The Burds: Part I
Howdy. Offft! This one has been a long time coming but here's another wee post looking at some of Alfred Hitchcock's output...his filmic output, nothing else - certainly nothing biological that would be disgusting. It seems timely as a load of his films have had a digital makeover and Vertigo (1958) completes it's 30 year climb to the top of the BFI: Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time list. Anyhee, the gist is, I read an article in the Guardian recently which described Hitchcock's representation of women in a less than flattering light: 'the female characters in his [Hitchcock's] films range from stupid to cunning to traitorous' (Bidisha, Guardian, 2010) and I thought...ohh, I don't know about that and immediately sprang into action, composing this response. In my own immutable, straightforward and succinct style, this is currently looking like two posts and it will hopefully end there.
The crux of these posts is to suggest that the female characterisations in Hitchcock's films are perhaps not as straightforward as a perfunctory look at their portrayal might suggest, particularly if they are examined in parallel with the representation of men, as I will here in Rear Window (1956), and the wider society, for which I'll look to The Birds (1963) in the next post. These are two of the three texts looked at in the article and the main reason I chose them, I could also maybe have had a wee look at North by Northwest (1959) but I don't know if there is the storage space on the whole of the interweb.
So to Rear Window and how the characters of L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) and Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) face off.
For a change I'll get straight to the point, in Rear Window, L.B. Jefferies must become more feminine to solve a murder. That's what I think about this film and I will now tell you for why.
On second thoughts, here's a quick plot summary. Rear Window focuses on the character of L.B. Jefferies, a photographer who takes risks and lives a life of adventure. Injured on assignment he is confined to his small apartment with a broken leg. This does not seem to please him and through boredom (and perhaps some kind of mental defect) he takes to spying on his neighbours. The creepy bugger then becomes convinced that he has witnessed a murder...with his ears...a man (Thorwald) kill his wife and now all he has to do is convince everyone else.
Almost immediately Hitchcock aligns us to the male protagonist, we start on a sweep of the rear courtyard, seen from L.B.'s apartment window, in which there is very little action. We return to the apartment and see L.B. asleep in a wheelchair and zoom into his his sweaty forehead. Gadz yes, but it serves a point as we are then taken on another tour of the courtyard which is now full of life, characters performing functions and acting in ways that might generally class them as stereotypical and typically from a male point of view; single hard working creative bloke, nubile Ms. Torso who seems to have some sort of explosive reaction to clothes, so much so that her bra flies across the room when she stands up, and a women that should be bloody chopped up for being a cow, allegedly. What I would argue is that we have now seen the courtyard singularly from L.B.'s point of view and specifically from the psyche of our 'protagonist'.
The focus on the male character that my brief plot summary defines, and the idea that the audience is firmly aligned with that male protagonist, would seem to suggest little in the way of innovation. Given the strong male domination of film narratives and the patriarchal nature of film production. A very influential essay of the 1970's, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by feminist theorist Laura Mulvey looked specifically at Rear Window, and a couple of others, and seemed to take a similarly dim view to the female role within Hitchcock's narratives as Bashida did in her article, it also affirms that the audience is firmly positioned in L.B.'s point of view but not that the film is very progressive in it's representations of women:
The idea of the male spectator indulging in scopophilia, taking a voyeuristic pleasure in viewing women, certainly seems to be part of the film at least at the beginning Lisa literally displays herself for us as she moves around the room switching on lights. The obviousness of this visual exhibition could mark as a counterpoint to the girl of action that is to come, but this woman of action is also problematic for Mulvey as L.B.'s gaze, and therefore the audiences', is firmly fixed on her throughout. There is also the brief scene where topless sunbathers are noted by L.B. and a helicopter that hovers over them, as well as the extended attention paid to 'Ms.Torso' who almost all the males in the film seem drawn, at least visually. But could this film be a comment on the male domination of the gaze rather than a conformation of it? After all Hitchcock's career would appear to suggest that the man knows his Freud.
