Rear Window, Psychosexual Deviance, And The Computer Age

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is about a voyeuristic action photographer who suffers a leg injury and is forced to stare out of his window all day and night for recreation; he begins to assume details of his neighbors' lives, and concocts a conspiracy theory that one of them has murdered his wife and buried her body parts. On a metaphorical level, this film is about the character's fetishistic, psychosexually morbid scopophilia, in which he derives a sick, diseased pleasure from his voyeurism, and is aroused by his own psychotic imagination when he tries to solve this self-invented murder mystery. His desires also represent his inability to settle down and be married, instead always on the look-out from his window for new encounters. The large, long telephoto lens Jimmy Stewart attaches to his camera to better view his neighbors is a phallic symbol, an optical erection signifying the pleasure he derives from viewing people from his distant window. As he sits in his wheelchair, powerless to move, impotent really, his spying activities with the telephoto lens become almost masturbatory. When the supposed murderer finds out he's been watching him, and breaks the safety of space and distance, coming into the photographer's apartment and therefore his reality, the film reaches its climax, as does Jimmy Stewart's psychotic morbid fantasy; he blinds his approaching attacker with flashbulb after flashbulb from his camera, representing white flashes of orgasmic fulfillment, ejaculations derived from the physical materialization and realization of his fetishistic obsession which he previously could only view at a distance, as if through a movie screen. It is only after this last psychosexual encounter that he's willing to settle down and abandon his deviant and perverse desires for the relatively "normal" institution of marriage.

Further explorations can be made about the sexually deviant nature of metacinematic desires addressed in Rear Window; it seems every moment a character "breaks through the screen" and invades another spatiotemporal paradigm, it is a moment of climactic excitement for Stewart's character, who can do nothing but watch with morbid fascination from his masturbatory audience-seat. Thus, the question may be raised: do we as viewers of cinema share the same voyeuristic sexual deviance, especially when we desire metacinematic breakage and invasion of the hymen/movie screen to invade the reality of the film?

SO, I am now forced to comment on today's modern society. "We've become a race of peeping toms" is a comment, I believe, even more applicable today than in Hitchcock's time. With the arrival of the information age has come things like blogs, Xangas, LiveJournals, Facebook profiles, online photo albums, Geocities personal webpages, and hiding behind the "Invisible" feature on AOL Instant Messenger, and it has become increasingly easier to satiate one's psychosexual voyeurism digitally. I do believe that the computer screen has become the new "rear window," the channel through which people can fulfill their cyber-scopophilia. So what does that make this blog? What does that make you right now? I'm breaking the computer screen right now to address you and this problem in general, an act of meta-blogging, if you will. How does that make you feel?