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PROFESSOR: My intention tonight is primarily
to provide you with some suggestions, framings
that will help in your viewing of these two films.
And we'll also, at the same time,
reinforce and extend some of the things
I was saying this afternoon about Hitchcock's work
more generally.
And about the recurring preoccupations,
themes, obsessions, strategies that
are characteristic of his work.
And I want to begin by adding one note to what I
was saying this afternoon.
You remember I began this afternoon by talking about
the relationship between Hitchcock and what I call
the "Genius of the System"-- borrowing on that famous
passage from Andre Bazin, who said Hollywood is very
interesting, and there are interesting directors,
but why don't we talk about the genius of the system--
the way the system itself encourages or enables complex
forms of narrative.
And we've already talked several times earlier
in the course about this topic.
But there's another way in which one
can think about this issue with regard to Hitchcock.
And I think it's helpful in clarifying,
so I want to mention it again.
One way to think about Hitchcock is
to think of the Hitchcock film as a kind of genre unto itself.
Right?
The Hitchcock.
Just like the Western, or the screwball comedy.
Broadly, Hitchcock belongs to the broad category
of what might be-- well, of two categories-- the horror film--
although, he's a strange director of horror.
He certainly is incredibly influential.
In fact, when he made Psycho, he publicly announced,
"This is my first horror film."
Even though there are elements of horror earlier.
And it made something of a publicity splash
when he said that.
So one way to understand Hitchcock
is to think of him as participating
in at least two categories of genre or subgenre
that are more and more widespread than Hitchcock's
work itself.
And we might call that the horror film and the mystery
film.
And even that's a bit of an oversimplification,
because within the category of mystery,
you can have different sort of subcategories.
One of which is the sort of romantic adventure of the sort
that North by Northwest.
The chase film starring Cary Grant
that Hitchcock made that ends with characters
climbing across the face of Mount Rushmore.
So that's one sort of action-adventure version
of a mystery story that Hitchcock makes.
Another version-- other versions are examples of the films
that we're seeing tonight.
But my point is that although one could fit Hitchcock's film
into some sort of larger category-- of mystery
or mystery and adventure, something of that kind--
it's also the case that once you begin to look closely
at Hitchcock's films, you can see
that there's such a profound, almost obsessional coherence
in them.
They keep returning again and again to those dominant themes
I talked about this afternoon.
That one can see that they, in some sense,
constitute a kind of category of their own.
If we think of-- so if we think of the Hitchcock
as a kind of genre, even within that category
we can discover immense variation.
So that Hitchcock's example itself becomes
a kind of crystallized, or distilled example
of the principle I've been talking about all semester
concerning the way in which a system like the Hollywood
system could engender variation, even as it is also
committed to giving its audience something that seems familiar,
that they recognize, that they're willing to attend
to week after week after week.
I think the primary point is this-- in a system in which you
have any habitual, a regular, a daily, or a weekly relationship
to the material, there have to be elements of familiarity,
of repetition.
Of a return to shared subjects and themes.
Or you wouldn't do it.
You would find it intolerable every time
you made what was a routine or habitual connection to a text,
if what it gave you was a completely new experience which
forced you in some sense to begin at the beginning
to figure everything out for your--
you would find that you would resist such an experience.
It's one thing to go to a great overwhelming theatrical
experience once or twice a year, or once or twice a month.
It's quite another thing to try to watch King Lear every day,
or even every week.
So part of the difference has to do
with the need to what it means to have a habitual, rather
than an occasional, connection to the artwork.
And one of the fundamental-- well,
maybe the most important thing about the Hollywood studio
film, and later the most important thing
about American television narrative forms,
is the is the intimate, regular, routinized connection
that the viewer has with the material.
And in the case of Hitchcock, what we can say
is, really from the very beginning
of his work to the end, there are these fundamental,
emotional, and strategic, or technical coherences,
resemblances, that made virtually every Hitchcock
film a kind of commentary on an earlier one.
And the two films you are seeing tonight
are a particularly rich example of this.
So I hope you'll think hard about the way in which they
are both profoundly different from each other,
and also at the same time, strangely, mysteriously,
profoundly similar.
How they circle back on the same kinds of obsessions
and the same kinds of problems.
And part of our pleasure in looking at the two films
is the simultaneous recognition of the difference
and similarity.
Well, that is an example in small compass of the larger
principle of popular aesthetics that I was saying needs
to apply to the way in which we understand the audience's
relation to the classic Hollywood film.
So as you're watching these two films and thinking about them,
think both about resemblances and differences.
And you'll get some sense of how much remarkable variation is
possible within what remains certain familiar conventions,
expectations-- not only about the content of the text.
But also about the way the text is organized,
about its formal features.
So what I'd like to do then is say
a couple of introductory things about each of the films you're
going to see.
And if I'm able to keep the time right,
maybe we'll pause for one clip.
Maybe we won't, depending on how concise
I'm able to be in my arguments.
You'll notice that Shadow of a Doubt and Rear Window
are 11 years apart.
And I think that's significant because one
of the most interesting ways to think
about comparing the two films is to think
about the way in which Rear Window seizes on many
of the preoccupations and themes that
are at the center of Shadow of a Doubt.
