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asakiyume, who had asked me about the differences watching Rear Window (1954) first as a child and then as an adult:
It never occurred to me as a child that James Stewart's Jeff could be wrong. He was the protagonist; if he said something was going on, something was going on. Rewatching as an adult, I can recognize that a major part of the fun and the tension of the film comes from the danger and ambiguity of whether Jeff really has detected a murderer across the courtyard of his two-room apartment in Greenwich Village or whether his boredom and imagination and a collision of personal and professional frustrations are working up an exciting story which is getting out of hand as more and more of the people in his life take it seriously and either way someone is going to get hurt because you can't have your girlfriend and your physical therapist start investigating a murder, real or invented, without repercussions. As a child, it was entirely about the terror and the unfairness of being disbelieved, especially about something as important and horrible as a murder that happened where everyone could see, but no one—except one photojournalist, whose business was people-watching; the cinematic reflexivity of observing the lives of your neighbors like sitcoms through a telephoto lens also passed child-me by—was looking. Consequently my memory of the film is much higher-strung than the actual experience of rewatching it, where much of the point is how cheerfully and banally the life of the apartment courtyard is ticking along on this very hot summer in New York until all of a sudden a woman screams over her murdered dog like the myth of Kitty Genovese and all of Jeff's suspicions snap into dreadful plausibility where before they could be pushed off into the unknowable countries of the lives of the strangers next door. Hilariously in context of recent film interests, I had no distinct memories of the character played by Wendell Corey at all, even though he figures importantly in this plot: he's either the voice of reason or the voice of wrongheaded rationalizing, because he's the character—and he's a detective lieutenant of the NYPD, so his opinion means more than moral support—who holds out the longest on believing Jeff. As an adult, I can see what he contributes to the different layers of the story, the ways in which he shadows and foils for Jeff. As a child, I imagine he just looked to me like dumb authority not listening, all the more maddeningly because he's so friendly about it. I can see more about the lives of the neighbors, too, which to a child were more of the background color and from an adult perspective deliberately emphasize that Jeff's is just one of however many million stories in the naked city, just the one that we happen to be watching while all around him other people's stories go on far more completely than he can understand from his glimpses through their windows and vice versa. I had forgotten a lot of details, obviously, and not necessarily caught a lot of the humor or the sexual daring of Grace Kelly's Lisa, who strikes me now as an atypical, rather wonderful heroine for Hitchcock. I had remembered the disbelief. This time around, while I still wasn't able to share it, I could at least see where it had been fairly introduced.
asakiyume, who had asked me about the differences watching Rear Window (1954) first as a child and then as an adult:It never occurred to me as a child that James Stewart's Jeff could be wrong. He was the protagonist; if he said something was going on, something was going on. Rewatching as an adult, I can recognize that a major part of the fun and the tension of the film comes from the danger and ambiguity of whether Jeff really has detected a murderer across the courtyard of his two-room apartment in Greenwich Village or whether his boredom and imagination and a collision of personal and professional frustrations are working up an exciting story which is getting out of hand as more and more of the people in his life take it seriously and either way someone is going to get hurt because you can't have your girlfriend and your physical therapist start investigating a murder, real or invented, without repercussions. As a child, it was entirely about the terror and the unfairness of being disbelieved, especially about something as important and horrible as a murder that happened where everyone could see, but no one—except one photojournalist, whose business was people-watching; the cinematic reflexivity of observing the lives of your neighbors like sitcoms through a telephoto lens also passed child-me by—was looking. Consequently my memory of the film is much higher-strung than the actual experience of rewatching it, where much of the point is how cheerfully and banally the life of the apartment courtyard is ticking along on this very hot summer in New York until all of a sudden a woman screams over her murdered dog like the myth of Kitty Genovese and all of Jeff's suspicions snap into dreadful plausibility where before they could be pushed off into the unknowable countries of the lives of the strangers next door. Hilariously in context of recent film interests, I had no distinct memories of the character played by Wendell Corey at all, even though he figures importantly in this plot: he's either the voice of reason or the voice of wrongheaded rationalizing, because he's the character—and he's a detective lieutenant of the NYPD, so his opinion means more than moral support—who holds out the longest on believing Jeff. As an adult, I can see what he contributes to the different layers of the story, the ways in which he shadows and foils for Jeff. As a child, I imagine he just looked to me like dumb authority not listening, all the more maddeningly because he's so friendly about it. I can see more about the lives of the neighbors, too, which to a child were more of the background color and from an adult perspective deliberately emphasize that Jeff's is just one of however many million stories in the naked city, just the one that we happen to be watching while all around him other people's stories go on far more completely than he can understand from his glimpses through their windows and vice versa. I had forgotten a lot of details, obviously, and not necessarily caught a lot of the humor or the sexual daring of Grace Kelly's Lisa, who strikes me now as an atypical, rather wonderful heroine for Hitchcock. I had remembered the disbelief. This time around, while I still wasn't able to share it, I could at least see where it had been fairly introduced.
