HITCHCOCK’S VERY FIRST FILM, The Pleasure Garden (1925), on which Alma Reville worked as assistant director, opens backstage on dancing girls descending a spiral staircase onto a stage that we view from the wings. Hitchcock cuts to a medium shot of a female dancer performing in front of a line of scantily clad dancing girls, and then to a reverse field lateral tracking shot across a row of ogling gray-haired men in entranced appreciation of the show. The camera alights on one man who adjusts his monocle for a better view, and Hitchcock cuts back to an out-of-focus point-of-view shot of the performers. A pair of binoculars then rises in the foreground, and a match on action reveals that the old man has traded in his monocle for a pair of binoculars. A new point-of-view shot through a circular mask, now in focus, laterally tracks in closeup the legs of the chorines until alighting on the female protagonist Patsy Brand (Virginia Valli) tilting up her figure to her face. The old man reacts with enjoyment to what he sees and ogles afresh with his monocle. The girl, for her part, is initially perceived wearing a genuine smile of enjoyment as she participates in the performance. However, when she realizes that the old man is leering at her, she returns his gaze with a blank stare, as if to say “and what do you think you are staring at?”
This scene at once establishes Hitchcock’s preoccupation with staging themes of male voyeurism toward women in the cinema and the complexity of that staging, and it also serves to reflect indirectly on the relationship between voyeurism in the theatrical setting and voyeurism in the cinema. The scene establishes a parallel between the female performer on stage and the female performer on screen and the audience for both as a public viewer. However, from the beginning, Hitchcock reveals how cinema departs from the theater by taking us behind the scenes to the labor of the female performer. The power of cinema is further revealed as Hitchcock individuates a single spectator from the audience and aligns the spectator of the film with his perceptual point of view. The eyeglass and the binoculars explicitly link cinema to prosthetic devices of vision that allow the spectator, like the character, to ogle the bodies of the female performers. At the same time, far from establishing the authority of the male gaze, Hitchcock also suggests the unsavory nature of this front-row voyeur, whose gaze is “returned” in no uncertain terms by the blonde performer.1
Hitchcock’s preoccupation with voyeurism and what it might tell us about cinema and, in particular, the representation of gender relationships in cinema, is among the most well-trodden ground in the literature on film. Yet in spite, or perhaps because, of the influence of Christian Metz’s book The Imaginary Signifier, there remain several fundamental questions about voyeurism and its relationship to the cinema that appear unresolved. One set of questions has to do with what exactly is voyeurism. Is voyeurism a pathology? Is there one kind of voyeurism, or several kinds? Is cinema really a voyeuristic medium, or is it simply used to represent fictions that stage voyeurism? The second set of questions pertains to the moral status of voyeurism. Is voyeurism morally reprehensible, and if so, why? If cinema is a voyeuristic medium, is cinematic voyeurism morally reprehensible? Is there a gender bias in voyeurism? Hitchcock’s practice, I believe, continues to shed light on these issues. I begin this essay by exploring the conceptual and moral issues surrounding voyeurism outside and inside the cinema with reference to Hitchcock, and I conclude with an analysis of Rear Window as a moral allegory of film spectatorship.
Within psychoanalysis, the concept of voyeurism is closely linked to that of scopophilia or schaulust. Freud discusses this concept in “Three Essays on Sexuality” in relationship to the so-called “polymorphous perversity” of children where the sexual “instinct” is not focused on the genitals but distributed across the body and its organs (109). In the case of scopophilia, this instinct is “attached” to sight and drives children’s uninhibited visual curiosity about sexual matters. The growing male child represses polymorphous desire, to which shame is attached, as his sexuality becomes entirely focalized through his genitals and toward the goal of penetrative sex. However, this sexual reorganization raises the threat of castration, of the loss of sexual potency, concentrated, as it is, within the male sexual organ. While the male child overcomes this fear by assuming the symbolic, castrating, social authority of the father, the pathological voyeur is someone who refuses, in this way, to psychically grow up. He obsessively seeks sight of human sexual organs and sexual activities that prompt castration anxiety in order to attempt to gain mastery over the fear of loss of potency that their sight portends.
The classical psychoanalytic account of voyeurism has several important characteristics. First, although voyeurism is clearly defined as a pathology, there is no sharp distinction to be drawn between the pathological and the normal. Second, voyeurism is a normatively male activity to which women are subjected: all men are subject to castration anxiety and to the allure of voyeurism which, per impossibile, holds that anxiety at bay. Finally, as Jonathan Metzl has emphasized, voyeurism is defined in classical psychoanalysis not simply by sexual satisfaction through sight, but by its underlying cause as a defense against the vulnerability and impotence that it at once serves to register and occlude (417). It is, therefore, easy to understand the appeal of psychoanalysis to feminist psychoanalytic theorists, such as Laura Mulvey, who in her classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” used Freudian theory to diagnose the gendered asymmetry of looking relations in the cinema—that is, the way in which “classical cinema” enacts the displacement of male anxiety onto the fetishized figure of woman. Mulvey sees Rear Window as exemplifying this displacement, though it is perhaps better understood, as Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson suggest, as a “critique” of male voyeurism (208). L.B Jefferies, formally active, is now confined to his wheelchair, his leg in a cast. He is physically unable to make love to Lisa and symbolically if not literally impotent. He compensates for this incapacity through becoming a Peeping Tom and using the extended telephoto lens as a phallic prop, while Stella, his nurse, and Lisa explicitly criticize his visual fixation and his lack of appropriate desire toward Lisa.