But deals with them in ways that one might say
are even more disturbing and profound,
that press more deeply into the implications that are mobilized
in the earlier film.
And maybe that sounds too general
and abstract and mysterious.
Let me be specific about what I mean.
One example is-- one of the most interesting aspects of Shadow
of a Doubt, if you look down to my next to the last item,
is what I call the subplot.
And the subplot in Shadow of a Doubt
involves essentially a kind of subsidiary story about two
very ineffectual characters.
In this subplot, the husband of the family
has a kind of-- his main preoccupation
when he's not working at his bank-- is
he has an ongoing conversation and sort of reading group
with his friend, played by Hume Cronyn.
Also as a diminutive man, also a man who seems to
lack masculine force.
He's short, he's not aggressive.
And they spend their time reading murder mysteries.
And they spend their time trying to devise the perfect murder.
So part of what's funny about this,
but also macabre in its own way, is
that while these two sort of capon
like older men-- who stand for a kind of impotent maturity,
a kind of useless, unattractive maturity--
they spend their time and their diversion
is to try to invent or imagine murders and mayhem.
When in fact a real murderer is living
at the heart of the family.
And Young Charlie herself is actually in danger,
even though her father and and no one around her in the world
understands that that's the case.
Although the viewer comes to understand it fairly early.
And even Young Charlie comes to a recognition of it
before the film is over.
So in this subplot, what's going on
is we have two sort of characters
playing at the diversion of murder,
and finding stories about murder a kind of escape.
And in fact, one of them is actually
trying to devise the way to kill someone and get away with it.
And what we're supposed to feel is
that this subplot is a reminder to us about a number of things.
But most disturbingly and subversively,
it should be a reminder to the audience
of what the audience is doing sitting and watching
Hitchcock's film.
Because the equivalent of the audience in the movie
is-- one equivalent of the audience in the movie
are these two sort of foolish people
who, immersed in, and in some degree surrounded
by evil and authentic danger are living out
their silly diversions by reading silly magazines
about murder stories.
So it's a variation on Hitchcock's obsession,
or deep, deep recurring interest in the space of entertainment.
And what it means to want to go to entertainments.
And there's a certain sense in which every single Hitchcock
film enables or is grounded upon this experience of sitting
in the dark-- actually what sort of equivalent
to what the Jimmy Stewart character does
in Rear Window-- sitting in the dark, anonymous peeping
watching the lives of other people.
And the idea is not only that you're anonymous,
but in some sense there's something sort
of illicit about it.
As if in the process of doing it,
you're indulging what are base desires
or at least not totally respectable impulses.
But you're doing it in a space of comparative safety
and a place of anonymity.
So the subplot in Shadow of a Doubt, in a certain sense,
raises self conscious questions about the nature
of the entertainment that we ourselves
are watching as audiences for the film.
All right?
And it's clearly a major dimension of Shadow of a Doubt.
It's one of the things that make Shadow of a Doubt a rich movie.
There's a kind of cunning, cynical complexity in it
that careless viewers, or very superficial viewers
won't pick up on.
And it's really possible, I could really imagine,
that they were viewers who came away from Shadow
of a Doubt fully satisfied.
Thinking, oh yes, evil has been purged.
What a nice mystery story!
Never fully picking up on the dramatized elements
of the text, which put in question
the ease with which we embrace these forms of entertainment,
the ease with which we accept murder and mayhem
as a form of diversion.
And some of the implications of that for human nature
and for our ideas of entertainment itself.
So that moment when in Strangers on the Train
when the merry-go-round goes mad and becomes
an instrument of terror and murder
is another example of Hitchcock's interest
in the complexity and problematic nature
of our connection to what we call entertainment.
And one of the things you can see
when you shift to Rear Window which
you can see how these preoccupations have
been distilled and clarified.
Because the entire field becomes a meditation
on the nature of our voyeuristic impulses.
The entire film becomes a story about seeing and not
being seen, about following-- about shadowing people,
about hidden impulses or potential doubles
of our own respectable nature.
And the way in which Rear Window is
self-reflexive or self-conscious is much more systematic
and much more deeply embedded in the experience
of watching the film than was the case
with Shadow of a Doubt.
The same theme, the same self-consciousness,
the same awareness of the problematic nature
of entertainment, but now much more
systematically and fully integrated
into the formal and thematic nature of the text.
So I love Shadow of a Doubt.
In many ways it's one of my favorite Hitchcocks.
But it's early Hitchcock, and you
can feel the much greater rigor with Hitchcock
has begun to seize on the implications
of his own problematic relation to his material.
And his audience's compromised, complicit relationship
to the material that Hitchcock mobilizes in his film.
So Rear Window was more systematic in some sense,
more coherently conscious of this element of its meaning.
It's almost as if by the time we get
to the mature films of the '50s and beyond-- the period
between, let's say, 1951 in the early '60s, when Hitchcock did
all of his most powerful work-- it's almost as if we can say
that the films of this era have a kind of double significance.
That all of these films-- all the films
after Shadow of a Doubt are partly about filmmaking.
They're partly self-conscious attempts
to be meditations on the nature of movies.
And it's almost as if there's a kind of separate story,
a separate plot.
There's the traditional kind of mystery story
that, is characteristic of many films.
