Film as Dream: Alfred Hitchcock'S Rear Window

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window returns to the American screen after many years' absence like the surfacing of a long-repressed memory — or like the traces of a memory disguised in a dream. Like memory, the film is concerned with the reconstruction of a sequence of events that might or might not bear the interpretation implied by their reconstruction. And like a dream (and like many of Hitchcock's movies) the film somehow just misses making logical sense. Although it is one of the most tightly constructed and highly unified of Hitchcock's films, its unity is achieved not so much by the logic of plot as by the impact of visual imagery and cinematographic techniques, which seem to function as filmic analogs of primary process thinking.

Also like a dream, the film can (and must) be read on many different levels. The film can be seen as a spellbinding murder mystery; as a disturbing dissection of a moral issue; as a social commentary on alienation in modern urban life and on changing gender roles in our society; as a tour de force exercise in modernist self-reflective film techniques — a film about film; as a psychological self-portrait of Hitchcock; and also, as I will argue, as a profound, frightening fantasy of castration anxiety, voyeurism, and sadomasochism.

Like a dream, the film's story occurs between intervals of sleep. The dreamer, L. B. (“Jeff”) Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart), is first caught by the camera in a fitful sleep, and in our last view of Jeff he is once again asleep, this time more peacefully. As if to underline the point, the background music to our final view of Jeff is the theme song, whose words at that point are “ … if I'm dreaming may I never wake….”

The dreamlike quality of Hitchcock's movies, and of Rear Window