For Your Eyes Only: Looking at Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) through the work of Laura Mulvey
- pauldudar
- 3 hours ago
- 10 min read
Hello Fellow Showbiz Hobos! The following piece is a paper I wrote in Film Theory for Professor Corrin Columpar at the University of Toronto while I was working on my Cinema Studies Major. This is not the original; I went through it and fixed the mistakes and poor grammar of Paul in 2006.
“Those are just a few of my neighbours. At first, I watched them just to kill time, but then I couldn’t take my eyes off them, just as you won’t be able to.”
-Jimmy Stewart, addressing the camera in Rear Window trailer
In her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey offers a feminist critique of classical Hollywood Cinema. She asserts that male domination rules the gaze of classical Hollywood films and the female form within. According to Mulvey, the female form elicits the pleasurable gaze of the active male spectator. In her words, “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.”(Mulvey, 33)
To control the gaze is to control the woman being looked at, and ultimately, it is the goal of classical Hollywood film to maintain and promote male domination over women. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window tells the story of L.B. Jefferies, a globe-trotting photojournalist confined to a wheelchair in his humble Chelsea, New York apartment following a mishap on the job. To pass the time, Jefferies takes to staring out his windows, watching his neighbours go about their day-to-day lives. Through his surveillance, Jefferies begins to suspect one of his neighbours has murdered his wife.
In Rear Window, Jefferies controls the active male gaze and looks outwards to compensate for his castration anxiety imposed by the “plaster cocoon.” Two characters threaten Jeffries' masculine dominance in the film, manifesting his impotence and castration. Using the devices of voyeuristic sadism and fetishistic scopophilia, Jefferies relieves his castration anxiety in the face of his girlfriend, Lisa Freemont, played by Grace Kelly, and his neighbor/murderer Lars Thorwald, played by Raymond Burr. It is through his control of the gaze and scrutiny that Jefferies can subdue these threats and emerge at the films end as the dominant male. Mulvey’s analysis focuses on the male gaze towards the female form and neglects the male gaze being used towards other males as a way of establishing dominance. Her analysis is dedicated to the exploitation of the female form for the visual pleasure of the active male gaze.
The most important threat to Jefferies masculinity is Jefferies girlfriend, Lisa Freemont. Lisa is a socialite, working as a model and editor in the high-end fashion industry. She wears $1100 dresses (approximately $13,250 in 2026) and dines at 21 (which you can still do today if you got the $$$). As a female figure, Lisa inherently represents castration in the eyes of the male spectator. According to Mulvey, the female form
“connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure.”(Mulvey, 35)
As a female form, Lisa is a symbol of displeasure, and she threatens to project her lack of a phallus upon Jefferies. Throughout the film, the future of the relationship between Jefferies and Lisa is debated. Lisa wants them to become closer; for Jefferies to commit to her and give up his life as a photojournalist. Lisa’s attempts to solidify their relationship and bring them closer together project her castration upon him. She would turn him into a domesticated homebody trapped in an existence of passivity and domesticity.
Mulvey asserts that to relieve the castration anxiety the female form signifies, classical Hollywood films use voyeuristic sadism and fetishistic scopophilia to make women desirable objects for the viewing pleasure of the male. In Rear Window, both these tactics are used to make Lisa an appealing figure to male hegemony. Through voyeuristic sadism,
“pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness.”(Mulvey, 35)
Lisa is guilty of projecting her castration upon Jefferies by attempting to alter his way of life. She becomes an object of desire when she begins to trust Jefferies assessment of Thorwald’s guilt. Lisa becomes a subject of the male gaze that Jefferies uses in his pursuit of Thorwald. She first lends her “feminine intuition” with respect to Mrs. Thorwald’s jewelry and other belongings, stating, among other things, that “women aren’t that unpredictable.”(Hitchcock)
Later in the film, Lisa ventures out of Jefferies’ apartment in pursuit of Thorwald, putting herself in peril, acting as an extension of Jefferies agency. According to Mulvey, to alleviate castration anxiety through voyeuristic sadism, it is essential to “…force a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end.”(Mulvey, 35)
Lisa is not simply acting as Jefferies agent because he has asked her to; her personality has changed. She has cast off the trend-setting 5th Avenue persona and begins to embrace the adventure-seeking attitude of Jefferies.