But then there's this meta story, this separate story.
It's the story of the filming.
The story of the making of the film.
The story or the drama of watching--
the drama of the watching, we might call it.
The literary version of this would
be the drama of the telling.
Right?
There are literary-- if you think
of a novel like-- a novella like Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
I think I've mentioned this before in the class
because it's such a clear example.
But the story of Heart of Darkness is really two stories.
It's the story of the narrator's trip up the Congo River
when he was a young man.
But it's even more of the story of his struggles
to tell the story 20 years later.
And when you read Heart of Darkness, naive readers
hate it, can't figure out why it's taking so long.
And why it's taking the narrator so long to get to the point.
But of course, the story is not primarily
even about the adventure he's trying to talk about.
It's about the struggle to tell the adventure.
So that there's a kind of double plot in that novella
as there is in a lot of great modernist fiction.
As there is in another way in a lot
of great modernist paintings, where you are aware
not only of the subject of the painting, but of the materials
that go into the making of the painting.
I'm thinking of the great impressionist and
post-impressionist painters, right?
Or of the painters who would paint--
like Monet who would paint 50 versions of a haystack
in different lights.
Or 32 versions of Rouen Cathedral in different lights
at different times of the day.
Why?
Well, one of the reasons is, he's
trying to say that reality is not stable.
That Rouen Cathedral changes depending
upon the light, depending upon the weather,
depending upon my emotion when I look at it, right?
In other words, reality is much more complicated.
And so that when we look at the Rouen Cathedral paintings,
we're aware of paint.
We're aware not just of the fact that a cathedral
is being represented.
We're aware of the process whereby
Monet went through the terrific labor of capturing the image.
And you can see there's a lot of examples even on painting
of the thickness of the paint.
When you look at Monet's paintings,
very often the paint is so thick that if you see in reality
you want to reach out and touch it.
So you're aware of the materials that go in-- again,
another kind of self-consciousness
or self-reflexiveness.
Well, Hitchcock belongs in that tradition, I think.
And a great many of his mature films have this double plot.
Right?
The second plot is what we might call
the drama of the watching, the drama of watching.
And Rear Window was a particularly austere ingredient
instance of this topic.
Well, let me start over again with Shadow of a Doubt,
set the context.
It's World War II was going on.
I already mentioned that Hitchcock had already
felt ambivalent about leaving England
at the end of the 1930s.
And now, by 1943, this anxiety-- because the war was on,
England was being attacked.
Hitchcock felt ambivalence about that.
His mother was tremendously ill, he kept receiving information.
And she couldn't get back to England
because the war was going on.
You couldn't travel there.
And it was said that he was afflicted
by a kind of a really deep guilt and unhappiness
during the filming of Shadow of a Doubt.
And during the filming of Shadow of a Doubt, his mother died.
Now there are some film critics who
say, Oh well, the port-- well there's
one critic who writes that the portrait of the mother
in Shadow of a Doubt is Hitchcock's
last benign portrait of a mother.
But if this is a benign portrait,
I'm very nervous about what is a mean portrait.
And it's a very bad mistake.
I mean, it can't be that Hitchcock
was trying to memorialize his mother in the primary character
in this film.
Because as you'll see, she's a magnificent airhead.
The only dumber woman in film that I know
is Annabelle Lee in The General, who
sweeps out the engine while they're
trying to escape their enemies.
And as you'll see, she's a figure--
she's a benign figure in the sense
that she has not a mean bone in her body.
But she's really a dullard.
She's really silly.
And she silly in ways the film is aware of.
But we'll come back to that.
So there are elements in the film of autobiography,
but there are skewed by Hitchcock's
own sour, cynical, disturbed nature.
And this portrait of a family is very far
from being a celebratory portrait,
as will say in a moment.
So Hitchcock's in exile.
He's feeling a bit sour, he's feeling alienated.
So he makes a film in which-- really his first film, or one
of his first films-- in which an American family is
at the very center of the story, right?
But he treats this family with an odd kind of comic irony
or distance that careful viewers immediately see
and lazy viewers might not see.
But the careful viewers definitely see.
And one way to pick up on how subversive
his portrait of the family is, is
to compare him to his great contemporary Frank Capra.
We've seen a Capra film already, of course, that standard
and establishing screwball comedy.
But the more characteristic Capra films--
all of these kinds of film were also coming out
at the same time-- are even more fundamentally
celebrations of American life.
And maybe the quintessential instances of this as a film,
that anyone who lives in the United States
for a few months around Christmas time
becomes sick of, what's the film?
Starring Jimmy Stewart, who was also
the star of one of tonight's Hitchcock film, Rear Window.
What's the film?
It's a Wonderful Life, yes.
And in fact the title tells--
Capra-- although there is a dark side to Capra, too.
But Capra's the great American sentimental and optimist.
He celebrates small town virtues, celebrates--
and the villains in Capra's films
are Big Business and people who are
hostile to the values of small town America.
Hitchcock-- and one way of understanding what Hitchcock
is doing in Shadow-- so I feel like it's
A Wonderful Life-- also, incidentally, these films
often star Jimmy Stewart-- James Stewart.
