Hitchcock's Rear Window by John Fawell

Author:John Fawell [Fawell, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780809389704
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

6

Playing the Windows Game 2: The Lonely Hearts

After the Thorwalds’ window, the most featured and important has to be Miss Lonelyhearts’s window. Miss Lonelyhearts is the only neighbor, beside Lars Thorwald and his wife, to survive from Cornell Woolrich’s original story. She seems a descendant of the young widow in Woolrich’s story who would put her child to bed and then “sit there painting her eyes and mouth.” Once, the narrator relates, “I was still up, and I looked and she was sitting there motionless with her head buried in her arms. Something about it, it used to make me a little sad.”1

Lisa is the one who most often projects herself into Miss Lonelyhearts’s window. “Well, at least that’s something you’ll never have to worry about,” Jeff says to Lisa as he watches Miss Lonelyhearts weep at her dinner table after entertaining her imaginary suitor. He assumes the youthful, glamorous Lisa has nothing in common with the old maid. “Oh, you can see my apartment up on Sixty-third Street all the way from here,” responds Lisa, emphasizing that she is not as different from Miss Lonelyhearts as Jeff thinks she is. Hitchcock certainly agrees. If Mrs. Thorwald represents the strongest physical parallel to Lisa, Miss Lonelyhearts represents the strongest emotional parallel.

The scene that makes the connection between Miss Lonelyhearts and Lisa clear is the carefully arranged one that occurs in the wake of Jeff and Lisa’s angry conversation in which Jeff informs Lisa that he cannot see a future to their relationship. The heated conversation finishes with Jeff taking a very rude and condescending tone. “Let’s just stop talking nonsense, shall we,” he tells Lisa, who sets off forlornly to the kitchen to prepare their dinner. As so often happens in this film, the dialogue between Jeff and Lisa sets the tone for, or serves as a prelude to, what happens next in the windows across the way. Jeff has hurt Lisa. It is an easy jump here to the sad Miss Lonelyhearts. Hitchcock is careful to maintain consistency between the mood in Jeff’s apartment and the mood across the court.

Still, Hitchcock does not take us directly into Miss Lonelyhearts’s apartment. When Jeff looks across the courtyard, he first focuses on Mrs. Thorwald in her bed. Only then, in a very geometrical pan down, does he take us to Miss Lonelyhearts’s apartment. By starting with Mrs. Thorwald and then moving to Miss Lonelyhearts, Hitchcock emphasizes that Miss Lonelyhearts is picking up from where Mrs. Thorwald left off (she had been the subject of our last window viewing) and that both are united as Lisa’s reflection.

The song “To See You Is to Love You” that serves as background music to Miss Lonelyhearts’s sad imaginary date represents yet another ironic commentary on Jeff, who seems to have so much more feeling for the women he watches than the one who is in the room with him. Moments after being so cruel to Lisa, he turns a deeply sympathetic eye on Miss Lonelyhearts, to the point of being willing to take on the role of Miss Lonelyhearts’s imaginary lover.

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