“Most Frightening Ghouls”: Freud and Feminism in Rear Window

Alfred Hitchcock filmed that which was not meant to be seen, per se; his films deal with the injection of deeply embedded psychological anxieties into quotidian social matrices. Paradoxically, his Rear Window is a film about voyeurism, and as such the perpetuation of its narrative is precipitated upon its employment of the male gaze. On a cinematic level, the film’s preoccupation with “seeing” immediately mirrors the filmgoing experience. But on many levels, the problematic explorations of viewing, sex, and power in the film seem to bring that which “should” be repressed to the narrative’s forefront. Herein the Freudian dimensions of the film are at odds with its feminist assertions. This ambiguity and dissonance evoke notions of the uncanny that in turn give the film a reflexive and sexualized psychological power over the viewer.

In the film, Jefferies’ frame of vision becomes the audience’s on a quite literal level: the camera’s gaze invokes Jefferies’ viewpoint through wide shots and tracking sequences that follow his gaze across a convenient, compartmentalized tableau of neighborhood windows. This constructed surrogacy is most problematic when the viewer is informed of Jefferies’ psychosexual complexities, and how they might manifest themselves in acts of “seeing” that he shares with the viewer. To that end, his physical confinement and reliance on neighborly voyeurism for entertainment and intrigue is nothing short of masturbatory. A psychoanalytic reading of the film’s first act would suggest this, as his watching begins as a solitary and virtually shameful event. The cynical Stella reinforces this reading—she sees his voyeurism only as “trouble.” But Jefferies’ watching of particular neighbors—the buxom ballerina, the newlyweds consummating their marriage behind the drawn shade—also possesses an overtly sexualized dimension. It is a conscious visual invasion of domestic spaces that is defined by the fantastical and uncanny dimensions of what is not seen. If the “Hitchcockian blot” is a phallic agent that imbues the rest of the narrative with symbolic and multiplicitous meaning, then the tableau of the neighborhood is the blot writ large (Zizek, 90). The cutting off of heads by windowpanes, the closing of shades to hide sexual activity, the drawing of blinds to obscure suicidal acts—all of these acts of partial omission stand out in the once-open frame of vision, and thus lend the entire courtyard an air of uncanniness. The folly of the film’s establishing tableau is revealed—how could things have been so easily seen from one solitary gaze, and what is being omitted now instead? Herein lies the potential for uncertainty and, by extension, the possibility of sexualized stimulation.

In being forced to identify with Jefferies (the film’s protagonist and, by extension, the film’s primary agent of perspective), the audience is already implicated as well, perhaps by Stella but mostly by the camera itself. What is not shown by the omniscient (and yet perspectivally confining) framing only calls attention to the erotic potential of the scenes from which the viewer is also barred. The viewer is thus artificially conspiring in a literal manifestation of the male gaze. Zizek notes that Jefferies, from the comfort of his social domain, observes “fantasy figurations of what could happen to him and [Lisa],” introducing the sexual dimension to his looking through the impasse but also consciously drawing attention to the imaginary implications of this observance (Zizek, 92). However, only when Jefferies and Lisa can finally both engage in the former’s thinly veiled voyeurism can they make a genuine, sexually charged connection. Wherein Jefferies was once alone in transmuting his sexual impotence into his masturbatory viewing of his neighbors, Lisa also channels her sexual frustration into engaging with Jefferies through the realm of fantasy, suspicion, and the “uncanny” (Zizek, 90). Notably, this continued, albeit mutual, “deflection” of desire still constitutes an indirect relationship between the two lovers. Feminist literary theory suggests that males’ repressed desire for one another is transmuted through shared association with a female figure. In a metaphorical treatment of this concept, Jefferies can channel his sexual impotence towards Lisa through the decidedly phallic (and thus male-oriented) conduit of voyeurism—the realm of desire that only evidences his psychosexual repression.

