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This essay will try to give an overview of two interpretations
of Rear Window, both of which focus on the gaze and voyeurism
of the movie, and both of which can be situated (to a greater or lesser
extent) within a psychoanalytic context. Mulvey’s interpretation
is explicitly inspired by psychoanalysis and feminism, while Žižek’s
interpretation has to be situated in a Lacanian context and is an attempt
to come to terms with the “Hitchcockian Blot” – the
uncanny moment in a Hitchcock movie.
The Voyeurism of Rear Window.
It is a commonplace to say that Rear Window
deals with curiosity and the need to pry into the lives of others. Jeff’s
curiosity begins harmlessly enough, but gradually, this innocent curiosity
turns to semi-professional spying. For example, he starts to use a photographic
tele-lens and binoculars from his job as photographer. At this point,
it also becomes obvious that being curious is Jeff’s job. His
nurse Stella and his fiancée Lisa feel very uncomfortable and
accuse him of being an immoral voyeur, a Peeping Tom. Moreover, they
do not believe his story about Thorwald. Stella calls him a “window
shopper”, someone who “should have [his] eyes put
out with red hot pokers.” After Lisa starts spying too,
she says they are “two of the most frightening ghouls [she
has] ever met”. The other characters in the movie indeed
present Jeff as a typical voyeur:
"The voyeur is presented as a ‘diseased’, often
paranoid, violent individual who violates the norms of everyday life.
Films validate these depictions of the voyeur by having persons in power
(family members, editors, supervisors, the police) articulate how and
why the voyeur is a sick or deviant person and why his or her gaze is
inappropriate." (Denzin 1995: 3)
They analyze Jeff’s obsessive gaze as inappropriate and immoral.
However, very soon they cannot escape becoming Peeping Toms themselves.
Firstly, Jeff’s voyeurism gives him an insight
in his own future choices with regard to his relation with Lisa. The
different windows represent images of Jeff or Lisa or both. The windows
are held up as mirrors, and the people inside could become, or already
are, their doppelgängers. For example, in Mr and Mrs Thorwald,
Jeff sees a man who is stuck with an invalid and nagging wife. In the
case of Jeff and Lisa’s relationship, Jeff is the invalid, and
Lisa is the nagging wife. Indeed, Lisa wants Jeff to commit himself
to her through a marriage. Lisa and Jeff are reflected in Miss Lonelyhearts
and the lonely composer. Miss Torso displays a similar exhibitionism
as Lisa. In the future, they could be the newlyweds, or the sterile
childless couple whose only joy in life is their little dog.
Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic and feminist interpretation.
This analysis of Rear Window can be complemented by,
for example, Laura Mulvey’s interpretation of the traditional
Hollywood narrative film. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”,
an article written in 1973, and published in Screen in 1975,
Mulvey adopts a radical critique of contemporary cinematic discourse
by using psychoanalytic and feminist discourse to analyse “the
way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially
established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images,
erotic ways of looking and spectacle.” (Mulvey 1989: 14)
Her article revealed classic Hollywood film as an expression of the
patriarchal ideology, basically establishing the woman in an inferior
position subjected to the male gaze. An ideal case in point in Laura
Mulvey’s analysis is the so-called voyeur’s film –
like Rear Window – which mostly “deploys
an investigative narrative structure, often presupposing a male hero
‘in search of the truth about an event that has already happened,
or is about to come to completion’.” (Denzin 1995:
8) The action in such a film is usually defined from the male point
of view. Moreover, the woman is often the object of investigation (as
in most films noir). At the same time, the woman can function as the
dangerous femme fatale or as an obedient wife or girlfriend: “Within
this framework, the voyeur’s film […] probes the secrets
of female sexuality and male desire within patterns of submission and
dominance”. (Denzin 1995: 8) Mulvey argues that Hollywood
film is profoundly phallocentric, the woman being the danger, which
the man at once desires and denies.
Central in Mulvey’s article is the concept of
‘scopophilia’, or the pleasure in looking, which cinema
offers. Looking itself becomes a source of pleasure. Scopophilia was
originally linked by Freud to the component instincts of sexuality,
which he associated with taking other people as objects to be subjected
to someone’s controlling gaze. In its most extreme form, the pleasure
of looking becomes a perversion “producing obsessive voyeurs
and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching,
in an active controlling sense, an objectified other” (Mulvey
1989: 17). This of course aptly describes Jeff in Rear Window.
