P A R T    T W O
Lies About the Good Old Days, During the War

+ Part One: Blacker Blacks and Whiter Whites
+ Part Three: A Tour of the East River

Arguably the most popular way of understanding Lisa's (Grace Kelly) and Jeff's (Jimmy Stewart) fascination with the macabre in Rear Window is as a sort of stand-in for the moviegoer's voyeuristic infatuation with violence. There's something to be said for this idea. Homebound with a pair of binoculars and an enormous telephoto lens (which Stella [Thelma Ritter] refers to as a "portable keyhole"), Jeff looks all the time; it's his primary preoccupation. After a brief period of resistance in which she describes as "diseased" Jeff's compulsive, morbid theorizing about Anna Thorwald's (Irene Winston) fate, Lisa becomes an inveterate looker, too. Jeff's apartment even resembles a movie house, with a panoramic window that mimics a theater screen and reveals such a wide vista of activity that the eye (Jeff's, or ours) must track around to take it all in.

After Detective Doyle (Wendell Corey) scolds Jeff for looking in on people's private lives, adding that "Lars Thorwald is no more a murderer than I am" before leaving the apartment in a huff, Lisa and Jeff brood over what they've done. "You'd think we could be a little bit happy that the poor woman is alive and well," says Lisa, and pulls the blinds down over the window for the first time in the film. "Show's over for tonight." Perhaps in 1954 the audience could feel some of Lisa and Jeff's shame over their secret wish to learn that Anna Thorwald has died, thus vindicating their theories about her murder. But in the Year 2000, the alignment between Jeff's apartment and a movie theater doesn't quite wash anymore. After all, the blinds clearly stand in for curtains, and how long has it been since you've seen a movie screen hidden by a curtain? Suddenly it's as though you're not seeing yourself in the way that Lisa and Jeff look; you're seeing a long-gone moviegoer, evoked in the simulation of a long-outdated apparatus.

Restoring Rear Window entails not only the impossible task of retrieving the color spectrum of the movie's original negative, but also exhibiting it in the sort of theater Hitchcock had in mind when he first put the movie together. This is doubly impossible, although when the curtain falls on Lisa and Jeff's voyeuristic gaze, it's a dim reminder of how much things have changed. Rear Window opens to a disembodied shot of the window in question, blinds lowered. They gradually rise as the credits unfold, finally freeing the camera to drift around the courtyard. One can only theorize about the alignment this sets up with the curtains that have just floated back from the movie screen in our hypothetical theater of the mid-1950s. The experience of watching the theater and the movie work in concert this way isn't available to us anymore.

The newly restored film plugs doggedly away at its cinematic metaphor regardless. Just as the movie is affected by the variety of perspectives that an audience brings to it, so too are the narratives within the movie rewritten based on who happens to be witnessing them. Lisa, a fashion expert who always knows how to dress for an occasion, uses what the movie calls "feminine intuition" to deduce Anna's murder from her husband's cover story that she has left for the country without her alligator handbag. Being a nurse, Stella is the one to spot an impending drug overdose from a couple hundred feet away. And Jeff, with his background in wartime airborne reconnaissance and as a photojournalist with a taste for the violent and spectacular, is uniquely qualified to distill the telltale signs of murder from the seemingly innocent comings-and-goings of one Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr). Stella is an avid reader of mystery novels so she can theorize about how Lars might have disposed of the evidence. But it takes Jeff, a war veteran, to ask Rear Window's big, seriously fucked-up question: "Just how would you start to cut up a human body?"

Not much is made of Jeff's participation in one seriously fucked-up war, in which many bodies were terribly injured or worse. But the movie seems to want you to notice he was there, repeatedly blocking Grace Kelly in front of a framed photo of a younger Jeff and Tom Doyle — who pose with what appears to be a reconnaissance plane — and giving Doyle lots of chances to refer to his and Jeff's wartime tour. "How did we ever stand each other in that plane for three years?" he asks Jeff.

This comes right after Doyle stands at Jeff's mantle and casually glances over the apartment's sole color picture: a cheerful, if unremarkable, still life. He favors the still life, even though black-and-white wartime photos, which fill the apartment, would serve better to jog his memory and help him answer the question he's about to ask. It's a scene that begs to be blocked in front of the picture of Jeff and Doyle together at the airfield, but at no time do the characters ever look at this photo or remark on it. He may be a homicide detective, but Doyle is suddenly uninterested in uncovering violence once his mind drifts to the war. As he gazes at the happy still life, he absently reminds Jeff about the constitution to explain why he can't search Lars's apartment. This is in the middle of Lars's prolonged effort to erase signs of his murder. His flat "must be knee-deep in evidence," Jeff argues; had Doyle chosen to go ahead and violate Lars's civil rights, he would have walked into a chamber of horrors.

His refusal to see the evidence first-hand leaves Lisa and Jeff to try and explain what they have witnessed to make them think a murder has taken place. When their enumeration of the evidence against Thorwald starts to bend Doyle's ear, he changes the subject by suggesting that they trade "lies about the good old days, during the war." What could exorcize the subject of murder from a conversation quicker than lies about one of the most murderous armed conflicts in history?

By this point, Lisa and Jeff are so infatuated with their own theories about Thorwald's murder that they keep on about it, despite Doyle's parry to the conversation's thrust. Doyle, though, can bide his time, because he knows the truth: everything is about the war. It is the foundation of Rear Window's fictional world, having brought Jeff success in his career, and, ultimately, having left him homebound with a broken leg and a seasoned eye for the grotesque. And this truth comes out when Jeff, haranguing Doyle to sneak into Thorwald's apartment without a search warrant, scolds him not to be so careful. "If I had been careful piloting that reconnaissance plane during the war," Doyle retorts, "You wouldn't have had the chance to take the pictures that won you a medal and a good job, and fame and money."

The war, memories and images of the war's violence, are a silent presence looming over Rear Window. Mentioned in passing but never really discussed even in lies, the war nevertheless creates the events we see and orders Jeff's imagination so that he is able to discern, from the quotidian kaleidoscope beyond his apartment window, Thorwald's subtle signatures of cover up and murder.