'A race of peeping toms'
#23 - 'Rear Window'
“We’ve become a race of peeping toms,” Stella tells L.B. Jefferies early on in Rear Window. “What people ought to do is get outside their house and look in for a change.”
Stella, Jefferies’ caretaker as he recovers from a broken leg, is chiding the film’s protagonist for his burgeoning voyeurism. Jefferies, played by Jimmy Stewart, is a man about town - about the world, actually - suddenly turned in to a man about his apartment. The world-traveling photographer, confined to a “swamp of boredom,” is idly training his lens on his neighbors, intruding in to their lives to pass the time.
All films are autobiographical to a degree. The people making them infuse their own values and belief systems in to the story. The heroes and villains represent part of the makers’ own personalities. Many, many films are also about the process of making a film. Some, like Birdman or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), are quite literal. Others, like High Noon, shroud themselves in metaphor. Rear Window is Alfred Hitchcock’s entry in to both categories. There is some abstraction, but it is much closer to Birdman than High Noon.
This is a film that is obsessed with framing.
There are the quite literal frames that L.B. Jefferies peers through with his telephoto lens and binoculars. The garden apartments he can see through his window are like dioramas where the characters move. What he is able to see and not see are tantalizing in different ways.
The intrusion on someone else’s private space and the mystery of what is blocked from view form the metaphorical framing. Together, these two parts tell a story that Jefferies can craft to his liking. And he can craft it so well at a certain point that he can suck others in with him. By the back half of the story, Stella is right there with him. So is his stunning, socialite girlfriend Lisa, played by Grace Kelly, and his detective friend Doyle, played by Wendell Corey.
In this way, Hitchcock is showcasing the raw power of a filmmaker, while not exactly celebrating it as a virtue. It is interesting, isn’t it, that L.B. Jefferies isn’t exactly a likable or laudable hero? There is his spying on his neighbors, of course. But there is also his selfishness and indifference to others. Stella, Lisa and Doyle all give him perfectly good reasons to put down the binoculars. It is especially exasperating that Lisa, with her kindness, her beauty, and her willingness to orient her life around hers, can not capture his gaze. All three of these people should leave Jefferies to his own devices. Somehow, his devices become theirs.
He has a good story, you see. It is one where he has filled in details gratuitously and sensationally. That’s the thing about a good story, though. We don’t really mind the liberties as long as they don’t get in the way. It is even more interesting, isn’t it, that Jefferies turns out to be right about what is going on in the Thorwalds’ apartment across the way even though he has no real logical right to the conclusions he makes. It is most interesting that Jefferies ends up satisfied but with a second broken leg as a result of all of his story-weaving.
In this thinly veiled metaphor, most of us are a Stella or a Lisa or a Doyle. We are the audience. We are along for the ride, whether we want to be or not. Hitchcock himself, he is a Jefferies. He is a fabulously gifted storyteller, and as such he wields enormous power. In Rear Window, as in life, this is neither good nor bad. Mostly, it must be respected.