Mulvey also links the experience of watching a film
to this, arguing that film often produces a similar kind of separation,
and plays on the same voyeuristic fantasies as, for example the child’s.
The spectator’s position is, in essence, one of “repression
of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the
performer” (Mulvey 1989: 17). This situation arises by
taking the other as object of sexual stimulation. In contrast with this,
the pleasure of looking can also be related to Lacan’s mirror
stage. Jacques Lacan’s analysis of the mirror stage denotes the
constitutive moment when the child recognizes its own image in the mirror
and identifies with an image of itself, resulting in the articulation
of its subjectivity (which is of course not based on the ‘real’
self, but on an image of the self). Analogous to this is the identification
of the ego with the objects or subjects on screen. Contrary to the first
scopophilic position, this position arises through narcissism, and is
the result of the identification with the image seen (in a mirror/on
screen), and is a function of the ego libido.
Screen capture: Jeff looks at Lisa who
is on the bed.
In the traditional movie, the woman has been displayed
as an (erotic) object for both the other (male) characters within the
movie and the (male) spectators in the audience. At the same time, a
male/active versus female/passive dichotomy is at work controlling the
narrative sequence. The man both holds control of the action, and of
the gaze (character and spectator): "As the spectator identifies
with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his
like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist
as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic
look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence." (Mulvey
1989: 20) The importance of the look “of the spectator in
direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment
(connoting male fantasy) and […] of the spectator fascinated with
the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through
him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis”
becomes obvious (Mulvey 1989: 21). The woman, in this type of movie,
becomes “isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised”
– which is how not only Miss Torso is presented in Rear Window,
but also Lisa.
In this psychoanalytic interpretation, the woman also
represents the lack of the phallus and is as such the symbol of the
man’s castration anxiety: "Ultimately, the meaning
of woman is sexual difference, the visually ascertainable absence of
the penis, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex
essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and
the law of the father.” (Mulvey 1989: 21) Voyeurism, which
is set to demystify and investigate the object (the woman), is one of
the ways to channel that fear.
An example of this is Jeff’s relationship with
Lisa. In the beginning he does not really show any interest in Lisa.
He is afraid to commit to her through marriage. Lisa’s display
of sexuality (a form of exhibitionism accented by her insistence on
clothes and jewelry) triggers this sense of fear, the symbol of his
castration anxiety, in Jeff, and which he consequently has to try to
channel. The female threat has to be eliminated (hence Thorwald’s
murdering of his wife as Jeff’s dream scenario) or neutralized
(e.g. by a marriage). Subsequently, Jeff’s anxiety for Lisa’s
sexuality (and exhibitionism) can only diminish when she becomes a part
of the world he looks at from his window, when she can be gazed at and
controlled like the other objects in his gaze. We can therefore argue
that Jeff’s submissive gaze at Lisa canalises and neutralises
his fear. Lisa only becomes desirable to him (sexually) when she enters
the perspective of his window (1).
The woman means a threat for the man, she is the evidence
of his castration complex: “Thus, the woman as icon, displayed
for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look,
always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified.”
(Mulvey 1989: 21) The man has two solutions for this: voyeurism or a
“re-enactment of the original trauma” which has
sadistic overtones, or, “disavowal of castration by the
substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself
into a fetish” (Mulvey: 1989 21). Generally speaking, both
solutions can be found in Hitchcock’s movies. Mulvey’s psychoanalytic
and feminist analysis provides an adequate critique of traditional narrative
film as similar to the patriarchal ideology: “women in representation
can signify castration, and activate voyeuristic [Rear Window] or fetishistic
[Vertigo] mechanisms to circumvent this threat.” (Mulvey
1989: 25)
Taking this analysis one step further, we see that
spectators are, moreover, almost forced to identify with Jeff’s
male gaze objectifying the woman. However, we should also remark that
the female spectatorial look works somewhat different from the male
look in this situation. On the one hand, she (the female spectator)
is described as a passive exhibitionist. Miss Torso is the extreme representation
of this exhibitionism as a character in the movie, but Lisa’s
accent on clothing is also an element contributing to this exhibitionism.
On the other hand, the female spectator is also able to identify with
the gaze of the male hero, which turns her look into a masochistic look
(as opposed to the male spectatorial look which is sadistic), at which
point she turns into an active voyeur rather than a passive exhibitionist.
