Rear Window
Posted by J on July 3, 2007
Every story has a point, and this one’s was obvious: it’s good to spy on your neighbors. There’s little else one can get from this film, made during an era of Communist scare. In Rear Window Jimmy Stewart is an old grump, and his extravagant young girlfriend whines about his grumpiness. And then she whines further about the fact that he won’t marry her. Makes perfect sense. She’s so upset at his reluctance to marry that, in order to provoke him, she spends the night at his apartment. And here we thought people in the 1950s were moral prudes.
It is, of course, impressive that all the action takes place in one locale, the camera hardly moving from one spot in Jimmy Stewart’s apartment, and that even despite this the movie is supposedly so harrowing as to be ranked #13 all-time on IMDB.com. But the fact about the limited camera movement is ultimately a novelty. And we were greatly hoping it would move, too, because we were tired of seeing the barely-clad blonde do calisthenics in her window. This kind of female obsession is more than a fault in Hitchcock movies, viewer beware.
The villain of Rear Window turns out to be just the kind of murderer you expect: a middle-class Norwegian, (the sort of person in a group with one of the world’s lowest murder rates, but since Norway is so close to Russia and we’re dumb Americans, we were thinking he was a Commie Pinko all along anyway). The movie, of course, reveals no motive for our knife-wielding Norseman. And for almost all of the movie, all we have is purely circumstantial evidence to judge him on. In Rear Window, the Biblical principle of having two or three witnesses is discarded in favor of Jimmy’s Stewart’s one-man-band assumption that the guy across the way is a murderer. Meanwhile, the characters over and over ask the movie’s lone moral question: what is the ethics of Stewart’s window observation? At the end we receive a clear answer: spying is okay, because we’ve got to watch out for middle-age Norwegian males. Thanks for the tip, Mr. Hitchcock. We’ll be on the lookout for Thor and Lars next time.
Entertainment: 6
Intelligence: 3
Morality: 1