Drawing on, but not limiting ourselves to, or presupposing the truth of, psychoanalysis, we can discriminate at least three distinct though related uses of the term “voyeurism.” The first sense of voyeurism, loosely derived from the technical concept of scopophilia, suggests the pursuit of sexual pleasure or enjoyment through looking. Mulvey herself defines voyeurism as “pleasure in looking at another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight” (18). This definition, while helpful, is limited in the sense that the class of erotic objects is surely broader than another person. It includes sexual organs, sexual activity, and perhaps also symbolic substitutes for those activities. Furthermore, it would seem that the class of erotic objects that might satisfy scopophilia might include a suitably composed painting, photograph, or film. In addition, certain qualities that we might attribute to an individual’s looking behavior such as being transfixed, fixated, leering, obsessive, and ogling, may contribute, in context, to our recognition of the voyeuristic gaze, as it does in The Pleasure Garden.
Voyeurism also has a more precise sense that is attached to the idea of the Peeping Tom, who looks unseen and hence unauthorized by the person being looked at. Thus the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV defines voyeurism as the “act of looking at unsuspecting individuals, usually strangers, who are naked, in the process of disrobing, or are engaging in sexual activity” (532). There is a critical ambiguity here. Is the point of voyeurism in this sense to gain sexual pleasure from looking on unsuspecting strangers, and therefore remaining unseen, or is the condition of remaining unseen somehow necessary to sexual arousal itself? Freud suggests that it might be the latter. He argues that one way that children may grow into adult voyeurs is where their sexual pleasure in looking is overridden by disgust. The shame attached to the sexual pleasure in looking requires the viewer to be hidden from view in order to be satisfied. However, as Metzl points out, the DSM IV definition of voyeurism does not presuppose this Freudian diagnostic etiology, just a practice of concealed sexualized viewing that renders the sexual arousal impersonal and ensures that touch or intimacy is avoided. L.B. Jefferies’s voyeurism in Rear Window also meets this condition: he spies upon Miss Torso unawares.
Voyeurism, considered as unauthorized looking into something private, does not necessarily involve erotic enjoyment. The term “voyeurism” may imply looking unseen and unauthorized at the private lives of others. This kind of voyeurism has a kinship with spying, but for the voyeur, unlike the professional spy, the activity of looking on the lives of others unobserved is undertaken for its own sake. I will term this kind, or perhaps aspect, of voyeurism, psychological voyeurism as opposed simply to sexual voyeurism since the interest here is more in the mind of others—their thoughts and feelings—than it is with their bodies. This kind of voyeurism is intimately connected with eavesdropping or listening in, unawares, on the lives of others. Like voyeurism, eavesdropping may be linked to sexual thrills, as in the telephone chat room, but it need not be. Eavesdropping is a very common feature of Hitchcock’s work. L.B. Jefferies in Rear Window is not only a sexual voyeur; he is a psychological voyeur and eavesdropper as he spies on the activity of his neighbors.
What is the moral status of voyeurism? The term perversion implies a moral evaluation, a deviation from what is natural and therefore right. In Freud, sexual perversion extends to all sexual activity outside the category of heterosexual genital sex whose aim is sexual reproduction. This is too broad a category on which to base moral evaluation. While few of us would wish to view nonprocreative sex as immoral, there are surely some kinds of sexual activity that we still unhesitatingly condemn, such as pedophilia and necrophilia. The grounds of this condemnation have to do with the absence of human reciprocity or mutuality involved in these activities, or what Thomas Nagel terms “self-reflexive recognition” (Nagel 47). There is no possibility of mutual acknowledgment, authorization, and participation when the child’s body or the adult’s corpse is used as a source of sexual satisfaction. Following Nagel, we might therefore define those forms of sexuality as perverse where there is a distortion or erasure of reciprocal mutual awareness between individuals in the sexual act.
This absence or distortion of mutual understanding, awareness, and participation is built into sexual and psychological voyeurism where the viewer’s gaze is unseen and therefore unauthorized. As Nagel points out, a voyeur “need not require any recognition by his object at all, certainly not a recognition of the voyeur’s arousal” (49). It is this lack of recognition or authorization by the other that lends Jefferies’s voyeurism in Rear Window a morally unsavory quality. Voyeurism, in the stricter sense of sexual or psychological voyeurism, is a violation of privacy, and hence it is immoral, though arguably we attach a greater moral sanction to sexual voyeurism, since it combines unauthorized intrusion into the life of another and unwanted sexual objectification. Psychological voyeurism is also immoral. However, it is given moral license when its prima facie immorality is trumped for some supposedly higher moral purpose, as in practices of surveillance, which is state-sanctioned voyeurism. The practice of surveillance forms an important cultural background to Rear Window. The dilemma expressed by L.B Jefferies in the film as to whether their activity of spying is a moral one, even if it turned out that they proved that the object of their investigation was innocent, speaks very directly to the morality of surveillance in McCarthyite America.
