Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies (2001) - Review of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window
Details
- article: Review of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window
- author(s): Gerald Izenberg (Professor of History, Washington University, Faculty, St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute)
- journal: Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies (Jul/2001)
- issue: volume 3, number 3, pages 307-310
- article DOI: 10.1023/A:1011596020774
- journal ISSN: 1521-1401
- publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers-Plenum Publishers
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Grace Kelly, James Stewart, Rear Window (1954)
Links
Article
Film and Theater Review and Commentary
Review of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window
I was 15 when I first saw Rear Window, and I loved it. Of course, my motives were not entirely pure, at least not purely cinematic. I was in love with Grace Kelly; Jimmy Stewart's behavior towards her in the film was utterly incomprehensible to me. He seemed like an idiot for putting her off, especially since she so obviously wanted him.
There were other reasons. It was a wonderful suspense film, absolutely riveting, and funny to boot and even at that time I knew that I was attracted by more than the murder mystery. The film represents a fascinating combination of intimacy and non-intimacy. People who are usually completely isolated from one another are bound together in a community of shared experience by an external event, a heat wave, though they are unaware of it. They are united only through the voyeurism of Stewart, who enjoys watching them in their separate apartments through the rear window of his and living vicariously through them. The community exists in his mind; we see it through his eyes. I sensed and responded to his fantasy, just as I sensed the guilty pleasure of my identification with his Peeping Tom-ism.
Later, I came to realize that the viewer's sense of being implicated was a deliberate intention on Hitchcock's part, and that it involved more than just a little innocently prurient voyeurism. (Though in the pre-sexual revolution 1950s, "Miss Torso's" exposing her naked back as she drops her halter was a lot more daring, and titi...