But when Hitchcock uses James Stewart,
this upstanding, perfect example of middle American decency
and American honesty is turned into a much more
fearful, damaged, impotent sometimes sexually
perverted or implicitly sexually damaged adult.
And it was Hitchcock's version of Jimmy-- the Jimmy Stewart
that Hitchcock draws out is a much more disturbed and damaged
character.
And part of what makes Stewart's performances in Hitchcock's
films so powerful-- there's some people
say Hitchcock and Stewart's collaboration
was one of the great collaborations
between a director and an actor in the history of movies.
And you could see one great example of it in Rear Window.
But the primary thing to recognize
is that what Hitchcock is doing something so subversive,
because Jimmy Stewart was already
a kind of American icon.
He stood when he-- except in Hitchcock's films--
he stood for a form of American decency and openness
and honesty and sincerity, goodness and even heroism.
Which Hitchcock undermines in all kinds of-- I don't mean
that he makes Jimmy Stewart an evil character, he doesn't!
And he him his outwardly heroic lineaments.
But then we discover that there are things wrong with him,
as you'll see in Rear Window.
And he does this again in Vertigo,
an even more dramatic example of Jimmy Stewart playing
an impaired or a damaged character.
In Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart has
one leg that's broken, right?
In a cast for all the film.
As you'll see.
At the very end of the film-- one of the outcomes of the film
is what-- in the denouement-- we see Jimmy Stewart
after the action has occurred and now he has two broken legs.
So he's back where he was in the beginning.
He's even more damaged, and impaired,
and immobilized than he was before!
And we'll come back to this, because there's
something very disturbing about this ending in a certain way.
Even though it purports to be a kind of survival tale
and in that sense, a kind of happy ending.
But the important point for the moment
is that Hitchcock was certainly fully aware of the fact
that what he was doing was juxtaposing
his much more sour, unsentimental, even
cynical vision of American life against Capra's more
sentimental one, right?
So it's as if he's against Capra.
Or he's against Capricorn.
The corniness.
Get the pun?
I'm stealing it, I'm stealing it.
But the corniness, the sentimentality
of a characteristic Capra film.
And the characteristic attitude in the Capra film
towards small town American life.
And one of the ways to recognize this
is to recognize a kind of recurring trope of his
that I've mentioned before.
Let's show it, Kristen.
So here is the opening Shadow of a Doubt.
I'm giving you a chance to watch it and then
savor it the second time when you
see it again, in 20 minutes, half an hour or so.
And it dramatizes a scene, a version of which
occurs in many Hitchcock films.
Watch what happens.
In which the effect of the opening
is in some sense to implicate the viewer
right at the beginning in an act of voyeurism.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
PROFESSOR: See?
A benign scene.
A benign cityscape.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
PROFESSOR: We go up to the window.
In Psycho, it's even more dramatic.
The film actually crawls under a window shade
that's almost all the way down.
But you see what the camera did?
[KNOCK ON THE DOOR]
CHARLIE: Come in.
PROFESSOR: OK, stop.
When we first see Young Charlie in the film many,
many scenes later, what we've just
looked at will be replicated, shot by shot.
It's an example of what I call rhyming scenes.
And I'll come back to that in a moment.
So behind any door or window is potential evil.
And the way that we go out in the street,
that then the camera looks up at a window,
then it goes implicitly through the window.
And as I say, in some Hitchcock films,
the slithering through the window
is actually even more explicit.
And you actually feel that the camera has slid in,
as if it's a kind of unwelcome and unobserved witness
to the event.
And the implication is that you are watching something
that you shouldn't be watching, or that you
have access to worlds that normally you would never
have access to.
So behind any door window in Hitchcock's world
can be evil, danger, fright.
An American town, an American family.
I've already mentioned that one of the things that's
going on in this film is a portrait of an American family
that has a kind of ironic undercutting built into it.
We can feel almost from the very beginning
when we first go to Santa Rosa.
Our first shots of Santa Rosa-- which
will occur shortly after the scene you've just seen.
You'll see, there will be a more elaborated scene in which we
learn a little bit more about Uncle Charlie,
and then we shift to Santa Rosa.
And the very opening scene in Santa Rosa
shows a sort of fat, jolly policeman in bright sunlight
directing traffic.
As if nothing could be more wonderful than the job
of directing traffic in a small American town
in sunny California.
What could be more noble?
But there's something excessive about it.
I mean, you almost feel, even before you fully
realize that what the film is going to be doing,
you sort of feel that this is too much.
And this is characteristic of Hitchcock as well.
Almost as if there's an excess of brightness
and an excessive jolliness.
As if it's more than we could possibly believe.
And then, as the family's nature begins to unfold to us,
what we begin to see is these children are horrible,
insipid children.
They're hardly admirable.
The daughter's a nasty little bitch
who is more interested in reading her books
that in speaking civilly to her parents.
Not long Charlie, but Charlie's younger sister.
There are three children the family.
Charlie's the oldest, right?
And then, she has a sister and a younger brother.
And the younger brother and the sister
are insipid, nasty little children.
The boy when we see him is constantly
saying, what-- when he first sees Uncle Charlie,
he says, "What have you got?
What present have you gotten for me?"
And if we don't think that the children are very attractive,
wait till we look more closely at the fact the parents.