Laura Mulvey thus explains how identification mechanisms work different
for the female and the male spectator. In doing so, she elaborates on
the analysis of Rear Window as Hitchcock’s most self-reflexive
movie, which takes the movie as a metaphor for cinema itself.
Screen capture: Thorwald's reflection in Jeff's photo-lens.
This analysis takes Jeff’s apartment as the ocular
centre from which the action is described. The spectator’s view
is limited to Jeff’s view, since we often see events through the
limited vision of his lens. This makes it particularly tempting for
the spectator to identify with Jeff, an element of the movie, enhanced
by the use of the subjective camera.(2)
The theme of reflexivity, mirror effects and doubles
can be worked out on another level. Jeff’s specific position in
his apartment looking out on the different windows/screens is reminiscent
of a viewer in a film theatre. In this self-reflexive analysis, Jeff’s
double is the spectator in a theatre. Jeff himself admits that he can
be looked at by the other characters in his fictive world: “Of
course, they can do the same thing to me – watch me like a bug
under a glass if they want to”. However, the same holds
for the world outside of the fictive world on screen. The spectator,
from his safe seat in the theatre gazes at Jeff, the way Jeff gazes
at his screens/windows. This self-reflexive meta-narrative moment complicates
Rear Window. The cinematic apparatus automatically turns the
movie spectator into a voyeur gazing at a window or a screen himself.
The “voyeur watches a voyeur gaze” (Denzin
1995: 3). Jeff is the spectator’s double, like the spectator is
Jeff’s double.
However, Jeff’s gaze is doubled on yet a third
level by the perspective of the director behind the camera. This is,
for example, symbolized by Jeff’s profession as photographer.
But, the spectator is allowed to see only what the director wants him
to see. The spectator’s vision is thus reduced both by Jeff’s
lens and by Hitchcock’s camera: "[In Rear Window],
a paradigmatic instance of reflexivity, the film performs the metalinguistic
dismantling of the structures of scopophilia and identification operative
in dominant cinema generally." (Stam & Pearson 1983:
137)
In a psychoanalytic interpretation, voyeurism generally
establishes a separation between the object gazed at, and the source
of the ‘drive’ (the eye) producing this gaze. The voyeur
tries consciously to establish a division between object and eye, between
the object and the own body. This happens in Rear Window as
well. There is a clear separation between Jeff and the objects he gazes
at. He is not a part of the world in front of him, but sits in his dark
room and insists that Stella and Lisa do the same. However, this distance
proves to be only illusory and in the course of the movie that distance
is progressively broken down. This happens for example when Lisa consciously
turns on the light, exposing Jeff to the world outside of his window,
or when Thorwald looks out of his window and Jeff tries to hide. Another
instance is when Lisa herself steps into the space of the spectacle
and Jeff asks in a panic: “Lisa what are you doing? Come
on, get out of there!”.(3)
In a theatre, the distance between object and eye is
normally too remote for the spectator to be aware of his own gaze. Because
the images he sees are produced by an absent entity, the spectator usually
looks without hindrance. The film voyeur is a stealthy spectator. His
viewing pleasure is no more authorised than the viewing “pleasure”
of a child in front of the “Ur-scene” in which a similar
prohibition is at work. However, on the other hand, even if the kind
of voyeurism that takes place in a theatre is as such not authorised,
it is certainly an institutionalised form of voyeurism. Film is a legitimised
practice of a forbidden gaze. In contrast with the primary voyeurism
of the “Ur-scene”, going to the movies is a legitimate enterprise.
The “Ur-scene” is doubled in the spectator’s view,
which in turn is doubled in Jeff’s gaze. Moreover, Jeff’s
situation is described as if he is spying through a keyhole sitting
in his dark room. Stella, for example, explicitly calls his lens a portable
keyhole.
Feminist critics like Laura Mulvey argue convincingly
how women are often turned into passive objects of the male gaze in
Hitchcock’s movies, also in Rear Window, and how this
also affects the spectator’s viewing habits.
Slavoj Žižek and the Hitchockian Blot: The Uncanny.
Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation takes
Lacan as starting point. This interpretation more explicitly deals with
the uncanny moment in a Hitchcock movie, something which Žižek
calls the “Hitchcockian Blot”. This element is in accordance
with the effect, which Lacan would call the “point de capiton”:
“a perfectly ‘natural’ and ‘familiar’
situation is denatured, becomes ‘uncanny’, loaded with horror
and threatening possibilities” (Žižek 1991: 88).
