Whether or not the man across the way, Lars Thorwald, actually killed his wife is, in my opinion, the least interesting point of consideration within Rear Window.
For one, consider our protagonist, L. B. Jefferies: he’s a photographer who was injured in pursuit of a magnificent shot and has no other source of amusement for the last week of his confinement due to that injury except watching the various apartments nearby. Conveniently, a heat wave has struck, prompting all of those apartments to open the blinds and windows in hope of a cool breeze. Watching as Jefferies, an adult man, watched the ballerina he named “Miss Torso” brought a sense of perverseness to his voyeurism that I realized I would not have felt if the protagonist were, say, a noisy housewife or bored child. And his occupation as a photographer in turn made his observations less creepy, as he had naturally made a career of such observations and could likely turn the habit off no more than a critic observing a movie, and more, as he then should surely be aware of the boundaries of professionalism.
An important thing to note here is that he has been confined to his wheelchair and apartment for six weeks already, with one more go, and he explicitly states “Listen – if you don’t pull me out of this swamp of boredom, I’ll do something drastic.” such as get married. Later his attending nurse, Stella, remarks “I shoulda been a Gypsy fortune teller, instead of an insurance company nurse. I got a nose for trouble – can smell it ten miles away.” before claiming to have predicted the Great Depression. And the last of our trio of amateur detectives, Lisa Fremont, who wishes to be with Jefferies whether he stays with her or she travels with him, argues that people can change and wants to prove that she can survive the tough and sometimes dangerous job of being a photographer and chasing leads. All three are then predisposed to find trouble, even if there isn’t any.
And the film is aware of how skeptical their claims of murder are, as shown through the detective Thomas J. Doyle’s responses to being repeatedly called in for “new evidence”. Towards the end of the film, convinced that Thorwald has murdered both his wife and a dog, our intrepid trio send concerning, if not threatening, unsigned notes and calls to his address, lure him away, dig up his flowers in search of what the dog was executed for uncovering (where they found nothing), break into his home, and steal his wife’s wedding ring. That he physically apprehends Fremont before her arrest and then attempts to murder Jefferies after noticing and confirming his involvement is perhaps the most damning evidence of the fact that he did, apparently, kill his wife, but at the time of watching, when I fully believed he was likely innocent, I just saw it as a man snapping from the stress of repeated harassment on top of whatever was going on with his wife, whether that be legal separation, the advancement of her illness, or something else.
All of this, combined with the class on security and privacy I happen to also be taking at the moment, made me think about the privacy and security implications of these events. Consider the many people using their windows as intended, by opening them in search of a breeze on a hot day, and the insight into their life it gives anyone who decides to pay attention. One could argue that if they actually wanted privacy, they would just not open their curtains. And yet, especially for those living above the ground level, isn’t there a reasonable expectation of some amount of privacy? At least to the extent that people aren’t cataloging all their movements in an attempt to prove some wrongdoing? Is suffering in the stifling dark heat of their apartment the only way they should be allowed to have privacy? But then again, is Jefferies wrong to have just happened to see activity he considered suspicious? And given that a crime was actually committed, is the means of scrutiny justified for the end of catching a criminal? When Fremont broke into Thorwald’s house, was he to blame for leaving the window open such that if he didn’t want someone breaking into his apartment (off the ground floor, mind you), he should have closed it? And is Fremont justified in doing so because Thorwald was “acting suspiciously” or retroactively justified because he had actually killed his wife?
Think about this as a metaphor for modern internet use: if one uses social media as intended and posts about their life, they are making information about themselves public to potentially anyone else who uses the internet. On one hand, we as users do have a responsibility to be aware of what we post and the potential consequences it could have, but this is generally based on reasonable expectations of risk. Normally, posts are seen by family, friends, and online mutuals and we post about things we’ve done or are thinking about, which are generally of very little interest to those outside of our circles. And yet at any time, anyone could be scrutinizing our activity like Jefferies did Thorwald’s, cataloging details that seem innocuous to us but give away more information or a different impression than we intended when put together. If someone considers our activity “suspicious”, are they justified in stalking us, anonymously contacting us online, or by phone, at school, work, or our homes, if they discover that information somehow? Is it our fault for opening the door for them to get that impression or deduce that information, no matter how careful we are? What about if they send the police after us? If they keep going, keep harassing us, keep trying to find evidence of our crimes even when we’re apparently innocent? And if they do actually find something eventually, does that make this sort of behavior okay? One could argue that if you never want to be subject to this, you should just never use social media at all, even if it’s a good way to stay in contact with those you care about, meet new friends, and engage in communities.
To return to Rear Window, I, myself, keep coming back to the various other storylines playing out in the other windows. I think of the musician struggling with his music, the newlywed couple, the couple with the dog that slept outside, the sculptor, the ballerina “Miss Torso”, and the declining mental health of “Miss Lonelyhearts”. They all had their own story going on largely unbeknownst to us; any of them could have been the focus of a more innocuous story. Even further, we could have just as easily imagined any sort of wrongdoing being committed by them all, keeping watch and provoking them to gather evidence. And yet they remained peripheral. Even as “Miss Lonelyhearts” is driven to commit suicide before Jefferies’ eyes, she remains secondary to the investigation of Thorwald; we see her pain, but don’t reach out, barely acknowledging her beyond a footnote in the Thorwald Affair™. It’s arbitrary what catches our attention, just like it’s arbitrary whether we’ll catch the attention of others; life nevertheless goes on. But imagine if one of the windows we saw were shut tightly, with the curtains drawn and never opened; imagine someone alone in the privacy of their hotbox apartment in an attempt to avoid even the potential of scrutiny; and imagine all of the theories about them Jefferies and even we would have come up with anyway just to amuse ourselves.
-Corian
Intermittent Mechanism 