I've already mentioned the father,
who spends most of his most of his time
with Hume Cronyn trying to talk about ridiculous diversions
in murder mysteries.
Meanwhile, his family is in danger around him
and he doesn't have any sense of it.
But the wife, as I've mentioned also,
comes across as one of the supreme airheads
in American movies.
There's a certain moment when Uncle Charlie is
under suspicion, so some FBI agents
come to town in disguise.
And they suspect him but they don't have evidence yet.
So they claim they're from a magazine,
and they come into the family and they say,
"What we want to do is we want to do
a story about a typical American family."
And the mother of the family is very proud.
"Oh, isn't it nice to be a typical representative American
family?"
Well, who would want to be the mean, right?
We're the mean, we're the norm, right?
We are the typical-- but she loves this idea.
And then, not only does she love the idea,
she's really rather a silly person.
So at one point when they're getting
ready to sort of-- I don't know whether they're getting
ready to do still photography in the house--
she insists on completing her cooking
because she wants to finish the pie before the photographer
gets there.
As if completing her cooking has something
to do with what the photographer would find.
And you find repeatedly that she's kind of a little askew.
She certainly has no possible intimation
that her brother is a murderer and in fact
a cynical nihilist that has no respect for anything in life.
And she never learns any better, and that's
part of what makes the film so disturbing.
So what happens in the course of the film essentially
is that this American family is systematically
shown to be sort of silly and foolish,
banal in its ordinariness.
Hardly something that we might fully-- I
don't mean to say that we come away in horror thinking, Oh!
How disgusting this family is!
Just that we think how ordinary, banal, silly, foolish it is.
One of the ways I've talked already
about the way in which Hitchcock is obsessed by doublings.
And by the idea of a self divided.
And one of his richest treatments of that theme
is in the treatment of Uncle Charlie and Young Charlie.
And you'll see how explicit the film is about that.
One of the ways it's explicit about it
is that Hitchcock uses particular visual strategies
to reinforce the connection.
And I've already mentioned the rhyming scene in that opening
scene.
Watch it, because it's quite exciting.
Later, in our first introduction to Young Charlie,
the camera behaves identically to the way
it behaved when we saw Uncle Charlie.
And so even before Uncle Charlie has entered the story,
even before we're fully aware of what
the relationship between Uncle Charlie and Young Charlie is,
the camera has told us that they are linked.
And we can say then that in the doubling
Young Charlie represents a kind of innocence
and part of her night-- one way to understand
the film is to see it as a Bildungsroman,
as a growing up, as an initiation story in which Young
Charlie learns something about the evil
and difficulty of the world.
She has a naive and simplified view of the world,
and before she's done, she comes face
to face, not just with murder, but with the possibility
of murder.
And in fact, Uncle Charlie actually tries to murder her,
because he realizes she knows the truth about him.
So she's in danger for part of the film,
and knows she's in danger.
And part of the issue is that she can't really talk about it.
Why not?
Well, it's her uncle!
Have you ever heard this kind of thing?
There are actually critics who say that although that it's
never made explicit in the film, that one of the ways
to understand the film, and at least in the subtextual way
is to think about the relation between Uncle Charlie and Young
Charlie as that between the sort of perverted uncle man who
manhandles his young niece when his family isn't watching,
right?
And there actually is in the film what
is a scene sometimes called a betrothal scene in which we see
Young Charlie come down a staircase,
like a traditional bride down a staircase,
and Uncle Charlie gives her a ring.
So that's the film does insinu-- and that's really perverted.
The film doesn't actually say anything sexual is going on
between uncle and niece.
That's not-- but there are these suggestions
of illicit or disturbing connections
that are part of the subtext with which we experience
the film and with which we recognize
the tangled, disturbing quality of the connection between Young
Charlie and her uncle.
So the naivete on Young Charlie's part
is her failure to understand or to even to
be able to imagine the extent of evil and duplicity
in the world.
And we could say that what happens
as she comes to recognize what Uncle Charlie really is,
and what Uncle Charlie really stands for,
she is educated into the ways of the world.
But it is in many ways a very terrible and very serious
initiation.
And one of the climactic instances of this
occurs toward the end of the film
when Young Charlie and her uncle meet together
in a bar called the-- think it's called the Till Two because it
closes at 2:00, which is very late.
In the universe of the film, 2:00 AM
is very late in Santa Rosa, California.
They meet in this place, and this
is where Uncle Charlie realizes he
can no longer hide the truth.
And he talks openly to Young Charlie,
and he says at one point this.
"We're old friends, Charlie.
More than that, we're like twins.
You said so yourself.
You think you're the clever little girl who
knows something.
There's so much you don't know, so much.
You're just an ordinary little girl living
in an ordinary little town--"
You hear the contempt for ordinary there?
Hitchcock shares some of this, even though his villain
is saying it, right?
"You go through your ordinary little day at night
and you sleep your untroubled, ordinary little sleep, filled
with peaceful, stupid dreams.
You live in a dream--"
This is a direct quotation.
"You live in a dream.
You're a sleepwalker.
Blind.
How do you know what the world is like?
Do you know the world is a foul sty?
Do know that if you rip the fronts off houses
you'd find swine?
The world's a hell.