In this sense, it is curious to view the characterization of Lisa through a feminist lens, in that this critical exploration might reveal how she both submits to and subverts the psychoanalytic structures in which the film engages. Initially, Lisa is no player in Jefferies’ erotic fantasies, but only a symbol of his repression that—logically enough—always returns. (Note her seemingly self-sufficient resolution after an argument to leave Jefferies forever, stating that he will not see her “for a long time...at least, not until tomorrow night.”) On this level, Lisa’s unwillingness to disengage from Jefferies—despite his distracted gaze—is merely a simplified show of her constancy. It also presents her in conversation with reductive stereotypes of the Hollywood leading lady. Her unabashed romantic pursuit of Jefferies lacks nuance; it paints her as the hyper-beauty who, in a keen disregard for the social or economic incongruity of their coupling, wants nothing more than to marry the schmuck in the wheelchair. Here Grace Kelly’s casting is highly reflexive; her status as Hollywood royalty, the epitome of mediated perfection, almost places her in the realm of the uncanny as the starlet is confusingly placed in the realm of a drab, quotidian apartment. To this end, it appears Lisa is destined to submit or, in her own mocking and euphemistic words, “take out a subscription to [Jefferies’] magazine.” Her initial investment in Thorwald’s behavior, after a period of justifiable doubt, constitutes this submission to Jefferies’ own sexually charged needs. Lisa must accept the fetishization, then, of the “watching” to begin to insert herself into Jefferies’ paradigm of desire. Their aforementioned collaboration in amateur sleuthing is not so much a sexual compromise as it is a feminist failure for Lisa to engage with Jefferies on her terms.

Rear Window is unique in that its Freudian complications are not inherently concerned with a perceived feminine threat (Lisa) to what Zizek calls the “maternal superego” (97). Thus, Lisa’s role in the film serves to complicate, not simply constitute, its psychoanalytic levels of meaning. Ironically, Lisa’s entrance into Jefferies’ framed, phallic fantasy world—the conduit of desire—seems to undermine her sovereignty, but here she triumphs. Lisa enters Thorwald’s apartment on her own. She at once exercises an impulse that is at once beyond Jefferies’ control and within his world of the uncanny. She climbs the walls of the apartment building, she crawls through Thorwald’s window; her actions are performative, penetrative, and unexpected in that she is now interacting in a realm that was once only fantastical, or the surface-world of the Freudian tableau. Her play-acting in Jefferies’ framed world thrusts her into the realm of the simulacral, which ironically heightens Jefferies’ awareness of the physical harm that might befall her in that her actions are making the world more and more real. Jefferies, here, must disengage from his relatively objective status of observer, and actively participate in the fantasy with Lisa. Her arrest and Thorwald’s entrance into Jefferies’ apartment signifies this seepage of the Freudian realm into empirical reality, to the point where Jefferies’ own life is at stake. Only the self-sufficient actions of a feminist agent could catalyze this overlap; that is, catalyze Thorwald’s gaze matching to that of Jefferies’ (the viewer’s), and thus realize—make real—Jefferies’ desire (Zizek, 92).

If Lisa’s shattering of Freudian constructs is a feminist assertion of sexual and personal authority, then all of Rear Window must be reinterpreted by virtue of this new “blot” on the film’s once-solid structural and formal foundations. Lisa’s subjugation, in line with Jefferies’ self-doubt and repression, is at odds with her eventual triumph. The ambiguity that arises from these conflicts of meaning evokes the nature of the Hitchcockian blot itself: a “‘pure’ signifier without signified” (Zizek, 88). If these two critical approaches to the film are fundamentally at odds, this clash only reinforces the affective power of the uncanny. The “meaning”—that is, the sexual excitement and the suspenseful terror—of the film is gleaned from the ambiguity and doubt that exists between these critical poles. The literal, perspectival gaze and the critical gazes with which Hitchcock provides his audience is an assertion of his power to objectify his audience. Indeed, he may be the one true authority in that he is the agent outside the film’s varying layers of constructed reality.

What does it mean, then, to be objectified by Hitchcock himself? In establishing a power dynamic over the viewer, Hitchcock imbues the picture with a psychosexual dimension that transcends the narrative’s Freudian overtones. Is to watch the film to submit to an act of sexual aggression against oneself? The “double mirror play,” the infinitely reflexive structure of the repressed and its return in oblique and symbolically weighty modes, may manifest here in the form of circular, autoerotic impulse (Zizek, 90). If the viewer can transpose the gaze inward, then the horror is not only internal to the Hitchockian hero but also internal to that even further removed voyeuristic agent—the viewer—who cannot escape fulfilling the essence of his or her own declarative, definitive labeling of a voyeur as such. If the blot is on the viewer, then, “hereness” and “thereness” are actualized, realized, and gazed upon in radically new and subversive ways.