The key to my idea is how the details of the plot and, more importantly, the narration, how the information is delivered to the audience, may represent a shift in L.B.'s point of view as the plot progresses - look at him in comparison to his detective friend, Doyle who stays devoutly male, leery, smug and facetious throughout, with lascivious allusions and comments about L.B. and Lisa and Ms.Torso, as well as his emasculating comments towards L.B.'s approach to detective work; all-in-all, a bit of a dick (no pun intended). Mulvey states that 'Lisa has been of little sexual interest to him [L.B.]' (845) until she nips over to the neighbours then he, like the audience, derives a voyeuristic pleasure from the spectacle much in the same way as the cinema audience does. However, I would attest that the block opposite is not like the movie screen in the strictest sense but plays out L.B.'s anxieties and fears about their relationship, and it is not until she takes charge and tackles his fears head on that he begins to consider the possibility of them having a future together. He is incapacitated physically and emotionally and it is up to Lisa to make him want to change if their relationship is to work.
Neither Mulvey's or Bidisha's view takes into account the potential for the courtyard and it's inhabitants to be a manifestation of L.B.'s anxieties. These anxieties and fears are personified by the inhabitants of the houses surrounding the courtyard, anxieties and fears that are jumbled, confused and of various degrees of seriousness right to the ultimate - his ending of Lisa's life (metaphorically); the metaphorical ending of her life personified by the central most explicit manifestation of his unease in Thorwald, the killer. It is Thorwald who L.B. must face and defeat, primarily through Lisa's drive and action. The characters of the courtyard and the strong alignment with L.B.'s point of view is the main thrust of my argument (if I can use an absurdly phallocentric verb in an argument against a misogynistic point of view - yes, yes I can).
The murder victim is described by Bidisha as 'a shrew, a nagging wife' and she certainly appears to be, there is no denying that here. I would like to suggest that the character of the 'shrew' is more an attack on masculinity and the inability of men to commit - what the hell are you talking about!? Well I'll tell you. If it is taken that the inhabits of the buildings surrounding the courtyard are reflections of L.B.'s insecurities about his relationship with Lisa, then the woman is indeed a stereotype, thrown up by L.B. to convince him that he's better off like the composer - alone with his work, building a successful career - and Lisa will be fine as she is like 'Ms. Torso' and will have her pick of the many male suitors that will line up. This may backed up by the whirlwind movement through stages of marriage by the newly wed couple who go from the highly sexual honeymoon period to the tired stages later in the film where nether appears to desire, or make any attempt to appear desirable for, the other. It is this attitude that L.B. has to redress and (I'm arguing) does throughout the movie, by the end the courtyard characters are all settled and happy (although the newly-weds seem a little out of place here) and through the plot his view, of Ms. Torso and Miss LonleyHearts in particular, shifts. Perhaps his anxieties actually stem from an emotional place that considers how their relationship would effect Lisa's future and success and are not, at least entirely, selfish?
The film moves towards its conclusion through the action of the female characters, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) and Stella (the beautifully irrepressible Thelma Ritter), L.B. may kick start the whole thing but only comes close to resolution when his opinions and theories align with his female companions. Could L.B.s physical inability to be active suggest his overall inability to progress the relationship, and Lisa's desire and confidence (willingness to take chances) signal her strength to take their relationship forward, a view that ultimately L.B. comes to as he is forced to face his fears head on!? I should coco! This may be contrary to Mulvey's view that Lisa is passive in 'a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.' (841) Lisa confronts Thornwald, the most striking manifestation of L.B.'s fear possible, and obtains a crucial piece of evidence; a wedding ring. Popping it on her finger, L.B. views this scene and when she returns to his apartment he is beaming with pride. He appeared to take no pleasure in seeing her in danger, but does at witnessing her exhilaration from what she has achieved. This exhilaration is witnessed while she is in his apartment, not across the courtyard, not 'in the phantasy position of the cinema audience.' She has simultaneously dealt a blow to his anxieties and brought the suggestion of a binding future between the two to the forefront, and he seems happy about it. Lisa's action tips Thorwald to L.B.'s location and he goes to L.B.'s apartment, L.B. is finally brought face-to-face with his biggest fear and he must overcome it, and now, thanks to Lisa, he can.
