Mind if I use that portable keyhole?

Rating: Null/10 (2 August 2010)

One of Alfred Hitchcock's finest films, "Rear Window" finds actor Jimmy Stewart playing Jeff Jefferies, a photojournalist confined to his apartment due to a broken leg. Stuck in a wheelchair, Jeff finds himself becoming a Peeping Tom, spying on those who live in the apartment block opposite his urban complex.
As the film unfolds, we become aware that each apartment window Jeff spies on reveals an aspect of his own psyche, much of it having to do with his feelings of inferiority - which he hides by pretending to be a macho journalist - fear of commitment and sexual unease. Jeff thinks of himself as a "camera bum", a guy too lowly to be with Lisa, the gorgeous woman (played by the always sublime Grace Kelly) who's madly in love with him. "She's too perfect, too talented, too beautiful, too sophisticated, too everything but what I want!" Jeff moans, as he begins to project his insecurities onto the various characters living in the building opposite his. And so Jeff notes the dissatisfactions of a pair of newlyweds, the banal lives of an elderly couple, the frictions between a pianist and his lover and the arguments between a knife salesman and his wife.
Eventually, what Jeff sees across the courtyard becomes so intertwined with his own insecurities that he practically wills the travelling salesman into murdering his wife. In Jeff's warped mind, the salesman, who like Jeff is always away from home, always at a pit-stop between assignments, MUST murder his wife if only to decisively prove that things will never work out between him and Lisa!
Then the film gets really twisted, for Lisa TOO wants the woman dead. She exploits Jeff's obsession with solving the film's murder mystery in order to counter his misogyny by proving herself a fit companion for him. In a sense, Jeff "concocts a murder fantasy" to prove that their relationship is doomed, whilst Lisa "goes along with the fantasy" to prove that she is as tough and rugged as her dear Jeff (and only then does life in the apartment across the street become happy). It's like a freaky sadomasochistic game in which wive's offer themselves as corpse's to remasculinize men and lovers lovingly mend bridges with murder.
Throughout the film, Hitchcock's roaming camera (linked with curious cats and dogs, the latter killed for sniffing about) elegantly explores its urban surroundings. But what it finds is only a world of characters happy on the outside but afflicted by terrible loneliness and frustrations on the inside. And Jeff, of course, no more responds to the mental anguish (deaths, abuse, suicides etc) of these characters than he does to Lisa's suffering. They're all stick figures, existing for Jeff's own private amusement.
While Jeff and Lisa project their respective fantasies upon the mirror building, back in their own apartment, in their own world, they're still the same old conflicted couple. This dichotomy has led to about six decades of writers reading "Window" - a film which even pauses to discuss the ethics of watching (shades of "Rope") - as an allegory for the cinema experience. With such readings, the apartment Jeff spies on is typically read as a theatre screen, a blank slate upon which we project our fantasies, while in reality we sit, like Jeff, stymied and crippled. The film also explicitly links boredom to voyeurism and cinema to a kind of perverse, dehumanising thing, man interested in his fellow men only insofar as they provide morbid, detached amusement. Jeff's seen and catalogued the world, but is afraid of getting close to anything.
Of course "Window's" "highbrow" readings only came later. Upon initial release, the film was simply read as being – pick one - a pulpy thriller, a comment on post war complacency, a comment on the dark shenanigans that go on behind closed curtains and a light romance in which our sexy stars learn to "change" in order to better accommodate their partners. These may all be true, but Hitch does have Jeff defeat "Window's" villain with a (film) camera, opening a whole can of interesting self-reflexive avenues.
This self-reflexivity is pushed further by Brian De Palma in "Body Double", essentially a sleazy hybrid of Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and "Window". Here De Palma takes the impotency of Scotty from Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and applies it to a voyeuristic character called Scully in "Body Double" (Scotty has vertigo, Scully has claustrophobia). The film then goes on to have Scully "watch" a pornographic movie after his "female neighbour" dies (she's the echo of the knife salesman's wife in "Window"), as he is no longer able to voyeuristically watch women in real life. The con is, both Scully's neighbour and the woman in the movie are the same character, both self-consciously "acting" or "performing" on "stages" for Scully, who is himself both a performer (a failed actor) and too impotent (due to social phobias) to act. The simple reality/fantasy, subject/object, audience/screen, spectator/spectacle paradigm of Hitchcock's era increasingly breaks down as the film progresses. Instead we get a continuous succession of layers and meta-screens, everyone actors playing actors playing body doubles or doppelgangers. It's no longer a case of Scully, like Jeff, seeking out voyeurism, or even seeking out decontexualised voyeurism and the surrogate fantasies of film and television, but that under postmodernity, everybody is a participatory image, everyone is in someone else's "movie", everything is someone else's desire, a mutual charade in which everyone is enrolled. This, of course, is Lynch/Cronenberg territory, themselves two directors who owe huge debts to Hitchcock ("Body Double", "Blue Velvet", "Existenz" etc, all successors to "Rear Window", all coincide with either the end of the beta-max-VHS war and the boom of the internet generation. IE – they mark shifts in our evolving relationship with voyeurism).
9/10 - Stylish, audacious and packed with excellent banter. Worth multiple viewings.