31 Movies of May, Day 24: Rear Window

May 24th viewing: Rear Window, chosen by stay-at-home driven stir-craziness. 

Year of Release: 1954

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

Written by: John Michael Hayes (based on the short story by Cornell Woolrich)

Starring: Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Wendell Corey, Raymond Burr, Judith Evelyn, Ross Bagdasarian, Georgine Darcy

Accompanying Beverage of Choice: Galaxy Misfit (IPA, 6.5% ABV), Wild Onion Brewery, Lake Barrington, Illinois
(Support Independent Breweries - buy local when getting buzzed during quarantine)

This May, we all became Jimmy Stewart: Stuck in our apartments, sweltering in heat, forced to occupy our time by contemplating the death going on outside our doors.

Of course, it’s all much more dramatic and fun in Rear Window. Stewart gets to stare outside the walls of his apartment, look across the courtyard into the apartment of Raymond Burr’s Lars Thorwald, and solve the murder of Thorwald’s wife. We just get to stare out our windows at nothing, while COVID-19 silently runs amok through the country.

Part of the pleasure Jimmy Stewart’s LB Jeffries gets out of his murder-watching is the lack of consequences to it, at least initially. He gets to become a semi-amateur sleuth much in that way TV viewers do on an episode of Murder, She Wrote, only he gets a greater level of control over the story. Jeffries gets to define the characters in his own terms and assign them his own thoughts - the actions of the Songwriter and Ms. Torso are their own, but their motivations are provided by Jeffries, as well as Grace Kelly’s Lisa and Thelma Ritter’s Stella. 

And the life the characters in Rear Window create is, actually, shockingly similar to what a lot of people have been dealing with for the past three months, or at least the most fortunate among us. Jeffries lives isolated, his only contact being with the same three people dropping by his apartment regularly. Lisa has a fancy restaurant deliver a take-and-bake dinner to Jeffries’ apartment. Miss Lonelyhearts has phantom dates in her living room. The whole movie is modern quarantine in a nutshell. 

Beyond that, as the movie reaches its conclusion it takes on an increasingly allegorical feel for our modern coronavirus lives. Jeffries is able to maintain his safety so long as he stays inside his apartment. Danger only arises when Lisa and Stella go out into the greater world. Lisa, being a healthy young person of sound mind, is able to survive the danger when she comes face-to-face with it. But through Lisa, the danger comes home to Jeffries, who, in his already weakened physical state, is nearly killed by it. 

Even the last shot of the movie fees like a cherry-on-top for a metaphor Hitchock could have never intended. We gradually pan across Jeffries’ apartment, only to find out that his adventures have now led to a second broken leg, imprisoning him in his apartment for an even longer period of time. Lisa sits on the other side of the room, quarantining alongside him, flipping through a magazine about the Himalayas, planning for a day well into the future when she and Jeffries will be able to embrace the outside world again.