In the case of Rear Window, this element is constituted by
the gaze itself, and is most aptly demonstrated by one of the last scenes
of the movie. At that point Jeff’s gaze is returned by Thorwald,
which very much creates a doppelgänger effect, as I will point
out. However, before focusing on that last scene, an explanation of
Žižek’s analysis of what constitutes this “Hitchcockian
Blot” is in place.
Žižek distinguishes three ways of how an
event can be shown on screen, based on the different stages in a person’s
libidinal economy: oral, anal and phallic. He places Hitchcock in the
third category. The ‘oral’ stage can be compared with the
silent slapstick movie, in which a scene is simply shot, the spectators
just ‘devour’ the scenes with their eyes. However, a seemingly
direct natural rendering of reality is, already in this oral stage,
an illusion. Indeed, we see only fragments within a well-specified frame.
Reality has already been manipulated. The ‘anal’ stage of
a movie is introduced by montage. As a result of montage, the illusion
of continuity is lost completely. Montage, e.g. parallel montage, introduces
metaphorical meanings. In this type of montage two courses of action
are shown alternately, linking the first course of action to the second
one in doing so – this is a horizontal process. The ‘phallic’
stage no longer just plays on a horizontal, but also on a vertical level.
The threat is not to be placed outside one action sequence, but within,
it “under it, as its repressed underside” (Žižek
1991: 89). The uncanny aspect of an everyday scene is introduced. For
example, suddenly someone sees too much (e.g. at a dinner table), and
becomes a ‘man who knows too much’, resulting in a sort
of “surplus knowledge” which has “an
abyssal effect on the perspective of the host (and ours with it): the
action is in a way redoubled in itself, endlessly reflected in itself
as in a double mirror play.” (Žižek 1991: 90)
There is a clear link with Freud’s analysis of das Unheimliche.
Das Unheimliche, as well, is not something completely unknown, but an
anomalous aspect in that which is already known: “things
appear in a totally different light, although they stay the same”
(Žižek 1991: 90).
Analysed within the libidinal economy, desires, visions
or hallucinations are internalised or repressed:
"What we actually see becomes nothing but a deceptive surface
beneath which swarms an undergrowth of perverse and obscene implications,
the domain of what is prohibited. The more we find ourselves in total
ambiguity, not knowing where ‘reality’ ends and ‘hallucination’
(i.e. desire) begins, the more menacing this domain appears.”
(Žižek 1991: 90)
This is what Žižek calls ‘phallic’: the element
(in a scene) which does not really fit, something which renders a scene
uncanny, the point of anamorphosis:
"The element that, when reviewed straightforwardly, remains
a meaningless stain, but which, as soon as we look at the picture from
a precisely determined lateral perspective, all of a sudden acquires
well-known contours.” (Žižek 1991: 90)
This is exactly how Lacan also defines the phallic signifier.
As I said, the aspect in Rear Window, which
makes those scenes in a similar way uncanny, is the gaze itself. To
exemplify this I refer to one of the last scenes (4), which has a particular
accent on the gaze and the eyes. When Thorwald gazes back at Jeff, Jeff
is taken out of his voyeuristic passivity very much as if his double
looks back at him. At the same time, the spectator who has identified
with Jeff is confronted with his own gaze, and is left with the bad
taste of embarrassment:
"The shock of our gaze’s intrusion comes when Thorwald,
the ‘murderer’, sees Grace Kelly gesturing across the courtyard
to Jeff at the wedding ring on her finger. The camera pan shots from
Thorwald’s glance at the ring then to his sudden gaze back across
the courtyard at Jeffries, whom he sees for the first time. At that
point, the gaze is a weapon turned back upon his abuser."
(Orr 1993: 68-69)
Screen capture: Mrs. Thorwald's wedding
ring on Lisa's finger
At this point, the separation between voyeur and his object proves an
illusion. Jeff is confronted with his own desire, which can be illustrated
by the questions Thorwald asks repeatedly: “Who are you?
