Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window is among a rare type of film that devotes its entire running time to a single location. Two other examples are Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and Sydney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men. As with both of those films, Rear Window creates microcosms – miniature representations of larger ideas – with its various supporting characters. If any one of these secondary characters were made the lead protagonist of a feature film they would seem cliché. However, since they are only given small parts in the films they become archetypes, or microcosms representing larger sections of humanity.
J.B. Jefferies looks into eight windows from his apartment. By looking into them one at a time and checking back at certain moments the audiences learns the basics of these people’s lives. Out the left side of Jefferies’ view are the newlyweds, a young couple caught up in the romance of marriage, who are the only ones to close their window during the summer heat. Kept out of sight their relationship is barely noticed except by its absence. When Jefferies is asked about the window he simply says, “No comment.” This couple is a representation of so many others like them. They are people who believe so blindly in their situation that they don’t think any problems can affect them. This couple, like most in the real world, end up fighting because reality always slips in.
Continuing to the right, after a narrow alley, is a two-story building with two tenants. On the ground is a sculptress who owns a cat. She is seen either reading on her lawn chair or carving abstract clay statues. A stereotype that has developed – whether true or not – is that artists are solitary. This woman represents part of that image very naturally. Although she doesn’t actively shut people out the only time she is seen talking to someone else is when she warns her neighbor’s dog to get out of the flowerbed. She also never complains to the woman above her, Miss Torso, who spends large amounts of time bounding around the apartment in her underwear. This would make lots of noise for the sculptress below, but the topic is never breached.
Miss Torso seems one-dimensional for most of the film. She dances, she hosts three men at once, and she doesn’t seem to be trying to improve her life in any way. The final reveal that adds complexity to her character is when her husband, a glasses-wearing army private, arrives home and she is overjoyed to see him. This effectively jolts the audience and sums up one of the moral lessons of the film, which is don’t judge a book by its cover.
Next to the short building is a four-story apartment. From top to bottom there are four archetype characters: two career girls who sunbath on the roof, a couple who own a dog, a salesman with an unhappy marriage, and a love-sick woman that Jefferies calls Miss Lonelyheart. These four sum up most people’s love lives. The career girls seem to avoid it to focus on a modeling career (in the first pan around the yard a flashbulb can be seen in their window). The couple below them has a happy and long-term marriage, which contrasts to the newlyweds and the couple below. The salesman, it turns out, killed his nagging wife. Although this isn’t the regular outcome for an unhappy marriage there is a very high rate of divorce around the world. Finally Miss Lonelyheart is the perfect representation of the rest of the population. She is love sick and shy, two opposing personality traits that ironically go hand-in-hand.
The last window seen with regularity is the studio apartment, owned by the songwriter. Another artist, he represents the type who celebrates his talents publicly, as with the large party he hosts half way through the film. Unlike the sculptress he often has people over, but when he is alone he is violent and frustrated by his inability to live up to the public image. Because of this form that his personality takes it is interesting to note that for his traditional cameo appearance Alfred Hitchcock chose the songwriter’s apartment to appear in.
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