If voyeurism is simply considered as sexual pleasure that is sought through looking, voyeurism need not be considered immoral when the sexual objectification is matched with exhibitionism on the part of the person who is observed. However, as the scene from The Pleasure Garden highlights, whether the kind of “exhibitionism” displayed by Patsy in the dance revue warrants the lurid, lascivious gaze of the male spectator is open to question. There is a space of uncertainty and a place for misunderstanding in this highly gendered transaction. A similar ambiguity arises in Rear Window, where ostensibly L.B Jefferies is portrayed as a voyeur in a nonreciprocal gaze as he watches Miss Torso perform her daily exercise routine. Yet, there is something “exhibitionist” in that routine and the way in which she performs it in front of the window, as if inviting the voyeuristic gaze. Or perhaps it is Hitchcock who sets up the scene: Miss Torso appears as an exhibitionist in such a way that provides an alibi for Jefferies’s voyeuristic gaze.
Many critics have suggested that Rear Window offers an analogy between the character of L.B. Jefferies and the film spectator, as Jefferies confined to his wheelchair spies on the activities of his neighbors through his rear window in the manner that the film spectator looks upon the world of the film through the film screen. But how seriously should we take this analogy? In what sense is cinema a voyeuristic medium? If we simply define voyeurism as sexual pleasure in looking, then clearly cinema may offer these pleasures, but it is not special or unique in doing so. Poussin’s Nymph with Satyrs and Corbet’s famous painting of female genitalia, The Origin of the World, offer eminent pleasure for the voyeur, and so too does the Folies Bergère. The more interesting question is whether or not cinema affords sexual voyeurism, or sexual looking at a person unseen. This condition cannot be met in representational painting since we see the painting of a person’s body rather than the body itself. It is only marginally met in a theatrical situation. The actor performs in the presence of a general audience. Even though, as in the scene from The Pleasure Garden, the individual voyeur may shelter under the general anonymity of being an audience member, his gaze may be returned.
What about the case of cinema? The first rung of support for the idea that the film spectator can be a voyeur lies in the sense in which we can be said to look at the body of an actor when we look at a photograph or film. When we watch the film Rear Window we are not simply looking at the visual representation of James Stewart and the set of a West Village apartment, we are arguably, via the medium of photographic moving pictures, looking at James Stewart on set. This might seem to entail that when we watch a movie we are looking at something that happened in the past and no longer exists; and the idea that we can see something that no longer exists may seem paradoxical or nonsensical (outside the context of looking into the past by looking into space). However, we should not forget here that what we are seeing is an image of something, not the thing itself. The object photographed is not in fact bodying forth before us. We do not see the actor’s body rather than seeing an image of it; rather, we see the actor’s body via the image.
Kendall Walton characterizes this distinctive feature of the photograph as “transparency” (Walton 252). He claims that in photography and cinema we look through the image upon what is depicted in a way that is like looking through a telescope or other prosthetic device upon an object, except in the case of photography or cinema the image of what is seen is preserved through an image. Walton’s transparency argument is based on the idea that there is a sharp distinction to be drawn between what we see in a representational painting and what we see in a standard photograph or film image. Following Richard Wollheim, we may understand what we perceive in a painting as something that is formed out of the intentional configuration of marks on its surface in such a way that prompts us to “see in” those marks that which is represented (213). We cannot, however, if Walton is correct, look through a painting and gaze upon its representational contents, for paintings lack transparency.
The idea that we look through the photographic and cinematic image gives prima facie support to the idea of voyeurism in the cinema. First, it gives a meaningful sense to the idea that we are actually looking at someone, though we are looking at him or her indirectly via the medium of a photographic image. Second, as many film theorists have observed, while we are looking through the cinematic image at the body of a person on the screen we are necessarily looking at it from a position that is unseen. The fourth wall in cinema cannot be broken in the manner that it is broken in the theater of The Pleasure Garden. Even if a film actor looks back at the implied audience, he cannot actually apprehend the spectator in a mutual gaze. Thus, when it occurs in the cinema, voyeurism is never simply an erotic gaze, for it also always involves the idea of being hidden from view or looking unseen. This gives rise to the analogy between L.B. Jefferies and the film spectator who, as he looks unseen on the body of the actor, may take pleasure in looking at that body for its own sake.