What does it matter what happens in it?"
Now what an extreme nihilistic statement.
That's what Uncle Charlie stands for.
That's the full ugliness and disturbance
that Young Charlie-- and, of course,
a murder is speaking to her.
This is also implicitly a confession to her.
"Yes, I have killed people."
So it's a tremendously disturbing moment in the film,
and it represents in a certain way
Young Charlie's coming of age.
But the irony, or one tremendous irony of this tale,
of this story, is that when we get to the end of the film,
there is a profound kind of ambiguity.
Yes, the evil has been purged.
I won't go into the details of the plot
so as not to spoil your experience of the film,
but Uncle Charlie is eliminated from the scene in a--
and Young Charlie survives.
It's a kind of reassuring or happy ending.
But what undercuts it?
As all, remember all, of Hitchcock's endings
are undercut, they're never really happy.
They're never really reassuring.
They go through the motions.
They're conventionally reassuring, but they're not.
The moral ambiguity on which this film ends
is maybe it's most disturbing aspect.
Because what it says-- because Young Charlie never
tells her mother, never tells her father,
never reveals to the community that Uncle Charlie
was this evil figure, was the Merry Widow murder.
Why not?
Well, maybe she sparing her mother.
Uncle Charlie's no longer there, what's the difference?
There's no discussion of this.
But what does it mean?
It means that when the film is over,
the idea that evil might lurk at the heart
of the American family remains a reality
that no one has acknowledged.
In other words, it's as if the implications of the story
are denied bye Charlie's silence.
And we're left in the situation at the end
of the film in which the implications
or meaning of Uncle Charlie's life has been suppressed.
And therefore, the significance of his pervasive nihilism
and of what it means that such nihilism could exist
at the heart of a typical American family
is never acknowledged or known by anyone inside the film.
Even though it's a disturbing knowledge
that we take away from the film.
So to conclude on this film, one of the things
to think about as you're watching the film
is how remarkably Hitchcock is able to give us
what might be thought in many ways to be,
and what is in many ways, a light entertainment.
A humorous and very well put together mystery story
about an American family full of the wit and scene by scene
richness and complexity.
A film that even naive film goers can enjoy fully.
And yet the full implications of it,
the moral ambiguity with which the film ends,
and the moral ambiguity that's a really implicit all
the way through the film, the sense of the ominous
and the sense of disturbance remains with the viewer
after the film is over.
It's a characteristic way for Hitchcock to end films.
Rear Window, as I've suggested, is
an even more rigorous exploration
of some of Hitchcock's deepest preoccupations and obsessions.
Let me remind you to really savor
the opening scene of the film.
It starts under the titles, and you get the title sequence,
and onto the title-- it's a sequence that lasts
three or almost four minutes.
And it's completely wordless.
There is no dialogue.
Watch how much what happens.
It's a complicated moment in a certain way.
But if you are attentive to it, you can see what's happening.
Essentially, what we see the camera do-- first,
we see the blinds go up on two open windows.
And then we realize that they're open windows,
they're encasement windows that are open unscreened.
And after the blinds-- the camera is stable,
it doesn't move-- three separate blinds go up one time.
They reveal the other side of an apartment
complex being seen through the window of another apartment.
And then, what we see-- the camera then goes on and sort
of elaborate journey.
You're caught in the camera's gaze, as a viewer.
Once the shades go up, then the camera begins to move.
It moves toward the window, then it moves out the window,
and then it looks down and it does
a kind of circuit of the-- essentially,
it shows you what can be seen from this window.
It does a kind of circuit of the physical spaces that
are open it if it looked at this world from this window.
And you see it might make a kind of circle,
it's not a 360 degree turn but it's more than 180.
The camera turns like this, it pans, it turns around,
and then it comes back into the room.
And when it comes back into the room-- it goes out of the room
and it looks around, and then it comes back into the room,
through the same windows, backs up further,
and then you see Jimmy Stewart lying
there, sweating in the heat.
The camera then looks up a wall at a thermometer,
and you see the thermometer is hovering
in the mid 90s someplace, explaining why Jimmy Stewart is
sweating so much.
But then, the camera moves outside again
and does another circle of the space that you just looked at.
It's almost as if it wants you to look at a second time,
to remind you of the space of the action in the film.
And of course, we don't fully realize it at the time,
but this is a rehearsal for the whole movie,
because we are going to be confined in exactly
this way for the entire film.
We're never going to get out of this room.
Everything we see will be seen through this window.
Then the camera come pulls back in again,
we see Jimmy Stewart again-- so it's
almost as if that opening sequence does
the same thing twice.
What it mostly does, of course, is trap the viewer
in an act of voyeurism.
It traps the viewer completely in an act of spying.
And then, almost the very first words of the film, the camera
pulls back, it looks at a few items
to tell us a little more about the fact
that Jimmy Stewart is a photographer who
works for a magazine, who was injured taking
one of his action photos.
He can't wait to till he's out of his cast,
but he has another week to go and he's going stir crazy.
And then he has a conversation on the telephone
with his editor.
And at the same time engages in various acts of voyeurism,
including especially a young woman
who is scantily clad across the courtyard in her room
wearing shorts and a very revealing brassiere
doing sort of exercises and so forth while she's
eating her breakfast.