A further small point that may help underline the courtyard as a manifestation of L.B.'s psyche is a couple he never sees across the courtyard, a family with coffee drinking wife, a child at play and a husband getting ready to leave for work, this scene of blissful domesticity, which only appears at the very start of the film (as does as a flash of what could be a camera in an apartment across the courtyard) as L.B. sleeps and so just before we, the audience, are so solidly attached to his point of view.
The end of the film has also be viewed critically, as lisa is dresses in trousers and a blouse and reading 'Beyond the High Himalayas' it has been seen as Lisa conforming fully to L.B.'s way of life, and therefore abandoning her own, but who is to say that the way Lisa is dressed at the end of the film is not how she dresses around her house? Who's to say that L.B. has not made a commitment to Lisa and she now feels free and comfortable to call his house a home? Lisa's less formal dress and reading material may point to her accepting a more rugged lifestyle (although she was always willing to at least attempt to embrace this) but this does not necessarily mean that she has had to fully conceded (and indeed she soon dumps the book in favour of Harper's Bazaar).
Then there is L.B.'s expression at the end of the film. As he lies in the chair even more incapacitated than at the beginning, with two broken legs, he seems content. His position of enforced confinement no longer seems to stress him, as it did at the beginning of the film, and I would contend that it is L.B. who seems to have changed more at the close of the narrative. L.B. has throughout the film become more feminine, he has listened to the women in his life and paid attention to 'gossip' and 'intuition' things that his detective 'friend' Doyle dismisses offhand, and L.B.'s had in the beginning, and more important faced the anxieties and fears that have plagued his relationship and his worldview. By the end of the film L.B. has changed, he has moved more to Lisa's, perhaps slightly compromised (but isn't that a crucial part of a successful relationship, compromise?), idea of how their relationship can survive.
The point here is not to say that Laura Mulvey or Bidisha are wrong but that Rear Window is perhaps more subtle than they give it credit for. Bidisha's view that it is 'a strange, cowardly, mean film. It ought to be about the horror of witnessing a wife-killer doing his business. Instead, the subplot is about gratuitously bringing the loving, sincere and helpful Lisa down a peg or two – and then showing how (yep) untrustworthy she is.' is certainly a view of the film I can't side with for L.B. is the one whose peg level is altered (whatever that means).
Right that's it, that was a tough one, hopefully the next one won't take as long.
Mulvey, Laura (1975) 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' in Baudry, Leo & Marshall, Choen (Eds.) (2004) Film Theory and Criticism, Sixth Edition, Oxford University Press: Oxford. pgs.837-848
In the above book Tania Modleski also takes on Mulvey and gives an account, a much farer one in my opinion, of Hitchcock's representations of women in 'The Master's Dollhouse: Rear Window' pgs.849-861
The crux of these posts is to suggest that the female characterisations in Hitchcock's films are perhaps not as straightforward as a perfunctory look at their portrayal might suggest, particularly if they are examined in parallel with the representation of men, as I will here in Rear Window (1956), and the wider society, for which I'll look to The Birds (1963) in the next post. These are two of the three texts looked at in the article and the main reason I chose them, I could also maybe have had a wee look at North by Northwest (1959) but I don't know if there is the storage space on the whole of the interweb.
So to Rear Window and how the characters of L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) and Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) face off.
On second thoughts, here's a quick plot summary. Rear Window focuses on the character of L.B. Jefferies, a photographer who takes risks and lives a life of adventure. Injured on assignment he is confined to his small apartment with a broken leg. This does not seem to please him and through boredom (and perhaps some kind of mental defect) he takes to spying on his neighbours. The creepy bugger then becomes convinced that he has witnessed a murder...with his ears...a man (Thorwald) kill his wife and now all he has to do is convince everyone else.
