Rear Window

In Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), L.B. Jeffries, the incapacitated professional photographer, is cared for by an outspoken “insurance company nurse” named Stella. From the beginning of the film, Hitchcock establishes Stella as a character that reveals the film’s cinematic self-consciousness. Stella’s first appearance in the film is during the daytime, when she enters the room and finds Jeffries intently gazing out his rear window and into his various neighbors’ apartments, as is his habit. Stella warns Jeff about overstepping his boundaries by subtly reminding him of the self-blinding of Oedipus. “In the old days, they used to put your eyes out with a red hot poker,” she says. Through Stella, the film is referencing its own structure, which is based on the Oedipus complex; as Barbara Odabashian explains, the film centers on Jeff’s search for the truth about his “mother” (Mrs. Thorwald) and his investigation of Mr. Thorwald (the “murderer-father figure”) and the violent and implicitly sexual act he has committed.

As Stella walks over to Jeffries in his wheelchair, she notes with disapproval how, “We’ve become a race of peeping Toms. What people oughta do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.” Here, the film is once again acknowledging its own existence by referencing another Hitchcock mystery thriller, Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Stella reminds viewers of Uncle Charlie’s contemptuous speech to Young Charlie in the bar: “Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you’d find swine?” Later, when Young Charlie looks into her house from the outside, she realizes the burden of her knowledge of Uncle Charlie’s criminality and never again enters her house from the front door. Just like Young Charlie, Jeff’s voyeurism places a heavy burden on him. Even his profession, photography, is a form of voyeurism that physically incapacitated him. Later in the film, when Lisa is being physically abused by Thorwald in his apartment, Jeff’s voyeuristic tendencies draw him to the scene, while the corresponding burden of knowledge drives him into a state of panic as he sits in his apartment helplessly. Stella, one of the mother-like figures to Jeff in the film, nurtures not only Jeff, but also the audience’s understanding of how the film uses its self-awareness to comment on the consequences of voyeurism.