And you see the Jimmy Stewart character voyeuristically
savoring her as he's talking to his friend.
And then he hangs up the phone, a knock comes on the door,
a woman enters.
It's his cleaning lady played by the great actress--
what's her name?-- Thelma Ritter.
And Thelma's almost first words are,
"We've become a nation of peeping Toms."
And I mention this just to show you
how aware the film is, how much the film wants
us to be aware of the fact, that voyeurism is one
of its deep subjects, right?
Why do we have this desire to watch the illicit?
What is it about us that wants to make
us sort of look through key holes and peep at people
and watch the intimate lives of people?
So they saw the opening scene is a scene that
dramatizes the confinement and the voyeurism that
are at the very heart of what the movie is about.
We can say that the whole essay, the whole film in some sense,
is a kind of essay on seeing.
And in that three or four minute sequence
in the beginning without dialogue,
the camera is the star, in a certain sense.
We become aware of the camera, as Hitchcock
wants us to be, in a way we would never
be in another kind of film.
There are other forms of elegance in the film.
And I hope you'll watch the way the camera behaves,
because it's a marvel of complexity and intelligence.
But there's another way in which there's
an elegance of structure in the film.
As the camera in the very beginning
makes its tour of the building, what
begins to emerge in a very elementary way at first,
and then as the film precedes becomes more fleshed out,
is that there are three or four basic stories about people
who live in the apartments that Jimmy Stewart is looking into.
And each of them tells a separate kind of story.
There's a Miss Lonely Heart story
about a woman who was pining for a boyfriend
and who feels very lonely and maybe toying
with the idea of suicide.
Then there's a story about a composer who's
having trouble with his work.
They're a series of sort of subplots, mostly trivial ones.
Except for the primary one-- what's the primary one?
A murder may have been committed in one of the apartments
to Jimmy Stewart has been prying into.
And he begins to investigate the murder
and that puts him in danger himself.
And the people involved with him, including his girlfriend
Grace Kelly, get involved in the danger
as well because he's a immobile.
And Grace has to be the one who walks across the way,
and does--
So the elegance of the structure of the film
has partly to do with the way in which these subplots work
themselves out.
And at the end of the film, each of these little subplots
that we'd seen being played out in these different apartments--
only watching them through the windows of the apartments--
each of them is resolved in some way.
And I want to suggest that their resolution, while from one
angle is very satisfying-- there's a kind of elegance
of structure.
We're very satisfied by this sense of completion.
But at the same time, I think the very fact
that these stories are all tied up
in such neat knots makes us feel that there's something
a little too neat, a little too perfect about it.
In other words, the very perfection
with which these subplots are tied up at the end
suggests a kind of excess that Hitchcock
wants us to be suspicious of.
As if of this is just too perfect.
And of course, there are other ways
in which the ending of this film is deeply ambiguous.
And I'll come back to that in a moment.
I also ought to mention the way it
which, in a quiet, subtle way, this film is
an exploration of both class and gender issues.
Because there's a kind of little sort of contest going on.
Grace Kelly, who's this elegant upper class
woman who gets her clothes at the fanciest fashion stores
and has food catered from the fanciest restaurants
in the city and who reads magazines like Vogue
and so forth-- she stands for sort of moneyed elegance.
And there's a kind of tension between them.
She wants to marry Jimmy Stewart and Jimmy Stewart's resisting.
One reason is that he doesn't belonged to her class.
He's more of a working class type, right?
He's a down to earth sort of guy,
and he's worried about that.
And he's also nervous because like many American males,
especially in the movies, he's nervous about being entrapped
by marriage, as if he isn't already entrapped
in all kinds of ways.
And in an odd kind of way, we could
say that the Thorwald marriage-- that's
the name of the murderer and the wife
he supposedly murders and chops up, at least that's
what Jimmy Stewart comes to suspect.
We could say that the Thorwald marriage
is a kind of double of the marriage
that the Jimmy Stewart character fears he will have.
That his resistance to Grace Kelly
is partly a class resistance.
He feels uneasy around this aristocratic woman
because her tastes seemed to him banal and trivial.
In any case, they seem to him to involve values and commitments
that are at odds with a sort of rough
and tumble life of a traveling photographer who
goes to war zones and other dangerous places.
But that's his image of himself.
So his resistance to her is partly a desire
to maintain his freedom, right?
And it's partly a class issue.
So that both issues of class and gender are involved.
The gender issue has to do with how men and women, especially
in the stereotyped way of the '50s and '60s,
regarded the question of marriage.
And there are other marriages or relationships
that are alluded to in the film, and we
can say that those marriages and relationships also
double the relationship between Stewart and Kelly.
So there's a kind of low level, not exactly hostility,
but a low level badinage and argument going on between Kelly
and Stuart all the way through the film.
Which is in some sense resolved, but not fully resolved.
Or resolved in a typically unsatisfying Hitchcockian way
at the end of the film.
So the very ending of the film.
There is the tradition-- the murderer is caught, is exposed.
The danger to which the Jimmy Stewart character was exposed
is purged by the end.
Again I won't go into details if you've not seen the film,
but I need to say this much in order to explain the ending.
