Hitchcock's Moral Gaze by R. Barton Palmer Homer B. Pettey Steven M. Sanders

Author:R. Barton Palmer,Homer B. Pettey,Steven M. Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Rear Window Ethics

As I have already noted, Rear Window has often been considered an allegory of the film spectator as voyeur: L.B Jefferies confined to his wheelchair looks out across the courtyard, unseen, at the activities of the courtyard inhabitants—just as the film spectator looks unseen upon the world of the film. Furthermore, as noted, Rear Window has been taken to exemplify (Mulvey) and critique (Stam and Pearson) the male voyeuristic gaze in the cinema. Rear Window has also been construed by David Bordwell as a self-conscious enactment of how we “construct a story on the basis of visual information” (41). Here, drawing on Paula Marantz Cohen’s astute commentary on the film, I will suggest that Rear Window provides an allegory of the role of fiction in film viewing. In Rear Window, male sexual cine-voyeurism is revealed as merely one register of film spectatorship whose significance is transformed once it is embedded in the broader institution of imagined seeing or fictional voyeurism, where the gaze functions as a conduit to the thoughts and feelings of the characters who inhabit the fictional world. In Rear Window, as Cohen writes, we come to appreciate the potential power of our own look and “to recognize its connection to the way we generate meaning and feeling” (105).

The film opens with two panning and tilting camera movements across a courtyard surrounded by apartment buildings after a window curtain has been raised on the scene. The first movement establishes the overall setting as we begin to see people asleep or waking in distant view. The second movement gives us a closer view: a man in a penthouse shaves while we hear a male voice intone on his radio: “men over forty, are you tired and rundown, do you have a listless feeling,” before the man changes the station to jazz; an alarm wakens an older couple sleeping on the fire escape; a fit young woman does her morning exercises, one of which includes unhooking her bra with her back to the spectator as she bends down, and hooking it up again once she is erect, to the cooing of doves flitting on her roof; we hear the voices of children playing; and finally we see a pair of love birds being uncovered on the left of the screen, before the camera returns us inside to the sleeping Jefferies and shows us his broken leg, his name on his cast, and photographs that reveal how his accident happened. It is only the third time we see the courtyard, with Jefferies on the phone to his editor, that we see the events across the courtyard from his point of view. We are introduced to him as a sexual voyeur. He watches as a helicopter buzzes above topless bathers, and he observes Miss Torso’s extensive exercise routines that are so noisy they draw the attention of the female sculptor who lives below. He turns to look at the composer and, then, for the first time, we see, from his

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