THE WORK — Rear Window (1954), feature film DIRECTED BY — Alfred Hitchcock WRITTEN BY — John Michael Hayes, from the short story by Cornell Woolrich WITH — James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr

Contents

A Note Before Looking

I. Three Blinds Rise II. The Man Who Cannot Move III. An Anatomy of the Courtyard IV. Marriage, Considered as a Crime Scene V. Instruments VI. The Ethics of the Rectangle VII. What the Camera Knows VIII. Suspense Is a Form of Time IX. Lisa Enters the Picture X. The Ring XI. Two Laws XII. The Woman Who Was Not There XIII. The Look Returned XIV. Six Bursts of Light XV. The Second Cast

Coda: No Innocent Position

A Note Before Looking

This book proceeds from a single assumption: that Rear Window is not a thriller that happens to concern itself with looking, but a treatise on looking that has been fitted, with great tact, into the chassis of a thriller. The murder is the pretext. The subject is the eye — its appetites, its jurisdiction, its bad faith, and the particular kind of damage it does to the thing it studies and to the person who does the studying.

What follows is not a review, and it is not a summary. Readers who need to know what happens in the film will not find it here in serviceable order, and this is deliberate: to retell the plot of Rear Window is to reproduce the very operation the film is warning us about — the conversion of other people’s lives into narrative, performed at a distance, for pleasure. The reader is assumed to have seen the film. The reader is also assumed to have enjoyed it, and to be willing to examine that enjoyment.

The method here is close attention: to a shot’s duration, to the placement of a lamp, to the direction a body faces when it falls asleep. The argument emerges from those particulars rather than being imposed on them. Ideas from philosophy are present throughout, but they are not named, cited, or invited to sit at the head of the table. The film has its own philosophy and states it in its own language, which is composed of glass, brick, light, distance, and delay. My task is to translate, not to overrule.

One further warning. This is a book about a work of art in which everyone is guilty of the same thing, including the police, including the moralist who denounces it, including the director, and including — most durably — the audience. There is no seat in the house from which one may watch Rear Window innocently. The film sees to that in its first ninety seconds.

I. Three Blinds Rise

The film begins by quoting the theater and then quietly falsifying the quotation.

Three bamboo blinds ascend over the window. They do not rise together; they rise in sequence, unevenly, the way a nervous stagehand might raise them, and behind them a courtyard is disclosed in the early light. This is the oldest gesture in dramatic art — the curtain going up — and Hitchcock performs it with a household object. A window blind is not a curtain. A curtain exists to be raised. A blind exists to be lowered, and the entire moral machinery of the film will turn on that difference: on shades pulled down at the wrong moment, on a bedroom sealed against the heat, on the fact that in a building without air conditioning, privacy is a luxury the weather has repealed.

Note what happens next, because it is the film’s foundational proposition and it is delivered before a single character exists. The camera moves out through the open window and surveys the courtyard on its own authority. A cat crosses the flagstones. A man shaves at a mirror. A young woman rises from a fire escape where she has slept against the heat. Music arrives from a radio, then from a piano, then from a street. The camera then withdraws, re-enters the room, and finds a sleeping man with sweat on his forehead.

The order is not incidental. The world is shown first; the watcher is discovered second. For nearly two minutes, this courtyard is visible to no one inside the story. It goes on being itself — cats, razors, the slow business of morning — without the dignity of an observer. When the camera at last locates the man in the wheelchair, it locates him as a latecomer to a spectacle already in progress.

Everything that will go wrong in this film proceeds from that man’s refusal to accept the arrangement. He will spend the next two hours attempting to prove that the courtyard requires him — that his attention is not a supplement to the lives across the yard but a necessary condition of their meaning. The film’s opening shot has already refuted him. The world does not need to be seen in order to exist. It merely needs to be seen in order to become a story, and that is a different and much more dangerous claim.

The camera continues past him. It reads the room the way a detective reads a corpse: the thermometer standing in the nineties, a plaster cast running the length of a leg, a smashed camera, a shelf of photographs, a stack of negatives, a magazine cover. This is ...