And at the end of the film, as I said,
there's a moment where we see him-- the murder finds out
that he's watching him.
And after a while, he comes to Jimmy Stewart's apartment
apparently to try to murder him.
Because he thinks he's going to reveal
that he's a murderer himself.
And it's a terrifying scene.
The great climax of the scene-- Stewart--
his physical limitations some critics
have seen as a symbolic embodiment of what might
be seen as a form of impotence.
Both a sexual impotence and sort of broader kind of impotence,
an incompetence because he's crippled, he can't fight,
he can't defend himself.
He can't behave like a traditional man
in a traditional movie.
And again, remember, this is characteristic of Hitchcock.
His men are almost always like this.
It's amazing, in fact, how weak, vulnerable, damaged, fearful,
frightened his protagonists are.
So there's this climactic moment at the end where
Thorwald, the murderer, is trying to kill Jimmy Stewart,
and he pushes him.
And Jimmy Stewart is holding on.
He's on the second story window.
He's holding on like this, looking up.
The camera's looking down at him.
You see the fear and horror in his face.
He lets go.
There's a critic, a brilliant critic,
a French critic, who talks about the idea of letting go,
of losing your grip as central action in Hitchcock's films.
You lose your gripping.
You fall into a void.
And that moment that is, as I said this afternoon,
could be said to be an iconic moment in Hitchcock's movie.
So when Jimmy Stewart actually lets go and falls.
You see his face as if he's falling to his--
you think he might be falling to his death.
But of course, he's not.
He just breaks his other leg.
And at the end of the film then we have a final scene.
And this is where the ambiguity comes in.
We see him with both legs, now.
He's back where he was.
But the Grace Kelly character is sitting happily in the room.
She pretends that she's reading material that
would please Jimmy Stewart.
But in fact, if you look closely,
she has a copy of Vogue hidden inside the material
that she's reading.
And there's a very deep sense that in this gender
conflict between Grace Kelly-- and also we discover at the end
but they're now engaged.
So Jimmy Stewart has become engaged to this woman, right?
So it's almost as if he's sort of lost the battle.
Or at least he's agreed to marry.
But what we feel that the end is that his agreement to marry
her is still full of the same ambiguities
that were present before.
And many people watching the film have said,
you know the Grace Kelly character is
very beautiful and very elegant, but she's not a very attractive
person morally.
She tries to manipulate the Jimmy Stewart character.
She doesn't seem fully to appreciate him.
She doesn't see why he wants to run
around the world in corduroys and sneakers
instead of living the high life in New York and go
and going to Le Cirque for dinner.
She can't really understand that.
So the conflict between them is a kind of lifestyle conflict.
At the end of the film, none of those things
have been resolved.
And there's the sense that he's more entrapped than ever
at the end of the movie.
Now, I don't want to make too much of this.
This is a light entertainment at one level.
But these subjects that I've been talking about,
the sense of loosing your grip, of being caught
in a confined space and being terrified by forces far larger
than you, that you're too weak or damage to resist.
Those moments of horror and terror
are dramatized with profound authority
in this remarkable film.
So what Hitchcock repeatedly does, and especially
in these two films, and if you can see them
in a conversation with each other
you'll understand more fully, the fascination
of Hitchcock's career and the fascination of his work.
Because he keeps returning with these remarkable variations
again and again to the same set of problems and of subjects.
So there's even more ambiguity and uncertainty
at the end of Rear Window than there was when it began.
And one final point and then I'll stop.
One of the things that we notice in the course of the film
is there's one moment in the movie where the Jimmy Stewart
character responds to Grace Kelly with a kind of excitement
and allure.
It's almost the moment where you see suddenly
really desires her, really sees her as a possible partner.
And it's the moment in which she has
entered the voyeuristic drama.
It's the moment in which he's watching her
through his lens when she's gone across
to try to do some detective work in the murderer's apartment.
And there's a kind of excitement and adventure
that goes on there.
And it's actually the moment when they bond.
When they realize-- and there is some sense that they're both
engaged in a morally exciting, in a mutually exciting
adventure.
But there's also the sense, very disturbing in a way when
you reflect on it later, that the moment in which Grace
Kelly became truly attractive to the Jimmy Stewart character
was the moment in which he had entered the voyeuristic drama.
In which Kelly was now distant from,
which he was attracted to her because he was seeing her
as if he were a peeping Tom.
So now this is a subtext.
I don't mean that I don't mean that the film is
using a megaphone to remind us of these implications.
But the number of them build for the course of the film.
And as with Shadow of a Doubt, what seems on the surface
to be a kind of light diversion, once we
begin to press its details becomes
a much more disturbing and powerful meditation
on our human impulse to watch what we're not
supposed to watch, to participate
in illicit activities without being punished for it,
especially if we, like Jimmy Stewart,
are able to do so in the dark.
And in that sense, when we step away from Rear Window,
one of the things we might recognize
is that we in the audience have been engaging
in the same activity that Jimmy Stewart is
engaging in the movie.
That we are complicit as viewers in the immorality
and in the murderous tendencies of these forms
of entertainment.
So it's not possible if you're an alert and self-conscious
film goer to watch these apparent light entertainments
without recognizing their deeper and more disturbing
implications.
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