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Jeff’s musings are a central concern of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic, Rear Window, but are perhaps soaked in irony. In ‘50s America, the ethical debate regarding the state’s view into the intricate lives of its people, wasn’t really a debate at all. America had two things on its mind: Communism and the A-bomb. Finding ‘the enemy within’, that conspiratorial ‘Red’, was a task to be met with no boundaries. Indeed, McCarthyism and ‘spy culture’ were at the very epicentre of the American cultural psyche.
The intrusive all-seeing eye, in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, is condensed into the figure of Jeff (James Stewart); a globe-trotting photojournalist, confined to a wheelchair in his apartment, with no other stimulus than the seemingly banal domestic lives of his fellow neighbours. But Jeff encompasses more than the figure of a perverse ‘voyeur’ in Rear Window; he is a constantly shifting viewing agent within the film. He is, in a sense, the cinema goer, me and you, confined in his seat within a fixed, theatricalised perspective. Jeff desperately seeks drama in the various windowed vignettes projected in front of him, partly because of his (and our) viewer expectation. He desires an escape from the everyday banalities of his attention seeking girlfriend and lecturing home-care nurse; a desire finally relieved when Jeff believes he has witnessed a murder.
Indeed, Rear Window is a movie based on a negative, on doubts. The cinematography is based around glimpses from Jeff’s limited view, and these are almost erotically coy. Agency is at once invited and imposed in Rear Window as Jeff becomes the director and provocateur of the dramas unfurling in front of him. A partially self-fabricated adventure ensues; stuck between the flawless demeanour of the accused Thorwald and his disbelieving friends, Jeff sets out to prove his theories.
When Jeff crosses the boundary between himself and his subject and begins to manage the situation to his own satisfactions, the film finally reveals the obsessions of the voyeur. Whilst we can perhaps excuse Jeff for his wandering eye in the beginning, the climactic confrontation of the final scene, dramatically shows us what is at stake for the viewer in a media fabricated culture.
Perhaps this is the reason why Rear Window is considered such a canonical work in Hitchcock’s cinematic career and in cinema in general. As a piece of suspense cinema it is flawless; everything on the screen is designed to produce an intended effect. As a musing on the machinations of cinema, voyeurism and the media, it is labyrinthine and more than warrants its extensive critical endorsements.
Whilst Rear Window is symptomatic of its period, viewer ethics have changed little in contemporary times and we are still obsessed by our desire for information, significant or not; the latest update of the next reality TV show, the next secret celebrity revelation. Indeed, the formula of Rear Window has been restructured on numerous occasions, with contemporary filmmakers picking up Hitchcock’s model in a time of international terrorism and criminality. Films such as Disturbia, Panic Room and Right at Your Door are keen to remind us of the horrors that occur when the media space and the domestic space become one and the same; when we become the subject in our own lethal drama.
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