However, while these analogies between the film spectator and the voyeur might justify calling cinema a voyeuristic medium—that is, a medium that facilitates voyeurism—there are two fundamental dis-analogies that force us to discriminate the cinematic situation from everyday voyeurism. The fact that the spectator is necessarily hidden makes the sense of our looking unseen in cinema distinctive, for the film spectator is “protected” from the possibility and consequences of exposure. The film spectator is necessarily rather than contingently unseen. This takes away the risk involved in voyeurism and therefore changes the quality of the experience: it guarantees the voyeur anonymity and affords him impunity. Yet, while the spectator is necessarily unseen by the actor he observes, his look nonetheless receives a general authorization. Actors in a fiction film and, sometimes, the subjects of documentary footage, are appearing before the camera with the knowledge that they are going to be looked at. They cannot know who is looking, and unlike the theater performer, they cannot control to the same degree the way they are being looked at, because the filmmaker shapes the ways the spectator sees them. Thus, while the spectator who is looking at the body of an actor in Rear Window may share the impersonal, voyeuristic gaze of the character played by James Stewart, his position is different in two senses. First, the cinema spectator is necessarily rather than contingently unseen. When Lars Thorwald, the known murderer, looks back at L.B Jefferies from his apartment, giving him a taste of his own medicine, this “look back” is experienced very differently by L.B. Jefferies and the spectator. Second, the gaze of the spectator, unlike that of the character, is, in a general sense, authorized.
At this point the skeptic is free to conclude that cinema is not a distinctively voyeuristic medium at all. However, one could equally argue that because cinema affords the possibility of mediated sexual looking at another, unobserved, it creates a new and hitherto unprecedented mode of voyeurism that I shall call cine-voyeurism. Cine-voyeurism manifests a further important feature that Hitchcock brings to our attention in The Pleasure Garden through the binocular-motivated closeup, and also in Rear Window through the prosthetic device of the camera with which Jefferies gets closer to the objects of his sight. This is the capacity of cinema, through what Noël Carroll has termed variable framing, to bring us close to what is seen, and to do so from a multiplicity of different perspectives. Cinema not only gives us a distinctive kind of perceptual access, it allows for a close examination of what is seen from multiple viewpoints, as classical film theorists were keenly aware of. Cinema can thus satisfy a desire to see the human body, sexual acts, and sexual organs in ways that are actually sometimes impossible to see with the naked eye. Pornography, in particular, exploits this voyeuristic dimension of cinema, but all cinema partakes of it.
Four interlocking features thus characterize voyeurism in the cinema. First, the mode of looking is indirect (via a representation), which corresponds to the distinctive mode of looking that characterizes cinema in general. Second, the onlooker is necessarily rather than contingently unseen. Third, looking has a general, though impersonal, authorization. Fourth, the voyeuristic gaze is potentially unrestricted and ubiquitous. Whether sexual voyeurism is prompted in the cinema depends on both how cinema is used and the proclivities of the spectator, but all these conditions together help promote its occurrence. From the moral point of view, film spectatorship creates the formal conditions for sexual pleasure in looking to be exercised in a manner that is free from inhibition or shame. The voyeuristic spectator is protected from exposure by being unseen, and thus his gaze is an impersonal one. The impersonal nature of the transaction also affords protection to the actor who is engaged in self-display. At the same time, the actor’s general assent to being seen endows an element of qualified reciprocity to the transaction. Even though it is impersonal, the viewer’s gaze is not unwanted. Finally, the nature of variable framing allows an extreme sense of visual intimacy without the actual violation of personal space. Because the medium has historically afforded the possibility of uninhibited sexual looking, the scope and contexts of permissible representation in the cinema have historically been hedged with constraints in the form of censorship.
Of course, the moral questions arise here not simply from the fact of looking unseen but from the public display of the body, usually the female body, that prompts the sexual gaze. Patriarchal societies have long held taboos against women performing in public, and those women who did were considered on the same level as prostitutes or courtesans. However, because the display of the body in cinema is not live, but indirect and impersonal, the responsibility of the participant is lessened for that display and thereby given further license. In this respect, in spite of censorship regulations, it could be argued that cinema has actually contributed to easing the constraints on the public and impersonal display of sexuality. Cinema and other adjacent media isolate the participants from direct responsibility for the voyeuristic transaction. Furthermore, with Reality TV and the Internet, forms of what Clay Calvert calls “mediated voyeurism,” which require their own separate analysis, have metastasized (2). Beginning with cinema, technological modernity has arguably helped to lead a shift in public morality toward accepting voyeurism, although the terrain of what is permissible remains morally and legally contested.
