Who's Watching Who?

Rear Window seemed like just a normal film. Now, provided the information in Mulvey’s article, Rear Window seems like a movie about movies. However, it could also just be a normal film; it just depends on one’s perspective.

As I was watching the movie, for maybe the tenth time (positive statement!), I recognized the well-known fact that Hitchcock shot the entire film on one soundstage. It was clear to me each of the previous times that I had seen the movie, but now I began to wonder what the significance of that technique was. I think that Hitchcock was attempting to put the feeling of constraint on the view of the film just as L.B. was constrained to his wheelchair. This feeling of constraint is rather subtle until one of the final sequences when L.B. is being attacked by the suspect man. As he struggles to lock the door, grab his flash-bulbs, position himself, and defend against the attack, one can’t help but feel all the same frustration over one’s lack of mobility!

Mulvey also forced me to question what other significant role this single soundstage tactic played in my viewing and analysis of the movie. What is Hitchcock saying about the innate quality of the cinema to bring about voyeurism? The use of a single soundstage to promote limitation plays an important role in the perspective of the film. I venture to say that with some minor editing and my best Jimmy “Shtewarrt” impression this film could be changed to a first person narrative. This boosts the idea that the viewer of the movie is really in the driver’s seat with L.B., and doing all the same voyeuristic things that he is doing, but aren’t movie viewers free of the consequences resulting upon their protagonist? In typical movies the viewer is free of the consequences, which is what, I believe, Hitchcock is trying to say in this movie. We, as cinema supporters, attend movies and watch the lives of others with no chance of attending to the consequences that some of the movies’ protagonists’ subject themselves to.

However, in Rear Window the viewer is asked to take a look through the same camera lens and binoculars as L.B. The viewer is also made to feel that they are stuck in the same apartment with him and cannot escape. This leads to a fear of consequence not only in L.B. but in the viewer as well. Voyeurism may be inescapable at the movie theater, but Hitchcock wants us to know that he knows we’re watching, and one of these days we might get caught!