Almost immediately Hitchcock aligns us to the male protagonist, we start on a sweep of the rear courtyard, seen from L.B.'s apartment window, in which there is very little action. We return to the apartment and see L.B. asleep in a wheelchair and zoom into his his sweaty forehead. Gadz yes, but it serves a point as we are then taken on another tour of the courtyard which is now full of life, characters performing functions and acting in ways that might generally class them as stereotypical and typically from a male point of view; single hard working creative bloke, nubile Ms. Torso who seems to have some sort of explosive reaction to clothes, so much so that her bra flies across the room when she stands up, and a women that should be bloody chopped up for being a cow, allegedly. What I would argue is that we have now seen the courtyard singularly from L.B.'s point of view and specifically from the psyche of our 'protagonist'.
The focus on the male character that my brief plot summary defines, and the idea that the audience is firmly aligned with that male protagonist, would seem to suggest little in the way of innovation. Given the strong male domination of film narratives and the patriarchal nature of film production. A very influential essay of the 1970's, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by feminist theorist Laura Mulvey looked specifically at Rear Window, and a couple of others, and seemed to take a similarly dim view to the female role within Hitchcock's narratives as Bashida did in her article, it also affirms that the audience is firmly positioned in L.B.'s point of view but not that the film is very progressive in it's representations of women:
Jeffries is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen. As he watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image to the drama. His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so long as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their reationship is re-born erotically. He does not merely watch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful image, he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening her with punishment, and thus finally saves her. Lisa's exhibitionism has already been established by her obsessive interest in dress and style, in being a passive image of visual perfection; Jeffries' voyeurism and activity have also been established through his work as a photo-journalist, a maker of stories and captor of images. However, his enforced inactivity, binding him to his seat as a spectator, puts him squarely in the phantasy position of the cinema audience.
(Mulvey, 1975:845/6)
The idea of the male spectator indulging in scopophilia, taking a voyeuristic pleasure in viewing women, certainly seems to be part of the film at least at the beginning Lisa literally displays herself for us as she moves around the room switching on lights. The obviousness of this visual exhibition could mark as a counterpoint to the girl of action that is to come, but this woman of action is also problematic for Mulvey as L.B.'s gaze, and therefore the audiences', is firmly fixed on her throughout. There is also the brief scene where topless sunbathers are noted by L.B. and a helicopter that hovers over them, as well as the extended attention paid to 'Ms.Torso' who almost all the males in the film seem drawn, at least visually. But could this film be a comment on the male domination of the gaze rather than a conformation of it? After all Hitchcock's career would appear to suggest that the man knows his Freud.The key to my idea is how the details of the plot and, more importantly, the narration, how the information is delivered to the audience, may represent a shift in L.B.'s point of view as the plot progresses - look at him in comparison to his detective friend, Doyle who stays devoutly male, leery, smug and facetious throughout, with lascivious allusions and comments about L.B. and Lisa and Ms.Torso, as well as his emasculating comments towards L.B.'s approach to detective work; all-in-all, a bit of a dick (no pun intended). Mulvey states that 'Lisa has been of little sexual interest to him [L.B.]' (845) until she nips over to the neighbours then he, like the audience, derives a voyeuristic pleasure from the spectacle much in the same way as the cinema audience does. However, I would attest that the block opposite is not like the movie screen in the strictest sense but plays out L.B.'s anxieties and fears about their relationship, and it is not until she takes charge and tackles his fears head on that he begins to consider the possibility of them having a future together. He is incapacitated physically and emotionally and it is up to Lisa to make him want to change if their relationship is to work.
Lisa
"You don't think either one of us could ever change?"
L.B.
"Right now it doesn't seem so."
