The following is a transcript of Robert Pippin’s concluding lecture to our free screening of Rear Window on December 3. It has been lightly edited. You can listen to the original lecture by turning up your volume and you can find a list of discussion questions here. The relevant scenes from Rear Window will appear as they did in Pippin’s lecture.

Transcription done by: David North, Varun Joshi, Meera Joshi, Steven Chen, Lucy Johnson, Anna Prisco, and Felix Chaoulideer

Here’s a simple question to begin: Why don’t we see many scenes of the older couple? Because Jeff isn’t interested in happy marriages. He’s interested in unhappy marriages — and this projective understanding that Jeff is doing throughout the movie is one of the limitations of his character and the various things Hitchcock is thematizing.

First of all, there’s the theme of voyeurism. Movies are not voyeuristic enterprises; the things we’re seeing aren’t happening, but we don’t like voyeurism at least not in real life. We shouldn’t invade others’ privacy. We shouldn’t assume that what we see even while we’re unobserved is the truth. Now, it’s true that we feel a higher sense of credibility when there’s nothing theatrical. In our ordinary lives when we’re dealing with people there’s always the possible suspicion that when people are engaging with us, for some more than others, they’re being performative and might talk differently if we weren’t there. There’s an interpretive necessity to be on your toes. We always feel there’s a way in which someone might be presenting themselves disingenuously.

It isn’t the case though that if we voyeuristically observe them that they’ll be speaking more truthfully. People are often misguided about themselves. Suppose you overhear someone say something critical about you. Our tendency is to think we now know what the other person thinks about us. Of course this isn’t true because that person said something at a particular time to a particular person with a particular intention. So when we overhear someone say something negative we tend to believe that’s how they really feel.

But the problem with voyeurism isn’t just the invasion of privacy or the illusion that because we’re unobserved we see truth. It’s because we treat others as objects for our subjectivity: they’re for us but we’re not for them. There’s no reciprocity. It’s not exactly a kind of entertainment, though that is the suggestion at the beginning of the movie, that Jeff is entertained by these people, but you will notice that Jeff’s attitude is always projective of his perspective, his point of view. He’s always backing away from the window. He doesn’t want to be seen. Therein we get the first indication of the relation of the two plots. He isn’t willing for himself and Lisa to enter into a mutuality. Lisa must be for him and he must not be for Lisa. Without her being for him, there is no Lisa, there is no relationship. That element of the voyeuristic theme, that he is a subject looking at others as objects, whether for entertainment or not, and is unwilling to be on the other end of the dialectic between subjects who are also objects to each other, is one of his main limitations in this movie.

This couple, they have an objective problem. She wants to stay in New York and live the life of a fashionable rich person. Jimmy Stewart, who’s approaching middle age in this movie and wants to continue photographing spectacle, proves that Lisa has a point: he’s already broken his leg and isn’t getting any younger, he should change his lifestyle. But his attitude is much more dogmatic than hers and much more unreceptive to seeing things from her point of view. That’s the first general portrayal of voyeurism, but as I’ve been mentioning, we also get the sense of Jeff as a man who’s watching these scenes unfold as if he’s watching a movie screen. It’s 1954, so there’s already the suggestion that these little boxes are television screens. (Hitchcock was aware of this and soon after this movie he would go on to create a very successful television series where his brand became internationally much more famous.) Hitchcock implies that the way in which Jeff watches movies is deficient: he’s merely observing. We’ll have to see more about that when we see the transition from how he watches to when Lisa involves herself.

Throughout the movie, we are set up to think of the window as a screen, that Jeff is watching from the outside, unobserved, and having to carry that attitude into life is wrong, selfish, highly over subjectivist, projective: he’s unwilling to be seen, to be loved. Once we get that framework and we’re used to it, even if we’re only used to it implicitly, the scene where Lisa actually goes into the movie, and thus solves the case even though Jeff never could, is quite suggestive of what I think Hitchcock thinks is the limitation of watching a movie as a pure spectator: to be entertained by the object. We’ll see this some more in the Thorwald scene at the end.

