"Jeff" Jeffries (James Stewart is correct in his suspicion that Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), the man who lives in an apartment across the courtyard from Jeff's, murdered his wife and hacked her into small pieces in order to move the body in several trips with a suitcase during the course of a long stormy night one miserably hot summer. This is the meat of the thing, far more than the question of whether irritably wheelchair-bound L.B. And I will not be making a radical, groundbreaking contribution to film criticism when I say that Rear Window, like the vast majority of films in Hitchcock's career, is primarily about the convoluted path, leading through elaborate genre machinery, by which a romantic couple is formed and/or recommits to itself. I ask that we do this not because I think that it's not an important aspect of what the film is doing, or that it's not a very interesting and compelling aspect of what the film is up to, but because I think it has to some extent become so much the thing we know about Rear Window that we risk losing sight of the other main thing that the film is about - the "actual" thing the movie is about, I would almost say, if I wanted to be deliberately cheeky. This is a film about how watching movies and TV is voyeurism, and we're all a little bit naughty for doing it, and Hitch is a little bit naughty for making films that let us do it. Since we all know that, and have since 1954 (though, in fairness, the film spent a very substantial portion of its first three decades of life locked in a vault with four other Hitchcock movies - Rope, The Trouble with Harry, the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo - at which point we probably only knew it through reputation), I would like to take it as read. And it's about how that habit of treating humanity as nothing but spectacle, fodder to keep yourself distracted from your own life, can end up turning into something very grisly and unpleasant. And in a way that could have been barely imagined in 1954, when the film premiered, it's even more specifically about the prurient voyeurism of watching television: of sitting in your living room, bored out of your goddamned mind, blandly glancing from one square-shaped window on human beings framed in medium shots to the next, hoping that one of them will contain at least some amount of sex or violence, insofar as the censors will allow you to actually see anything. All those French theorists who made a cottage industry out of "solving" Hitchcock films sure as hell did. Art directors Hal Pereira and Joseph MacMillian Johnson did. John Michael Hayes, the screenwriter, knew this, although having never read the short story the film was adapted from, I do not know if the story's writer Cornell Woolrich, knew this, but I have to imagine he did. Alfred Hitchcock, the film's director, knew this. Rear Window is a film about the prurient voyeurism of watching movies. A review requested by Benjamin, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.ĭo you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
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