The murder victim is described by Bidisha as 'a shrew, a nagging wife' and she certainly appears to be, there is no denying that here. I would like to suggest that the character of the 'shrew' is more an attack on masculinity and the inability of men to commit - what the hell are you talking about!? Well I'll tell you. If it is taken that the inhabits of the buildings surrounding the courtyard are reflections of L.B.'s insecurities about his relationship with Lisa, then the woman is indeed a stereotype, thrown up by L.B. to convince him that he's better off like the composer - alone with his work, building a successful career - and Lisa will be fine as she is like 'Ms. Torso' and will have her pick of the many male suitors that will line up. This may backed up by the whirlwind movement through stages of marriage by the newly wed couple who go from the highly sexual honeymoon period to the tired stages later in the film where nether appears to desire, or make any attempt to appear desirable for, the other. It is this attitude that L.B. has to redress and (I'm arguing) does throughout the movie, by the end the courtyard characters are all settled and happy (although the newly-weds seem a little out of place here) and through the plot his view, of Ms. Torso and Miss LonleyHearts in particular, shifts. Perhaps his anxieties actually stem from an emotional place that considers how their relationship would effect Lisa's future and success and are not, at least entirely, selfish?The film moves towards its conclusion through the action of the female characters, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) and Stella (the beautifully irrepressible Thelma Ritter), L.B. may kick start the whole thing but only comes close to resolution when his opinions and theories align with his female companions. Could L.B.s physical inability to be active suggest his overall inability to progress the relationship, and Lisa's desire and confidence (willingness to take chances) signal her strength to take their relationship forward, a view that ultimately L.B. comes to as he is forced to face his fears head on!? I should coco! This may be contrary to Mulvey's view that Lisa is passive in 'a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.' (841) Lisa confronts Thornwald, the most striking manifestation of L.B.'s fear possible, and obtains a crucial piece of evidence; a wedding ring. Popping it on her finger, L.B. views this scene and when she returns to his apartment he is beaming with pride. He appeared to take no pleasure in seeing her in danger, but does at witnessing her exhilaration from what she has achieved. This exhilaration is witnessed while she is in his apartment, not across the courtyard, not 'in the phantasy position of the cinema audience.' She has simultaneously dealt a blow to his anxieties and brought the suggestion of a binding future between the two to the forefront, and he seems happy about it. Lisa's action tips Thorwald to L.B.'s location and he goes to L.B.'s apartment, L.B. is finally brought face-to-face with his biggest fear and he must overcome it, and now, thanks to Lisa, he can.
A further small point that may help underline the courtyard as a manifestation of L.B.'s psyche is a couple he never sees across the courtyard, a family with coffee drinking wife, a child at play and a husband getting ready to leave for work, this scene of blissful domesticity, which only appears at the very start of the film (as does as a flash of what could be a camera in an apartment across the courtyard) as L.B. sleeps and so just before we, the audience, are so solidly attached to his point of view.
The point here is not to say that Laura Mulvey or Bidisha are wrong but that Rear Window is perhaps more subtle than they give it credit for. Bidisha's view that it is 'a strange, cowardly, mean film. It ought to be about the horror of witnessing a wife-killer doing his business. Instead, the subplot is about gratuitously bringing the loving, sincere and helpful Lisa down a peg or two – and then showing how (yep) untrustworthy she is.' is certainly a view of the film I can't side with for L.B. is the one whose peg level is altered (whatever that means).
Right that's it, that was a tough one, hopefully the next one won't take as long.
Mulvey, Laura (1975) 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' in Baudry, Leo & Marshall, Choen (Eds.) (2004) Film Theory and Criticism, Sixth Edition, Oxford University Press: Oxford. pgs.837-848
In the above book Tania Modleski also takes on Mulvey and gives an account, a much farer one in my opinion, of Hitchcock's representations of women in 'The Master's Dollhouse: Rear Window' pgs.849-861
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