Mulvey and Rear Window

Conrad Barber

The first thing Laura Mulvey mentions in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" is scopophilia, or the sort of quasi-erotic pleasure humans can attain by looking at other people. This includes active or passive peeping, but definitely applies to cinema. When one watches a film, we are presented with the situation that there is nothing we can do to affect the characters or the outcome of the story. While this may seem obvious and ignorant to mention, it becomes significant when we consider the voyeuristic pleasure which is inherent in the act of watching an unknowing subject. Mulvey discusses how this pleasure roots from the viewer perceiving the person they are watching as an object rather than a living being.

So who cares? What does this have to do with movies? When applied to the cinema, this theory holds true in that we have a sort of separation from the characters and events portrayed onscreen. We cannot affect their world and they seemingly have no idea we're there watching them. Usually in hollywood film, we consider the view the camera presents as what our own eyes are seeing. It is as though we are standing there in the room with the characters, not as a fellow person, but as an invisible, intangible voyeur. This then helps to appeal to scopophilia, as discussed earlier.

In Hitchcock's Rear Window, L. B. Jeffries spends pretty much the entirety of the film looking into the windows of his neighbors, observing their actions while they are unaware. This is widely accepted to represent the medium of film itself, as his neighbors' windows are rectangular viewing spaces, much like a television or theater screen. Jeffries therefore represents the moviegoing and television watching society and his neighbors are the stars. But why would Hitchcock want to use this metaphor? What sort of point is he trying to make? In order to understand the underlying theme of the film in the way that I am analyzing it, one must remove oneself from today's society and imagine a world not ruled by television, movies, and computers. When the idea for television was first being developed, I imagine it was questioned by many regarding ethics. That is, isn't creating a visual record of another's actions in order to watch at a later time, alone or with anyone else, isn't that a sort of weird distant voyeurism? It is hard for our generation to imagine, but when a person is first introduced to the concept of a moving visual image, it would probably seem that way. This is portrayed in Rear Window by the maid Stella and by Grace Kelly's character Lisa Fremont's reactions to Jeffries' peeping tom past time. But sure enough, once they try it themselves, they become fascinated and obsessed, to a point where it becomes their own weird voyeuristic past time, exactly like what has happened with television and film in today's society.