Voyeur cinema
We're all peeping toms, and Hollywood knows it
Restorers bring old flicks back to life
By: Geoff Pevere
Toronto Star 11th Feb 2000
Rear Window part of a long history of films that prey on the guilty pleasure
of spying on others.
"We've become a race of Peeping Toms," laments the wisecracking housekeeper
played by Thelma Ritter in Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 masterwork of movie voyeurism,
Rear Window (which opens today in gloriously restored condition).
And she didn't know the half of it. Since that movie's release nearly a
half-century ago, not only have the technical means facilitating Peeping
Tomism exploded exponentially - palmcorders, webcams, digital audio, etc.
- so have the movies Rear Window has influenced and been imitated by.
Thus, while we may be a race of inveterate peepers, the upside is that at
least it's possible to peep at the legacy of movies - from Michael Powell's
suppressed master work Peeping Tom to the recently released clunker Eye
Of The Beholder - which owe their very existence to Rear Window. Thanks
to Hitchcock's mordant genius, at least it' s possible to be self-consciously
voyeuristic.
Based partly on Cornell Woolrich's short story "It Had to be Murder' ' and
partly on a couple of gruesome real-life murders Hitchcock found particularly
amusing, Rear Window represented a retreat from the formal restrictions
the director had experienced in the making of the relatively standard 3D
potboiler Dial M For Murder: Intrigued by the challenge of making a complex
and multicharactered movie on a single set, the 54 year-old filmmaker became
fascinated by the cinematic possibilities presented by Woolrich's plot involving
a voyeuristic invalid. Eventually, the self-imposed technical challenge
which would become Rear Window - a huge apartment set, the windows of which
offered glimpses of separate, almost self-contained narratives, viewed through
the lenses of the injured photojournalist played by James Stewart - would
facilitate one of the master's most complex, evocative and enduring works.
Ostensibly a thriller about a wheelchair-bound photographer (James Stewart
at his most deceptively unassuming) who thinks he has witnessed a murder
in one of the apartments opposite his own, the movie turns on one of the
most potent visual concepts in the history of the movies: that Stewart,
one of the most seductively easy-to-identify-with stars, would become our
on-screen surrogate. That, through his increasingly complex obsession with
the act of looking (an obsession Hitchcock renders subtly pathological through
the Stewart character's implied impotence and conspicuously unreasonable
fear of marriage), our own voyeuristic complicity would be the movie's true
subtextual subject.
Therefore, as that marvellously prismatic title implies, what's really scrutinized
through the rear window is us, out there watching, in the dark. And the
fear the movie exploits is therefore the ultimate fear of the voyeur: of
being caught, of being observed observing, and of having the safe distance
between us and the screen violated. That's what happens when killer Raymond
Burr turns up, angry and large, in Stewart's apartment, and that's why Rear
Window has spawned a virtual mini-genre in movies about voyeurs.
It's about looks that kill. And, as the following testify, kill and kill
again.
Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960): Made six years after Hitchcock' s movie,
Michael Powell's luridly creepy story about a psychotic photographer (whose
perversely customized killer-camera allows him to photograph women watching
themselves die) not only took Rear Window a logical Freudian leap forward
and anticipated the snuff furor by more than a decade, it just about ended
this eminent British director's career. So intense was the national uproar
in England upon its release, the film was dumped by its distributor and
Powell's career almost instantly short-circuited.
All of which suggests the movie's primary transgression was to flash its
bulbs a little too close to home: Peeping Tom remains one of the most disquietingly
perceptive movies about the relationships between viewing, male sexual dysfunction,
perversion and death, which might account for the fact it was eventually
recovered by feminist film theorists like Laura Mulvey and connoisseurs
of cinematic pathology like Martin Scorsese.
Indeed, Scorsese has often cited Peeping Tom as one of the main influences
on Taxi Driver, which be only way we can mark some kind of cause-and- effect
relationship between Jimmy Stewart and Robert De Niro.
Blowup (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966): For his first English-language movie,
Michaelangelo Antonioni, the Italian master of formally exquisite modernist
ennui, made this modishly enigmatic Rear Window riff in Swinging London.
Playing a fashion photographer with a smashing loft but no apparent emotional
affinities, David Hemmings (whose vigorously sexual approach to his studio
work was a clear influence on Austin Powers) one day takes some snaps of
a clinched couple in a windy park. Later, upon examining blowups of the
print, he sees evidence of what may, or may not, have been a murder.
Antonioni made a movie which at once criticized the tragically hip nature
of countercultural fashion while simultaneously becoming part of it In transposing
Rear Window's implications of emotional detachment to fashionable '60s London,
Antonioni made a movie which at once criticized the tragically hip nature
of countercultural fashion while simultaneously becoming part of it: Blowup
was nothing if not must-see viewing for thoughtful hipsters of the day.
Viewed today, it holds up primarily as an uncanny harbinger of the image-crazy,
emotionally zombified fashion culture to come.
The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974): As "the best bugger on the
West Coast," Gene Hackman in The Conversation is the audio version (which
is to say the post-Watergate version) of Stewart's L.B. Jeffries. He is
also, as befits a surveillance expert a generation later, a far more apparent
emotional cripple: terrified of intimacy and commitment, unable to communicate
meaningfully without the distancing comforts of technology, riddled with
paranoia and suspicion. When, like Stewart and Hemmings before him, his
work brings him in dangerously close proximity to what looks like murder
(or, in this case, possible conspiracy to commit it), it also makes Harry
perilously aware of the echoes ringing in his own being. It's the sound
of spiritual hollowness he hears, and, for the first and perhaps last time
in Harry's sad life, no microphone is required.
Blow Out and Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1981 and 1984): No filmmaker has
copped so blatantly, and at such cost of critical reputation, from Hitchcock
as Brian De Palma, and no two of his movies have copped Rear Window as blatantly
as these. As the title would suggest,Blow Out, which features John Travolta
as a movie sound technician who accidentally records (all together now!)
what may or may not have been the murder of liberal presidential candidate,
owes as much to Antonioni's mod masterpiece as Hitchcock's movie, but the
core premise is essentially the same: recording technology brings someone
dangerously close to murder, only to result in the spotlight swinging rudely
right back on the recorder. And so Travolta eventually finds himself on
the receiving end of a killer conspiracy, his life in nearly as much doubt
as his paranoidly strained credibility.
Body Double, De Palma's flat-out nutty attempt to amalgamate Rear Window
with Vertigo, is best appreciated (as some people insist on appreciating
Rear Window) as a purely formal exercise. And, provided you don't take it
too seriously, it does exert a certain abstract and undeniable (if entirely
unwholesome) fascination. The story of an actor who witnesses one of the
'80s' most outrageous movie murders (Deborah Shelton's death by giant powerdrill)
while spying on her through a telescope, Body Double manages to somehow
to expand on Hitchcock' s most resonant themes while simultaneously trivializing
them.
Thus, while the movie can make you dizzy with its manipulation of perspectives
and optical points-of-view, it does so in the service of a story which is
among the most stupid De Palma ever committed to film. Still, it does manage
to generate a certain genuine frisson of discomfort, which is not generated
simply the movie's frequent outrageous lapses of restraint and good taste.
It comes from a fundamental understanding of something Stewart says in Rear
Window of the man he's convinced is a killer, but could also be saying of
the man in the mirror: "That's no ordinary look. That's the look a man gives
when he's afraid somebody might be watching him." The look that kills.