The close-up of Jefferies at the end of this clip is the first time he looks at Lisa with excitement. As the film progresses, Lisa changes and acquiesces to Jefferies will in a way that allows him to remain masculine and dominant over her while she becomes an object of visual pleasure.
Fetishistic scopophilia is also evident with respect to Lisa. This method of compensation involves the female figure being physically more visually pleasurable. In Mulvey’s words, fetishistic scopophilia serves as a
“complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star).”(Mulvey, 35)
Lisa is portrayed by actress Grace Kelly, later known as Princess Grace of Monaco. More than 40 years after her death, she is remembered for her iconic beauty. Director Curtis Hanson refers to Grace Kelly as “…one of the most beautiful actresses ever to grace the screen, playing one of the most incredibly idealized females in movie history.”(Hanson)
From her introduction, Lisa is presented as an object of visual pleasure for the male spectator using several cinematic methods. One of Hitchcock’s frequent collaborators and Director of Photography for Rear Window is Robert Burks. Burks employs three-point lighting to eliminate the shadows on Lisa’s face. There is also a hint of soft focus on Lisa that serves to eliminate any imperfections in her face. Burks also uses back-lighting on Lisa that separates her from the background and adds a bounce of light off her blond hair an gives her an angelic aura. On top of all that, the frame rate is slowed slightly to smooth out her movement. All this combined makes the introduction of Lisa one of the most important sequences in the film, it establishes Lisa as a fetishistic object of visual pleasure under Jefferies active male gaze. From the beginning, even though Jefferies has his eyes closed, he controls the gaze, and his pursuit of her informs the rest of the movie.
Although Lisa’s overwhelming beauty establishes her as visually pleasurable to the spectator, initially, Lisa is a detriment to Jeffries' active male gaze. Lisa’s first appearances serve to hinder his progress in the pursuit of Thorwald and reveal the tense nature of their relationship. In Mulvey’s words, Lisa’s presence "[freezes] the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.”(Mulvey, 33)
Lisa only becomes appealing to Jefferies when she becomes an object of his scopophilic gaze by crossing over to the other side of the courtyard, becoming a part of the action. Jefferies has no control over her through his interactions with her because of his injury, but when she crosses into the purview of his gaze, she instantly becomes vital to him. Lisa is appealing to Jefferies when she is in a position where he can look at her without her being able to look back at him. According to Mulvey
“the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.”(Mulvey, 34)
Jefferies is the male protagonist through whom the gaze of the spectator is linked. Jefferies is also simultaneously castrated and powerless as a player in the narrative in the traditional sense. The opening shot inside Jeffries' apartment reveals not only his castration, the “plaster cocoon”, but the nature of his character, his masculinity.
Featured in this shot are Jefferies smashed camera, pictures that he took at motor races, oil field fires, street scenes, his brushes with death and his ability to control his fate through his gaze. The camera finally settles on a fashion magazine cover. From this, we glean that Jefferies is an intrepid man of action, the daring and death-defying essence of manhood. In Simone de Beauvoir's 1964 book, A Very Easy Death she declares
"…there is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation."
In De Beauvoir’s and Mulvey’s assessment, this shot positions Jefferies as the controller of his gaze and his presence and survival is a testament to his ability to fulfill his natural prerogative to control the female form through his gaze. On a sidenote, a look at Rear Window or Hitchcock from the framework of Simone de Beauvoir’s work would be worthy of a deeper look in future scholarship.
Due to Jeffries' injury, his status as the dominant active male is called into question. He can’t stop Thorwald in some daring physical feat; Jefferies can only look and persuade the people in his orbit. Jefferies does actively control the gaze of the film, but it is the physical actions of others that dictate the direction of the story. The most important character for moving the plot forward is the murderer, Lars Thorwald. Thorwald represents a dominant and controlling male figure superior to Jefferies in almost every conventional way. Thorwald controls the female form through physical subjugation and elimination. Jefferies is only able to do so through voyeurism. In “Rear Window”, Thorwald exerts the ultimate control over the female by killing his wife. This removes the castration anxiety imposed upon him. He is a powerful and unencumbered male and much more potent than the paralyzed Jefferies. Thorwald’s lack of castration, his possession of the phallus, eludes Jefferies and makes his own lack, due to Lisa, more obvious by contrast.
