One of Hitchcock’s most popular and least examined films, Rear Window has recently received a nice re-release on DVD and brought with it an issue that I find to be interesting in regards to the major schools of thought concerning the film. On the one hand there is Lesley Brill’s stolid and somewhat anachronistic belief that Hitchcock’s films express a desire to re-establish society (a belief that I buy into only when that desire is expressed as something vaguely insidious) – and on the other hand there is Modleski’s Freudian caution that a pickle is sometimes not just a pickle. Both approaches seem to me to be missing the point, somewhat, in regards to Rear Window.

Rear Window, to me, one of the slightest of Hitchcock’s works – holds the key to understanding many of Hitchcock’s later female anti-protagonists – and the key to clarifying why it is that I don’t believe Hitchcock to be the misogynist that he is most often accused of being.

the low down

L. B. “Jeff” Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart: Vertigo) is a photographer that’s recently broken his leg in the line of duty. Confined to a wheelchair and left to stare out of his rear window for hours on end, Jeff develops a nasty voyeuristic habit that results in him believing that Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) has killed Mrs. Thorwald. He enlists his unbelievably beautiful girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly: To Catch a Thief) in his paranoia, and soon the pair find themselves embroiled in something sinister.

Eve’s Apples and the Promethean fire

Creating at a time of turbulence in a post-bellum United States divided along gender lines and the specter of Senator Joe McCarthy’s “Red Threat,” Alfred Hitchcock paints a series of femme fatales who are dangerous not necessarily for their sexuality but rather, for their knowledge. Just as McCarthy preyed on the fears of Communist spies illicitly gathering information, Hitchcock’s female characters generally are dangerous more for their awareness, the possession of the so-called “gaze,” than purely for the sexual prowess that informs the genre of film noir.

Realistically, it is not that the female is sexually attractive to the male, but that the female is aware of her sexuality, and intelligent and brazen enough to use that knowledge to her advantage that makes her a threat. Hitchcock’s fatales are not sexual predators (although there is an element of the Mary Astor in them) – so much as they are the possessors of knowledge – less Dis than Eve, less Pandora (whose initial purpose was to seduce Epimetheus) than Prometheus.

Accused of punishing his strong female characters, I would suggest that Hitchcock is far more subtle than is suggested by Brill’s belief that he desires to re-establish society, and far more complex than Modleski’s too simplistic conclusion that “women are not what they appear to be.” Instead, Hitchcock, in Rear Window, echoes other popular works of his time: Nyby’s The Thing and Siegal’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by suggesting that the innocuous of the everyday is merely a façade for insidious counter-cultural, counter-traditional forces; that loved ones and neighbors could be murderers and/or commies.

Hitchcock, in Rear Window, endows his female characters with ill-begotten knowledge (Stella the maid’s prophecy of “trouble,” and Lisa’s “female intuition. . . a fairy tale”). which lends them a supernatural aura that is threatening to males and the male establishment. Hitchcock paints Lisa as a Promethean figure who has stolen the fires of erudition from a jealous and masculine god, she has robbed noir of its masculine problem solver/white knight by being the active solver (she discerns and retrieves the film’s MacGuffin – the wedding ring), and savior (she feeds Jeff, gets him jobs, and ministers to him after his rather nasty second-floor tumble). In a very real way, this masculanization of Lisa is the trope that will fuel Hitchcock’s late psycho-sexual masterpieces (The Birds, Vertigo, Marnie) – essentially the re-gendering of noir roles so that what was once seen as the fall of man at the hand of treacherous femininity, can now be re-imagined as the fall of woman at the hand of capricious masculinity. Far from being a misogynistic director, I have always found later Hitchcock to show strong women enduring a tragic, hubrical fall.

The fate for many of Hitchcock’s potent women is a stripping of knowledge and reintegration into traditional domesticity a la Erica of Young and Innocent (and Marnie, Madeliene, Melanie, etc. . ), or, to do as Lisa Freemont of Rear Window does and appear to have been stripped and subdued. Recall Lisa’s masculine garb at the finale, and, in the final scene, her reading of Beyond the High Himalayas, a book of which the virile Jeff would no doubt approve. The image of the Biblical Eve taking knowledge from God and, in so doing, becoming aware of her sexuality is useful in that this myth supports the image of the femme fatale as empowered in the knowledge of her sexuality. Yet it is unsatisfactory in that Christian theology has decisively punished the female for her transgression (pain of childbirth).