We also get a thematization of Hitchcock’s control of what we see. In the beginning of the movie, a man’s alone in his apartment, and this is what we see:

How are the blinds going up? Very innocent, but that’s not possible for normal blinds! The first convention being suggested is the convention of the theater – suggesting again that we aren’t just magically present at the events; that someone is showing us something. That showing has a point. Sometimes that point or purpose is to create a funny movie that will entertain us, or one that will frighten us. But sometimes the point is to illuminate something about human life that the director thinks he understands and wants to portray, that has a certain kind of credibility and power. And if we aren’t attentive to this as well, the way the set is designed, how the lighting works – if we aren’t attentive to this, we only see what Jeff sees when he looks into other people’s windows – the play of the human drama. Superficial, needy, narcissistic, not letting the scene we see to affect us, we view it only as an object out there that we have to attend to.

Hitchcock usually makes cameos in his films. The one here is unusual. He’s repairing a clock. He seems to be saying “I’m controlling the time, the pace, the narrative flow.” And he’s glaring in a certain way in our direction, as if its a certain kind of challenge: “Pay attention! This is not a piece of froth, a light Hollywood entertainment. This is about a man watching people in a way you might find objectionable. But what are you doing? You’ve come here unobserved to watch events in the same way that he does.” Yet, Jeff even has trouble understanding what he sees. I mean the worst is him not understanding that Miss Lonelyhearts is in fact committing suicide. Stella tells him, he’s watching, but then stops, because he’s got the other plot. So, when Lonelyhearts takes out a piece of paper to write a suicide note, he thinks, “Well, Stella’s wrong, she’s not committing suicide, she’s writing a letter.” It’s incredibly dense. So, Hitchcock’s glare at us, I think, and his mentioning the fact visually, that he’s controlling the temporality of the movie, the pace, all the events that are unfolding, as well as the music, whether we hear music or not, is meant to remind us that the movie has a certain narrative form that Hitchcock is responsible for, and that form is the form of the movie’s own intelligibility. It’s the point of this control being narrated and shown visually in a way that he wants us to attend to. I also think Hitchcock is always making some kind of joke about our willingness to be contemptuous of Jeff’s denseness at various points, whereas we’re not as willing to reflect on whether we’re understanding the movie, taking it seriously enough, probing enough, or allowing it merely to be an object of entertainment that we watch.

When we’re introduced to Jeff, the last connection with the theme of movies is that Jeff is a photographer. He’s a very unusual photographer. When we started the movie, he’s trying to convince his war buddy Lieutenant friend Doyle that a murder has been committed, and he’s got his camera out from a very early part of the movie, and he sees Thorwald go out with the suitcase, but he doesn’t take a picture. He sees him come back, go out again, doesn’t take a picture. He sees him unwrapping saws and knives in the sink, he doesn’t take a picture. He sees him watching down the walls of his apartment and doesn’t take a picture. It’s another way for Hitchcock to emphasize that even though he’s a photographer, because of his walled-off-ness from the scene, it doesn’t even occur to him that he can in effect penetrate into the scene photographically. He’s just watching. He doesn’t even take pictures. Another instance: when Lisa gets caught. Remember, Thorwald comes back, and she has that scene where she shows the ring, “I got it.” How easy would it be for him, and Stella, to say, “Thorwald, leave her alone, the police are coming. Don’t kill her! We see you.” Instead he pulls back and leaves the lights off. Who does that? Again, Hitchcock doesn’t comment on it, but if you ask yourself, what would you have done in that situation? All the windows are open. If he knows he’s being seen, and the police are coming, he’s not going to do anything. Another indication: there’s no film in the camera, no willingness to intrude into the scene, because that means he’s visible to the scene, and this sort of one-way dialectic that is the premise of his relationship to the events, the premise of his relationship to Lisa, and the premise Hitchcock assumes we assume in our way of watching movies, are all tied together in the film. We see why he’s injured and the