Thus far I have been concerned with voyeurism only in a very limited sense of the actual actor’s body as it appears on film, and therefore primarily with sexual voyeurism, since the thoughts and feelings of the actor are not themselves salient when watching a film. However, although this broad approach has been very influential in thinking about voyeurism in the cinema, it turns out to be a rather narrow and distorting lens through which to understand cinematic voyeurism and its moral implications. For, as I have argued, there is broader sense of voyeurism that is not restricted to the sexually informed, unseen gaze, but pertains to intruding on privacy and is connected to eavesdropping. Voyeurism in this sense is concerned less with looking at the physical body than in apprehending the thoughts, feelings, and motives of another. In fiction cinema, thoughts, feelings, and motives are apprehended through the performance of the actor as a character in a fictional setting. It is thus impossible to talk about the significance that voyeurism might have in the cinema without reflecting on how we engage with fictions in film and how our sensory involvement in the film world is linked to our imaginative response to fiction in general
I have followed Kendall Walton in arguing that moving image spectatorship is characterized by an indirect mode of looking, in which film allows us to gaze through the moving image at the physical bodies of the actors and props in a film. However, what is the relationship between what it is we see indirectly, and our apprehension of the fiction? We may sometimes speak of looking at a character when we are looking at a motion picture, especially when the character, say Superman, is known to us better than the actor, or when the character is actually a model, such as King Kong. Yet there is an inherent and insuperable paradox involved in the claim that we can see something that does not exist. Most thinkers reject, on these grounds, the idea that we can give any sense to the thought that we can see fictional characters and fictional worlds. However, the problem with such rejections is that they do not seem to acknowledge the distinctive experience of going to the cinema as opposed to, say, reading fictions, where we seem not only, or even primarily, to look at actors performing, but apprehend visually the actions of characters and the fictional worlds they inhabit.
The theory that best preserves the intuition that in cinema we, in some sense, perceive a fictional world is the theory of imagined seeing. George Wilson first proposed a systematic theory of imagined seeing in film, and more recently he has defended the theory at length. He argues that when we are watching a film, what we see and hear indirectly are the actors, the props, and the sounds they make, but what we justifiably imagine, or “make believe,” is that we are “watching from within the space of the story” (1988, 56). “In viewing classical narrative films under standard conditions of movie spectatorship, viewers normally do imagine seeing (in the image-track) and hearing (in the sound-track) the objects and events depicted in the movie. Further, in normal cases they are justified in so imagining” (2011, 55). In Rear Window we indirectly see James Stewart and Grace Kelly on the film set, but we imagine seeing and hearing L.B. Jefferies and Lisa Freemont looking out on the courtyard of a West Village apartment building.
Figure 8.1. Lisa (Grace Kelly) and Jefferies (James Stewart) watching.
As Wilson points out, what gives immediate plausibility to this idea is that there is a clear difference between an event in the fictional world of the film that we are prompted to imagine and events in the fictional world that we apprehend through sight. Thus, when in Rear Window Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) is enticed by L.B. Jefferies to leave his apartment to meet with him, we are invited by the film to merely imagine his arrival at the rendezvous and his realization that he has been duped. We do not see the event occurring. In contrast we actually see, or rather, we imagine seeing, his departure and arrival. However, the idea of imagining seeing has proven surprisingly difficult to defend. The central problem lies in where the spectator who imagines that he or she is seeing the fiction is located, for presumably if the spectator is imagining seeing the fiction he or she must imagine seeing it from somewhere. Gregory Currie dubbed Wilson’s original formulation of the theory of imagined seeing the “imagined observer hypothesis” and argued that in order to be true, this hypothesis seems to require a spectator who, implausibly, imagines herself flitting from observational viewpoint to observational viewpoint as we cut from scene to scene, or, absurdly, imagines herself potentially subject to physical impingement by fictional events (167).
In response to Currie, Wilson proposes and defends two possible explanations of imagined seeing. His “modest” or minimalist claim is that the spectator imagines seeing the contents of the fiction from whatever visual perspective it is presented, but it is actually indeterminate how the spectator has access to what she imagines seeing. We are mandated by movies to imagine seeing or hearing what they depict, yet we are not mandated to imagine where we see or here them from. We can imagine having a visual perspective on the fiction without imagining occupying a particular point of view. The reason for this is that our imagination, logically speaking, just has the character that we can imagine something without imagining what it normally entails. Since the viewer does not imagine occupying an observation point in the fictional world, she thus does not move from vantage point to vantage point in editing. Nor does she imagine herself impinged upon by fictional events. However, for several reasons, Wilson endorses a stronger “mediated version” of imagined seeing in which not only does the spectator imagine seeing the fiction, she imagines seeing the fiction via the imagined seeing of “motion-picture like images.” In other words, while we are actually looking through the film image at actors on sets, we imagine that we are looking through the film image at a fictional world. This does not mean that we imagine that some camera is actually recording the fictional world. Only certain films, such as This is Spinal Tap, mandate this. We are not required to imagine how it is possible for us to be seeing a fiction via a moving image for exactly the same reason that we are not required to imagine ourselves, in the “modest” thesis, occupying a point in space.
I am not going to attempt to adjudicate between these two positions. The issues are quite subtle, and Wilson’s own arguments are not decisive. Yet, taken either way, his proposal is an important one in the context of understanding the role of voyeurism in the cinema. As Berys Gaut has argued, a strong connection between the idea of voyeurism and imagined seeing can be forged: “The idea of the invisible observer is the notion that it is make-believe that the spectator sees the events happening in the fictional world. It is also make-believe of many of these events that they are private events, and that the characters, not intending them to be seen by anyone else, would be deeply embarrassed were they to be the object of another’s gaze. … [I]t is often make-believe that the spectator views private actions, but it is not make-believe that his gaze is returned” (7). Gaut himself rejects the thesis of imagined seeing and hence the concept of make-believe or fictional voyeurism, but if we do indeed imagine seeing and hearing fictional worlds when we watch movies we are, fictionally, voyeurs and eavesdroppers upon those worlds in a manner that allow us to imagine that we can have intimate access to the minds of others without them being aware. Cinema, as Colin McGuinn has suggested, enables us “to look in on the most private thoughts and feelings of the people we observe” (57).