Rather, the more compelling template to apply to Rear Window is the Prometheus myth, recalling that although the Titan is chained to a rock in the Caucausus, he might, at any time, win a “reconciliation of Jupiter and his victim (with) the price (being) the disclosure of the danger threatened to His empire” (Percy Bysshe Shelley from the preface to Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts - 1820). In other words, Prometheus is a willing martyr who might, at any time, free himself from the bonds of a capricious patriarchy. Lisa Freemont, similarly, needs only to hide her “intuitive” knowledge and sexual self-knowledge to gain the good graces of the patriarchy. Her imprisonment in the realm of the masculine is voluntary and the martyrdom of her femininity by her choice alone.

light

The image of light as a source of ultimate Truth surfaces with the introduction of Lisa Freemont. Recall that in the Prometheus myth (again) knowledge is, literally, flame. Recall also that the lighter in Hitch’s Strangers on a Train is the volition-gifting MacGuffin made significant in the images of that flame of knowledge reflected in the doomed Myriam’s glasses, and of Babs’s when she notices something amiss with Bruno at the tennis club. After a wry but loaded question from the impotent Jeff in Rear Window, “Who are you?” – Lisa turns on three lamps, one for each of her solemnly intoned names.

Hitchcock, in other words, has equated the lighting of lamps (the presence of knowledge), with Lisa Freemont.

Throughout the balance of the film, it remains Lisa who lights Jeff’s apartment and it is Jeff who continually regresses into shadow (ignorance & suspicion). Lisa is the possessor of Truth, the only female to light and smoke a cigarette in the film, and one who threatens to replace Jeff’s cigarette box with a plain silver container inscribed with only his initials – a Kafkaesque reduction of identity and a Freudian castration in her theft of the phallic power suggested by the penile image of the cigarette and the flame of erudition. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but a cigarette in Hitchcock (Young and Innocent, Strangers on a Train) is always something else (so, for that matter, are hats – see Foreign Correspondent).

It is Lisa again who has an intimate “knowledge of women that men lack,” and it is that very gift of intuitive prophecy which, as a threat to the male, posits her, much like accused communists and working women, in the role of scorn and abuse (necessitating her subterfuge). Although Jeffreis attempts to use light to thwart his assailant Thorwald (Burr) by setting off flash bulbs, his attempts are abortive and serve only to slow the aggressor. This scene, with its use of flashes of red following small explosions, recalls the denoument of Spellbound in which the evil Dr. Murchison commits suicide. It is another instance of Hitchcock reminding the audience of its collective impotence in affecting the drama they are watching: by recognizing the voyeur, he emasculates him (us).

Jeffries is not the possessor of knowledge until it’s too late and, once acquired, is unable to employ his knowledge usefully (in this respect, Jeff mirrors the doomed canine in that, at the moment of discovery, he is damned). The arc of Jeff’s acquisition of knowledge follows Aeschylus’s Oedipus drama with the character of Teiresius, the multi-gendered prophet who, like Lisa, holds knowledge no one believes, and Oedipus Rex who, at the end of his search for truth, discovers that he has indicted himself. Yet this knowledge is not one of logic (Stella accuses Jeff of “think(ing) too much”), but rather of intuition which, traditionally, the masculine is thought to lack and scorn. Jeff is unable to solve the crime by identifying the MacGuffin simply because the murder is committed in the middle of a rainstorm (feminine!) in the middle of the night (feminine!) while he’s asleep. Tired archetypes of worn analytical themes? Perhaps.

Yet I maintain that Jeff’s helplessness is a castration that he tries to remedy with the employ of phallic sticks (to scratch), and a telephoto camera lens (va va va voom).

conclusions

Though Tanya Modleski astutely observes that Lisa’s donning of the murdered Mrs. Thorwald’s wedding ring reminds the male film viewer of “his own passivity and helplessness,” she stops short of noting that more than a reminder of impotence, Lisa’s action complicitly informs the suggestively foreign-sounding Lars Thorwald of the voyeur’s identity and hence imperils him. Fueling the dual fears of communist spies passing along knowledge crucial to national (and personal) security, and of women in the workplace (I suggest that the propaganda of the time implied that women would be unreliable with the responsibilities given them just as Lisa is careless with her acquisition of the ring/MacGuffin), Hitchcock seeks here not to slay these collective shadows, but rather nurse them into suspenseful grotesgueries. What I mean to imply is that Hitchcock is, in fact, intending to repaint the noir fatale archetype into a pleasing and pleasingly Promethean hero.

The implications of the character of the female protagonist of Hitchcock’s Rear Window go far beyond Modleski’s perception that the presence of the woman introduces a situation “fraught with erotic and violent potential." In Lisa Freemont, Hitchcock reflects at once the national preoccupation with the cold war, the lingering paranoia about women in the workplace, and the sexual emasculation of the male by women too assertive, too sexually emancipated, and above all, too knowledgeable

Rear Window is a classic, no doubt about it – but its importance is that it stands as a testament to Hitchcock’s brilliance and subversion that the fatale Lisa Freemont is the figure with which we most identify. A shining plum that belies Hitch’s ill-applied “misogyny” tag – and one that, in an relatively “light” Hitchcock, clears the analytical path to many of Hitchcock’s late female protagonists.




Recommended:
Yes

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