spectatorial perspective, what interested him more than suspense were the reasoning procedures we have invoked, and yet with tension a constant, all the better to acknowledge the cinematic. In some ways, Rear Window draws from a literary tradition called the armchair detective: Gerald H Strauss says, ‘They succeed by using their intellect, intuition, and logical reasoning powers which [Edgar Allan] Poe called ratiocination to deduce solutions. Sedentary observers, armchair detectives rarely visit crime scenes or interview witnesses and suspects themselves.’’ (‘Armchair Detectives’) Jefferies is a variation of it, a wheelchair detective, and one long before Ironside on TV, played of course by Raymond Burr – who is Thorwald here. But Jefferies is also a wheelchair detective in a temporary predicament. He has broken his leg, and the film registers far more his frustration than his resignation. He is aware he only has another week in the cast, and Hitchcock registers well a man who is usually a figure of action. When Lisa climbs the ladder to Thorwald’s apartment, we sense his impotence and witness his fret. She is doing what he might be doing himself if he had two good legs to stand on and clamber with. This isn’t quite the armchair detective as Strauss defines it, but one reliant on others to help solve a case that might be predicated on ratiocination, yet can’t quite be solved without a bit of legwork that is temporarily beyond Jefferies capabilities.
The viewer is very much put in Jefferies shoes or rather his cast, aware of their own spectatorial impotence which most films hide from us, all the better to give the impression that we have access to spaces and places that the director will invite us to explore when good and ready, even if when we think about it we are going nowhere, stuck in our cinema seat and reliant on the goodwill of the filmmaker to give us a virtual sense of mobility. If psychoanalytical film theorists of the 70s were interested in false consciousness and the spectator’s inability to see how limited their purview really was, as films gave the impression of a dubious omnipotence, Hitchcock made one aware of this, yet didn’t quite want to ruin the pleasure of this circumscription. Regarding Christian Metz’s perspective, Rob White says that ‘‘the spectator settles into immobility, as if once again harnessed like an infant, steadily oblivious to this immobility, [and] allows any conscious check on fantasy to slip away.’’ (The Cinema Book) Hitchcock might reply that he wanted less false consciousness than higher consciousness, by putting the character and viewer into a correlatively contained position: one that allows us to feel the limitations of movement, and yet the mind’s capacity nevertheless to roam freely as it determines to work through a murder that may have gone unnoticed were it not for the constraints placed upon Jefferies. This fixity also perhaps gives Jefferies a new perspective on love, and one that eventually allows him to offer greater commitment. When Lisa says he seemed to understand what was going on in her apartment by viewing what has been going on in Miss Torso’s, it is by extension the range of stories that he observes, and the one that he and Lisa solve, as he finally realises that Lisa is indeed a keeper.

© Tony McKibbin