5 - Eternal Vigilance in Rear Window

Summary

The price of democracy is eternal vigilance.

(William T. Lhaman, Deliberate Speed)

One disconcerting aspect of Hollywood's film-making system is the illusory distance it offers from contemporary politics; the manufacture of escapist entertainment isolates fantasy from its origins in real-life anxiety. Alfred Hitchcock's success as a Hollywood film maker comes from making exciting the subliminal connection between fantasy and reality. He is widely thought to divert audiences with fictions of vicarious experiences and is hardly appreciated for gauging the social/moral temper of his times (although his most popular films are credited with influencing the intellectual atmosphere). Social themes do appear in Hitchcock's movies, but the overt political intrigue in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, 1956) or Notorious (1946) or The Wrong Man (1956) or Torn Curtain (1966), while leading scholars to analyze fascinating psychological subtext, still cloaks the very important political meaning that lies beneath the surface of his work and that becomes more clearly visible in the films of the subsequent generation of film makers Hitchcock inspired.

“Did you kill him because he liked you? Just because he liked you?” screams an outraged neighbor after her pet's death, a murder no one owns up to in Rear Window. This key moment cuts to the heart of everyday American politics. It is, most importantly, a stunning accusation of the alienation of postwar society. Witnessing it, the film's protagonist L. B. Jefferies (James Stewart), a photo journalist recuperating from a broken leg, and his fiancée Lisa (Grace Kelly) drop their insouciant banter and turn rigid with shame.