While in the case of the “modest” thesis, the relationship of imagined seeing to cine-voyeurism is more complicated to explain, if we adopt the thesis that we imagine seeing the fictional world by imaging seeing through a film image of it, fictional or imagined voyeurism appears closely congruent with its counterpart in cine-voyeurism. First, it is indirect: we imagine seeing the fiction by imagining that we look through a motion-picture image. Second, the spectator who imagines seeing in cinema is necessarily unseen because he imagines looking at the fictional world indirectly through the one-way device of the motion-picture image. Third, the general institution of cinema authorizes imagined voyeurism, though here the characters we imagine seeing are unsuspecting, unlike the actors that we see through the image. Fourth, the gaze of this imagined voyeur is as unrestricted and ubiquitous as the fiction itself. In this way, the imagined looking of the spectator at the characters in the fiction supervenes upon the actual gaze of the spectator at the actors. However, fictional voyeurism, whichever way it is construed, is crucially distinctive. The spectator who imagines seeing apprehends the thoughts, motivations, and feelings of another, and thus he apprehends the mind, not merely the body, of another. When we imagine seeing fictional worlds, we see the body of the actor, which we imagine as the body of a character in the context of our overall apprehension of the character and his role in the fictional world.
The manner in which the institutional authorization of voyeurism receives its rationale from the broader institution of dramatic fiction in cinema has significant implications for understanding the nature of cine-voyeurism. The institution of fiction allows us direct and immediate access to the thoughts and feelings of others in a manner that would, in actual contexts, appear morally intrusive. For this reason, it has at least the potential to tutor us in how to understand the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of others in a manner that, as many authors have argued, may have a socially civilizing effect, even if this effect is incapable of clear empirical measurement or proof. Of course, this possibility is true of other kinds of fiction, not merely cinema. But the distinctiveness of cinema, which Hitchcock’s Rear Window among other films constantly remind us of, lies in its particular position on the borderline between the real and the fictional and between visual, voyeuristic attraction and psychological identification. The cinema has often been condemned by moral arbiters for encouraging superficial fascination with the human body, yet, by the same token, it allows us to understand the relationship between those surface features of experience and a deeper sense of self and personhood that extends beyond our apprehension of the body. For me, this is a central reason why cinema is such a fascinating art form. Indeed, even if my characterization of imagined seeing as a form of voyeurism is questioned, on grounds similar to those used to criticize the concept of cine-voyeurism, I believe that the structure of the experience I have sought to describe remains central to the medium and to Hitchcock’s exploration of it.
As I have already noted, Rear Window has often been considered an allegory of the film spectator as voyeur: L.B Jefferies confined to his wheelchair looks out across the courtyard, unseen, at the activities of the courtyard inhabitants—just as the film spectator looks unseen upon the world of the film. Furthermore, as noted, Rear Window has been taken to exemplify (Mulvey) and critique (Stam and Pearson) the male voyeuristic gaze in the cinema. Rear Window has also been construed by David Bordwell as a self-conscious enactment of how we “construct a story on the basis of visual information” (41). Here, drawing on Paula Marantz Cohen’s astute commentary on the film, I will suggest that Rear Window provides an allegory of the role of fiction in film viewing. In Rear Window, male sexual cine-voyeurism is revealed as merely one register of film spectatorship whose significance is transformed once it is embedded in the broader institution of imagined seeing or fictional voyeurism, where the gaze functions as a conduit to the thoughts and feelings of the characters who inhabit the fictional world. In Rear Window, as Cohen writes, we come to appreciate the potential power of our own look and “to recognize its connection to the way we generate meaning and feeling” (105).
The film opens with two panning and tilting camera movements across a courtyard surrounded by apartment buildings after a window curtain has been raised on the scene. The first movement establishes the overall setting as we begin to see people asleep or waking in distant view. The second movement gives us a closer view: a man in a penthouse shaves while we hear a male voice intone on his radio: “men over forty, are you tired and rundown, do you have a listless feeling,” before the man changes the station to jazz; an alarm wakens an older couple sleeping on the fire escape; a fit young woman does her morning exercises, one of which includes unhooking her bra with her back to the spectator as she bends down, and hooking it up again once she is erect, to the cooing of doves flitting on her roof; we hear the voices of children playing; and finally we see a pair of love birds being uncovered on the left of the screen, before the camera returns us inside to the sleeping Jefferies and shows us his broken leg, his name on his cast, and photographs that reveal how his accident happened. It is only the third time we see the courtyard, with Jefferies on the phone to his editor, that we see the events across the courtyard from his point of view. We are introduced to him as a sexual voyeur. He watches as a helicopter buzzes above topless bathers, and he observes Miss Torso’s extensive exercise routines that are so noisy they draw the attention of the female sculptor who lives below. He turns to look at the composer and, then, for the first time, we see, from his point of view, the future murder suspect, Lars Thorwald, coming home and entering his wife’s bedroom, only to be scolded by her.
