The MacGuffin: News and Comment (21/Jan/2004)
(c) Ken Mogg (2004)
January 21
I recently kidded a friend that her attitude to me had somehow cooled since I moved from East Melbourne to Box Hill - from an inner to an outer Melbourne suburb - a few years ago. It was like I had literally gone behind her back, for she was situated between the two suburbs but was used to mentally facing towards Melbourne, if I can put it like that. 'You're like James Stewart in Rear Window', I joked, meaning that he, too, is used to looking in a certain direction - out his main window to the courtyard and the apartments beyond - but must finally confront his would-be nemesis figure, Thorwald, who comes at him from the opposite direction. Looking out the window is psychologically empowering for Jefferies, the Stewart character, whose position is almost god-like and for whose eyes numerous 'performers' seem to play out roles. Moreover, in true Schopenhauerian manner, each of the apartments across the way is seen by Jeff in terms of some condition or disposition of his own (e.g., Miss Lonely Hearts would seem to represent the inverse of Jeff's present situation with his literally ideal partner, Lisa, or perhaps he's seeing her as Lisa but with him away overseas ...). In other words, Jeff sees things subjectively. 'The world is my representation' wrote Schopenhauer, famously. In the case of Thorwald, Jeff increasingly projects onto him (and onto Jeff himself) a father-son antagonism, an Oedipal rivalry, with Jeff as the rebellious son. (See the Rear Window page elsewhere on this website.) So when Thorwald finally comes calling, via the street door and then the sole door to Jeff's apartment, it might almost be a social call, except that this one is in deadly earnest. 'What do you want of me?' Thorwald asks, almost helplessly and almost as if Jeff has lately begun to make outrageous demands on him. This is the human dimension of Thorwald, seen in actual close-up for the first time (by both Jeff and us). But Thorwald is also Jeff's dopple-gänger, a force emanating from Jeff himself, so the business with the flashbulbs has a peculiar appropriateness. Not only is Jeff a photographer (a formal reason for the scene) but the film's constant business of looking, as well as the Oedipal significance in this case, make the assault on Thorwald's eyes (while he tries to maul Jeff physically) expressive of everything that has been going on within the film, so to speak. The eyes are a Freudian symbol (as in Spellbound [1945]), and the threat of castration has been hanging in the air. Now it is shown up as the literally fantastic thing it is, and the flashbulbs seem a pitiful enough weapon against Thorwald's actual physical bulk. But I would make a couple of other points about this scene. It is Hitchcock's big climax and he gives it a sensuous fullness: the bright orange flashes, the afterglow slowly fading to darkness (the effect is superbly managed), the metallic popping sound of each flash - these things, too, are all splendid. (I think of the term 'synaesthesia', where one sense triggers another, and which Marshall McLuhan once defined as 'all the senses get into the act'!). Also, the fact of Thorwald's crossing the space of the courtyard, albeit via the adjacent street, and entering Jeff's apartment from behind him, as it may seem, is another coup, aesthetically. (It will be topped a moment later when Jeff is thrust physically out of his window and plummets down to the courtyard, in something like a symbolic rebirth.) This makes the film three-dimensional in a most satisfying way. As our architect friends will appreciate, Hitchcock's art designer Robert Boyle once said of the Mount Rushmore house in North by Northwest (1959): it was designed to be shot from all around, to exploit its many angles and to allow the greatest possible 'coverage'. Another case of Hitchcock dealing himself the best hand and then not missing a trick.
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