Essay On Rear Window

Privacy is a human right which we all wish to be granted to us. Technology has brought huge advances and benefits to society in the 21st century, but also at the cost of this privacy we all expect. By continually integrating the use of technology into our daily lives, the more of our personal details are exposed to the online territory which is accessible to hackers. The act of voyeurism is considered taboo and those who partake in it are condemned as dirty perverts. But in reality, we are not so different every time we indulge in a gossip magazine or visit the cinema and receive pleasure from watching the lives or people on screen, fictional or not. A whole industry in the film world has been born out of this desire to satisfy our inherent

The theoretical institutional building can act as an analogy for the set of the film. Everybody wants to be in the Panoptic ‘tower’ but our voyeuristic fantasies are shattered if we move to the ‘cells.’ It is not being photographed or watched which instils such fear in the prisoners of this conceptual building, but the fact that they don’t know whether they are being watched or not. Michel Foucault, who also likens the apartments in Rear Window to the Panopticon said ‘they are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is perfectly alone, perfectly individualised and constantly visible.’ Similarly, the tenants in Rear Window are also ‘perfectly individualised.’ They never seem to communicate or interact with one another, until they are all drawn out of their apartments onto their balconies at the same in the scene of the discovery of the strangled dog, the owner of which berates the onlookers, crying ‘you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘neighbour’.’ Otherwise the characters seem to be living in little yet lively worlds of their own confined to their apartments. ‘What you see across the way is a group of little stories that … mirror a small universe,’ Hitchcock says. Symbolically, the dog strangler is the only one absent from his balcony. Instead he hides in the

The image of the central all-seeing tower which is clothed in darkness and occupied by guards is inverted in Rear Window, as Jeff’s apartment is the one with the lights off, whilst he observes the lit apartments opposite via his camera lens. It is the use of light, or lack of, which keeps Jeff hidden whilst he carries out his investigation, but also eventually becomes his exposure in the finale. Whilst Lisa is about to be taken away by the police for trespassing Thorwald’s apartment, she gestures to Mrs Thorwald’s ring which she is wearing to Jeff across the courtyard. Thorwald sees this action and in a single climactic scene, the audience feels all of their scopic power stripped from them as Thorwald returns their gaze and they become the subject of the look for once. This is a direct reference to an earlier quote in the film by Stella, who tells Jeff, ‘what people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change,’ which is precisely what Thorwald does. It is this exact fear of reciprocity which instils such fear and tension in the prisoners in the Panopticon, making it such an effective institution. ‘Turn off the light, he’s seen us!’ Jeff exclaims to Stella, as they retreat into the darkness as people instinctively do when they have been caught doing something they shouldn’t be