Rear Window

Abstract

Unlike such aggressive beholders as the combative fairground patrons in The Ring, the interventionary Lawrences in The Man Who Knew Too Much, and the obsessed fan, Bruno, in Strangers on a Train, the spectator-protagonist in Rear Window is utterly seatbound. Immobilized in a wheelchair facing a set of windows, the shades of which rise like theater curtains during the opening credits to reveal a rectangularly framed exhibition space, L. B. Jefferies is forced by a broken leg into the physically static position of a classical audience. Although, based on the menace of Jeff’s actively regarding predecessors, the guarantee of unobtrusive beholding implied by his condition of inert reception would appear to be a directorial fantasy, such is not the case. This 1954 film contemplates the unsettling authorial agency possessed by the stationary viewer confined to the domain of reception and relegated solely to the gaze as both an individual observer and one allied with the surveilling collective.