What do you want from me?” This is even intensified when
Thorwald in return invades Jeff’s privacy, literally, like Jeff
has done before by his gazing. When Thorwald storms in, Jeff tries to
‘blind’ him – again to be taken literally –
by flashing the light of his camera. Jeff tries to remove the source
of the threat, Thorwald’s eyes, which constituted his own crime
as well, of course. At the same time, he closes his eyes not to be blinded
by the light himself. However, Jeff cannot avoid a direct confrontation
with Thorwald: Thorwald pushes Jeff out of his window, the frame of
his safe neutral world. This whole scene is intensified by the fact
that it is shot in a wholly ‘unrealistic’ way:
"Where we would expect rapid movement [the repeated flashes
of the lightbulb], an intense, swift clash, we get hindered, slowed-down,
protracted movement, as if the ‘normal’ rhythm of events
had undergone a kind of anamorphotic deformation.” (Žižek
1991: 91)
Jeff’s initial fascination with Thorwald and
his wife, stems, as already indicated from the fact that Thorwald reflects
Jeff’s own desire. Jeff too aims at evading a sexual relationship.
Žižek argues that Jeff transforms his own impotence in his
relationship into power through his gaze: “he regresses
to an infantile curiosity” (Žižek 1991: 92).
His window is a fantasy window through which he sees his own possibilities
reflected back to him (5). Moreover, after this confrontation with Thorwald,
Jeff is ready for marriage, because “he has been confronted by
the darkness that Hitchcock sees as underlying – or as surrounding
– all human existence: the chaos of our unknown, unrecognised
“Under-nature” (Wood 1989: 106). In other words,
the end is only possible because Jeff has submitted himself to the process
which lies at the origin of his voyeurism:
" the indulgence of morbid curiosity and the consequences
of that indulgence: a process which in itself is a manifestation of
his sickness. Only by following it through does progress become possible
for him” (Wood 1989: 106).
The solution for Jeff lies in not ignoring his problem, but in coming
to terms with it, accepting it. Characteristically, the end does not
show Jeff as the ultimate victor, but both his legs are now broken.
Moreover, the end scene shows Lisa dressed up in men’s:
"Order is restored, within and without – in the microcosm
of Jefferies’ personality, and in the external world which is
on one level an extension or reflection of it; but we are left with
the feeling that the sweetness-and-light merely covers up that chaos
world that underlies the superficial order." (Wood 1989:
107)
Of course, when she sees that Jeff is not watching, she just picks up
her woman’s magazine once again. In this way, we can again refer
to the ‘familiar’ aspect within the uncanny. There is still
a stain left, an incongruous element, a Hitchcockian blot.
As a final point, I would still like to say that Žižek
also mentions the soundtrack of Hitchcock’s movies, which can
bring out the uncanny, more specifically the background sounds. There
are different sounds coming from the different windows in the apartment
block and we can always attribute the sound to a particular person.
“All except one, the voice of an unidentified soprano practicing
scales and generally emerging just in time to prevent the fulfilment
of sexual union between Stewart and Kelly.” (Žižek
1991: 93) The bearer of this voice is not visible through Jeff’s
window: “the voice remains acousmatique and uncannily close
to us, as if its origins were within us.” (Žižek
1991: 93)
Endnotes.
(1) Although this is clearly the overall tendency in
the movie, a certain nuance is in place since at several points in the
movie both Stella and Lisa have an active gaze as well. Jeff’s
voyeurism seems to be quite contagious and Lisa and Stella who were
very cautious at first, start to gaze at their neighbours too. And,
without Lisa’s crucial (female) interference, Jeff would not have
solved the mystery: it is Lisa who finds Mrs Thorwald’s wedding
ring.
(2) Note, however, that at several important points in the movie, Jeff’s
gaze is broken, e.g. in the flashlight scene at the end, cf. infra.
(3) At this particular moment in the lecture this scene from the movie
is shown.
(4) At this point in the lecture, another scene from the movie is shown.
(5) Note that the Hitchcockian ‘blot’,
the uncanny moment in his movies, is formally brought out by the typical
Hitchcockian tracking shot. Žižek explains this quite thoroughly
and links it to Lacan’s objet a. However, the scope of this paper
forces me to refer to Žižek’s book for more information
about this (Žižek 1991: 93-106).
Selected Bibliography.
Primary Source.
- Hitchcock, Alfred. Rear Window.
Secondary Sources.
- Denzin, Norman K. The Cinematic Society. The Voyeur’s Gaze.
London: Sage Publications Ltd., 1995.
- Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Houndsmill, Basingstoke:
MacMillan, 1989.
- Orr, John. Cinema and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press,
1993.
- Stam, Robert & Pearson, Roberta. “Hitchcock’s Rear
Window: Reflexivity and the Critque of Voyeurism.” Enclitic
7 (1): 136-145.
- Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York:
CUP, 1989.
- Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry. An Introduction to Jacques
Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991.