This sequence is critical for several reasons. First, it introduces the general parallel between the position of Jefferies and the position of the film spectator. Second, it introduces the idea of sexual voyeurism by presenting the topless bathers and the performance of Miss Torso. In both cases, Hitchcock conveys by suggestion what he cannot actually show: the topless bathers are perceived only by the helicopter that hovers like a predatory insect, and Miss Torso’s nifty movement with the bra creates a crude sight gag, as if she has to release the bra as she bends down in order to accommodate the size of her breasts. Third, it introduces sexual voyeurism in the context of psychological voyeurism or unseen access to the intimate lives of others that serves to foster our interest in finding out about those lives. Fourth, Hitchcock’s narration clearly introduces the gaze of the spectator to the world of the courtyard and demarcates that gaze as distinct from that of L.B. Jefferies, because Jefferies is asleep. There may be a parallel between the point of view of Jefferies and the spectator, but there is also a distinction that Hitchcock is at pains to articulate. Finally, as Cohen points out, we are introduced to the story of Thorwald through the gaze of Jefferies that singles out this particular story as one that is going to be central to his development as a character.
When the spectator initially views the scene, he is not positioned as a sexual voyeur; rather, he is oriented on the threshold of a fictional world, waiting to be introduced to the characters within it. To be sure, we are invited to be sexual voyeurs as we watch Miss Torso do her routines. However, our incipient sexual voyeurism here is contained within the broader compass of apprehending the fictional world and, in particular, the lives of the characters it contains. In sharp contrast to the spectator, Jefferies is clearly involved in a morally dubious act of sexual voyeurism. To underscore the illicit nature of his viewing, the scene of Jefferies looking at Miss Torso as he speaks on the phone is framed by the shot of the helicopter pilot buzzing above the topless women, and the shot dwells inordinately on his look at Miss Torso in repeated point-of-view shots and reaction shots, even suggesting that he licks his lips while doing so.
Of course, the introduction of Jefferies’s sexual voyeurism is capable of being read in different ways. As I have argued elsewhere, Hitchcock often aligns us with characters who are engaged in perverse acts of looking in order to create an alibi for the spectator to enter a scene of perverse enjoyment (Allen 68). Our perceptual alignment with Stewart allows us a greater indulgence to view Miss Torso in closer view, by enjoying what the character enjoys; but, at the same time, we can also readily distance ourselves from that character, especially when prompted to do so by other characters in the fiction, such as Stella (Thelma Ritter), who roundly chastises him for being a Peeping Tom. While we are aligned with Jefferies’s point of view, we are never simply aligned with his psychology. Perhaps, too, as I have already suggested, there is a sense of self-conscious exhibitionism in Miss Torso, certainly an unalloyed pleasure in bodily self-expression, which, like the performance of Patsy in The Pleasure Garden, invites appreciation but abjures visual predation. Or maybe this is a setup by Hitchcock, who presents Miss Torso’s ostensible exhibitionism as an alibi for Jefferies’s voyeurism in a manner that renders it more palatable.
From the outset, appearing alongside Miss Torso in rear windows of the courtyard are other figures who expand the field of the fiction as the film unfolds and provoke a different kind of interest: Miss Lonely Hearts, the newlyweds, the composer, the childless couple with the dog, the Thorwalds, and the spinster sculptor. As a number of critics have pointed out, it is as if each window suggests a different perspective upon the story of the central couple. In this respect, Rear Window highlights the way in which, when watching fiction films, as in all fiction, the spectator is invited to reflect on behavior of the protagonists by apprehending different kinds of characters in different stories or subplots. At the same time, if Jefferies begins the film as a detached voyeur, which mimics the detachment manifest in his relationship with Lisa Freemont, over time, he begins to enter into the lives of the characters whom he initially observes only from a distance, understands them more sympathetically, and sees himself as part of a broader community. The film spectator is thereby taught about the nature of an apprehension that is based on a superficial and surface gaze. He is taught how superficial understanding must be revised and integrated if a deeper knowledge of how to live with others is to be achieved, and how cinema itself affords a means of reflection upon the relationship between surface and depth perception. Rear Window functions as an elegant allegory of the moral education of the viewer, in particular the male viewer, from a detached sexual voyeur to an empathic spectator through his engagement with the story-worlds of film.
The fact that Jefferies solves a murder, develops sympathy for his neighbors, and falls in love might seem a conveniently self-serving moral sleight of hand, given the fact that Rear Window starts from the premise of an intrusive voyeurism. Deep into his investigation of the murder, Jefferies stops to ponder: “I wonder if it’s ethical to watch a man with binoculars and long focus lens … do you suppose it’s ethical even if you prove that he didn’t commit a crime?” As we have seen, there is certainly a moral paradox to ponder here about real-world voyeurism and surveillance, but Jefferies is redeemed by the fact that he has evolved enough as a viewer to actually pose the question. The moral paradox of voyeurism in the film receives its echo in the residual moral paradox attached to the institution of cinema itself, with its potential for a frank display of the human body and human sexuality. It is as if fiction film, for Hitchcock, perversely, provides an alibi for the staging of voyeurism.
