“Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday.”
If someone who never saw a Hitchcock film asked me to recommend one, I would suggest Rear Window. It has everything that makes a Hitchcock movie great. It mixes comedy and romance, suspense and terror, and it features two iconic Hollywood movie stars. Jimmy Stewart plays Jeff, an action photographer confined to a wheelchair, and Grace Kelly plays his girlfriend Lisa who takes the opportunity of his confinement to press for a commitment. Lisa is dazzlingly glamorous, but for Jeff she might as well be chopped liver. He is not interested in her at all.
What he is interested in is spying on his neighbors, especially a beautiful, blonde dancer he nicknames Miss Torso. Day and night he scans the windows across his courtyard searching for glimpses of erotic intimacies. Then one evening he accidentally stumbles on a murder. The police do not believe him but Lisa does. At great personal risk Lisa enters the murderer's apartment searching for clues, and while Jeff watches her intently through his binoculars he comes to feel the erotic excitement that he could not feel when she was with him in his apartment. By the end of the movie, the police have their man, Lars Thorwald, and Lisa has hers.
Rear Window has the narrative structure of a detective story and it can be appreciated as a spellbinding murder mystery or responded to for its deeper levels. The primary subtext is the unbridgeable gulf and bloody conflict between the sexes. In this film's totality Hitchcock portrays women as fundamentally deceptive, offering false promises of sexual gratification and bent only on domesticating and emasculating their man in order to make him easier to exploit. Depending on the fragility of the man's gender identity, this emasculation will awake fears of castration or worse, and these fears will provoke in the man a violent rage culminating in a wish to dismember the woman in revenge, because this is what he fears she will do to him.
Thorwald does not just strangle his nagging wife. He decapitates her. He then places her head in a hatbox and buries it like a corpse beneath a flowerbed. He also cuts off her ring finger to recover her wedding ring for his new bride and slices the rest of her body into little pieces and scatters it around.
The idea that women tyrannize men and men seek bloody revenge threads through all of Hitchcock's movies. It was once considered unscientific to link a movie with the psychological world of its creator, but this view no longer holds sway among psychoanalytic film critics. So it is worth noting here that Miss Torso is a clear representation of the many cool blonde stars that Hitchcock cast as his leading ladies and often treated cruelly; the character of Lisa is based on Hitchcock's wife Alma, who was Hitchcock's collaborator in making murder mysteries just as Lisa is Jeff's collaborator in solving them. The character Jeff is perhaps the character that Hitchcock most identified with and it may not be too far of a stretch to say that Rear Window can be read as the director's psychological autobiography.
Were Jeff (or his creator) a patient in analysis we would suspect that such violent fantasies about observing marital intimacies derived from primal scene memories and their fantasy elaboration. In fact the movie contains three of the most graphic and detailed and least disguised portrayals of the primal scene in the history of cinema. The first scene conforms closest to a typical child's actual experience. Jeff is sitting in the dark trying not to be noticed, spying on a couple in a barely lit room while he drifts in and out of sleep unsure of what is dream and what is reality. He is startled by a cry, but whether it is a cry of passion or pain neither Jeff or the audience can be sure. There are fragmentary glimpses of movement but not a drop of blood is in sight. On the basis of this and little else the protagonist concludes something terrible has happened to the woman.
The second portrayal of the primal scene has the quality of being the dramatization of an unconscious fantasy. Here Jeff watches helplessly as Thorwald discovers Lisa in his apartment and strangles her. Jeff's identification with Lisa is evident as he holds his own neck in mute terror until the police come to Lisa's rescue. Finally, the third primal scene enactment follows Thorwald's discovery of Jeff. The audience, like children fearing discovery themselves, hear Thorwald's steps getting louder as he prepares to pounce on Jeff. In this scene in particular Jeff is as helpless as a little pre-school boy, weightless and weak, facing the brute force of an angry father.
The movie is also infused with the quality of primal scene memories and fantasies in its granular detail. Such fantasies are expressed through humorous asides, nicknames, pictures that look randomly placed on the wall, action that seems to coincidentally capture a character's interest, for instance, songs on the radio.
Peter B. Dunn, M.D.'s film screenings/discussions for New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute are among the most popular events offered in their newly renovated auditorium. He is the director of NYPSI's Low-Cost Treatment Center and a psychoanalyst in private practice.
Take just the opening few minutes (denoted as such) of Rear Window:
(1:00) The movie opens and the whole screen is not a screen at all but a window with closed shades. As the shades rise we look out from that window across a courtyard into the bank of windows on the opposing building. We see into the inner space of five apartments the last of which is the home of a beautiful blonde woman who is bending over provocatively.
(2:00) The camera angle shifts and we see a man in a wheelchair with a broken leg in a large white cast looking into the windows of the neighbors.
(3:00) The action is interrupted by a phone call from the man's boss who gently criticizes him for having broken his leg while getting too close to the action of an auto race while trying to get a picture of a crash.
(4:00) The boss tells a humorous story of having barged in on his own boss having sex with his secretary.
(4:00) As they talk the photographer looks at the same dancer we saw before assuming one intimate pose after another and notices as well two nude sunbathers on a roof balcony. At this moment a helicopter comes into view, dipping down to look at the same sunbathers.
(5:00) The boss puts in a word for his marrying his long-term girlfriend, Lisa, saying it is time for him to settle down. The photographer replies, “Can you imagine me married…coming home to a nagging wife?” The camera scans to the sight of Thorwald coming home to his wife who appears to be feigning illness in order to get him to serve her dinner in bed.
(6:00) Before the scene closes, I notice a picture on the wall. It is a picture of a car crash. The two cars are in a violent embrace. The wheel of one car has been dislodged and its naked axle has impaled the driver of the other car. The arms of the impaled driver are splayed backwards and the face is contorted in pain. The wheel that has been torn off the car is hurtling off in space in the direction of the photographer, accounting for the photographer's broken leg.
To compare the construction of this movie to a mosaic of tiles, it is as if the total mosaic constitutes a picture of a primal scene while on each of the individual tiles are variations on the same theme. Such repetition suggests that primal scene screen memories and fantasies are the deep structural organizers of the movie. My most astonishing observation was the shot of the car crash, which required me to freeze-frame my iPad. Before me was a precise symbolic representation of the primal scene fantasy at the heart of this movie: Sexual intercourse as a violent embrace in which father (one car) violently assaults mother (the second driver impaled by the first driver's tire axel) and the child (Jeff), who is identified with her, is castrated (the broken leg) by the father as well (the tire hits Jeff).
The film also invites speculations about voyeurism and I will offer mine. I was struck watching the film how miserable Jimmy Stewart looked when Lisa forced him to relate to her directly. It struck me that what Hitchcock was conveying was that the fundamental problem in voyeurism is not the voyeurism itself but the inability to experience life directly as a participant.
Perhaps at its core voyeurism reflects fundamental problems in anxiety tolerance. Primal scene fantasies might then be useful to “reformat” direct experience as experience being observed. Perhaps the predominance of primal scene fantasies in voyeurs does not reflect prior primal scene trauma but the tendency of developmentally normal primal scene fantasies to proliferate because of their adaptive value. In addition to obvious voyeuristic activities (reading, cruising the Internet, reviewing one's dreams watching movies or TV), a common symptom of voyeurism is to become the observer of one's own thoughts, perhaps a necessary adaptation when one's thoughts are too disturbing.
As an analyst the primary manifestation of voyeurism might not be the excessive interest in the intimate details of the lives of one's patients but a reluctance to engage the transference. I intend to watch Rear Window again and see what else I can learn.