Mulvey’s analysis addresses the active male gaze exploiting the female form. She does not consider how another male is represented in the active gaze of another male. In “Rear Window”, Jeffries' gaze of Thorwald resembles voyeuristic sadism as defined by Mulvey. Only in this case, the presence of the phallus threatens Jefferies with castration. As stated previously, Mulvey defines voyeuristic sadism as a device that compensates for castration anxiety, where
“pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness.”(Mulvey, 35)
Jefferies active male gaze is driven by his desire to find Thorwald guilty of murdering his wife. The pleasure that is derived in the viewing of Thorwald is based on punishing him for his lack of castration.
Thorwald’s ability to physically control the female form, through murdering his wife and assaulting Lisa, is a threat to Jefferies masculinity. Jefferies only power is his gaze. Just as Lisa became an object of visual pleasure when she moved into Jefferies's gaze by venturing across the courtyard, Thorwald’s leaving that space and entering Jefferies’s apartment eliminates the visual pleasure of viewing Thorwald. When Jefferies hears Thorwald coming up the stairs, he does everything in his limited power to avoid being looked at by him. Jefferies turns off the lights and backs into a dark corner. Jefferies’s weapon to deal with Thorwald is the flashbulb from his camera, the weapon of his gaze.
Control of the gaze proves to be powerless against Thorwald, who, with relative ease, forces Jefferies out the window. With the intervention of the police acting as Jefferies agents, it is the active male gaze of voyeuristic sadism that succeeds in subduing Thorwald’s empowered phallus and defeats him.
Rear Window is based on the active male gaze and the pleasure derived from that gaze. There are two characters who present a challenge to this hegemony: Lisa and Thorwald. They are the only two characters who challenge Jeffries' male gaze and look back at him and the audience, shattering the fourth wall of cinema and challenging the assumed omnipotence of Jeffries and the audience’s active male gaze. The act of these characters looking back challenges the visual pleasure of the cinematic gaze by making the spectator aware of their voyeuristic intrusion. Lisa, through her female form and Thorwald through his phallus, threaten to castrate the omnipotence that Jefferies enjoys as the holder of the gaze. Through the functions of classical Hollywood cinema, “Rear Window” is constructed around the gaze of the male protagonist, Jeffries. In Mulvey’s analysis, Jefferies represents “a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify.”(Mulvey, 34)
The audience aligns itself with the protagonist and is susceptible to the castration anxiety that Lisa and Thorwald represent. It is through the active gaze of Jefferies that these anxieties are compensated for by the methods of voyeuristic sadism and fetishistic scopophilia.
Works Cited
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Patricia Evans, Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 28–40.
Rear Window. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, performances by James Stewart, Grace Kelly, and Raymond Burr, Paramount Pictures, 1954. DVD.
Rear Window Ethics: Remembering and Restoring a Hitchcock Classic. Directed by Laurent Bouzereau, performances by Peter Bogdanovich, Curtis Hanson, and Alfred Hitchcock, Universal Studios Home Video, 2000. DVD.
Rear Window. Behind-the-scenes photographs. Paramount Pictures, 1954. Print.
Fair Use / Fair Dealing Disclaimer
This article contains limited excerpts, images, and references from Rear Window (1954), related behind-the-scenes and publicity materials, and scholarly and documentary sources for the purposes of criticism, commentary, analysis, education, and research.
Under Canadian fair dealing provisions of the Copyright Act, and U.S. fair use doctrine (17 U.S.C. §107), the use of copyrighted material is permitted without authorization when employed for purposes such as criticism, review, scholarship, or news reporting. All material used herein is presented transformatively, with the intent to analyze and contextualize the work rather than to reproduce it for entertainment or commercial substitution.
No copyright infringement is intended. All copyrighted works remain the property of their respective rights holders. The inclusion of film stills, behind-the-scenes photographs, quotations, or references is strictly limited to what is necessary to support critical discussion of Rear Window’s themes, ethics, visual language, and cultural impact.
If you are a rights holder and believe any material has been used inappropriately, please contact ShowbizHobo and the issue will be reviewed promptly and respectfully.
Comments