Gender plays a fundamental role in Rear Window’s moral allegory of spectatorship. Lisa wishes for domesticity, intimacy, and attachment. Jefferies is a voyeuristic adventurer whose attitude to Lisa is governed by skepticism, distance, and detachment. This places them at odds and renders them incompatible. Jefferies behaves as a sexual voyeur toward Miss Torso, self-servingly confirms his prejudices about the course of domestic relationships in his negative evaluation of Thorwald’s nagging wife, and manifests his facile view of sexual relationships when he opines that Miss Torso picks and chooses her men at her leisure. However, his view changes as he begins to see Mrs. Thorwald as a murder victim, as he comes to empathize with the character of Miss Lonely Hearts, and when Lisa, by joining his quest, helps tutor his understanding as she offers her own contrary judgment on Miss Torso as a woman who is engaged in “juggling wolves” and lacks interest in any of the men. Her hypothesis is confirmed when Miss Torso’s husband arrives home near the conclusion of the film. While Jefferies develops a more feminine, empathic gaze, Lisa herself demonstrates a masculine sense of agency when she enters Thorwald’s apartment in search of his wife’s ring. When she places her life at risk, as Jefferies has consistently done as a photojournalist, she draws out from Jefferies a deeply empathic response that finally expresses his love for her.
The figure of Miss Lonely Hearts plays a critical role in fostering the education and transformation of the male gaze. During the first evening of the story, as they prepare to sit down for dinner and at a moment when Jefferies continues to react critically and negatively toward Lisa, Jefferies watches Miss Lonely Hearts enact a ritual of entertaining a phantom suitor to dinner to the refrain of Dean Martin’s “To See You is to Love You:” “To see you is to love you/And I see you everywhere/In the sunrise in the moon glow/Any place I look you’re there.” The song’s celebration of bringing the loved one into sight is the antithesis of sexual voyeurism. It celebrates an inner gaze in which love brings to mind the beloved so intensely that he or she seems to appear. Miss Lonely Hearts, with pathos, seems to enact the lyric of the song as she imagines entertaining her dream lover over dinner. Jefferies, across the courtyard, not only appreciates her performance but also empathizes with her lonely suffering and forms an imaginary connection to her through a shot/reverse-shot across the courtyard as he raises his glass to toast her.
Later, Lisa and Jefferies, their gazes now attuned, share their discomfort and apprehension as they watch Miss Lonely Hearts fight off the assault of a young man she has picked up from a bar. Finally, Jefferies watches with Stella as Miss Lonely Hearts decides to take her life. The response of Stella and Jefferies to the plight of Miss Lonely Hearts parallels their empathic response to Lisa’s assault, and Stella’s prompt to Jefferies to call the police to save Miss Lonely Hearts actually serves to rescue Lisa. Miss Lonely Hearts herself is saved, it turns out, by the composer’s song, Mona Lisa. Lisa had earlier opined that the composer’s inability to write the song reflects on her relationship to Jefferies. The completion of the song now accompanies Jefferies’s empathic gaze and presages the realization of their love for one another, and Jefferies’s seeming retreat from skepticism and indifference.
Figure 8.2. Miss Lonely Hearts (Judith Evelyn).
Yet, as I argued in Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony and have intimated here, there is a powerful undercurrent of human perversity in Hitchcock’s vision that is also at work in Rear Window. Jefferies seems to bring into being across the courtyard a story that ideally expresses, indeed vindicates, his own darkest impulses toward Lisa and aligns him, imaginatively, with the figure of Lars Thorwald, his ostensible antagonist. As he imagines what it must be like to cut up a body, he looks at Miss Torso through the cross hairs of her window. At the very moment of his greatest empathy for Lisa, Jefferies, and the spectator alongside him, watch as Thorwald assaults her to the strains of the lushly romantic tune of Mona Lisa. Even the “happy” ending of Rear Window is, characteristically for Hitchcock, ambiguous, as Jefferies lies not with one but with two broken legs, and Lisa puts down her adventure novel To the High Himalayas to read Harper’s Bazaar. This undercurrent of skepticism does not undermine Hitchcock’s moral vision but is in fact constitutive of it. There is no easy triumph of communitarian values over skepticism or human isolation in Hitchcock, but a continued struggle, renewal, and reversal that rejects facile resolutions, especially in gender relationships. The aesthetic power of the voyeuristic gaze in cinema is that it can, through the entwinement of actuality and fiction, dramatize both extreme detachment from or objectification of another as well as empathic connection. Hitchcock’s cinema in general, and Rear Window in particular, articulates the full moral power and amplitude of that gaze.
1. I thank Leo Goldsmith for reminding me about this sequence.
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