Rear Window

“Rear Window” explores personal boundaries and transgression. The story is rooted in murder, the ultimate act of violence, and leads the protagonist and his adversary into a game of cat-and-mouse in which each observes, interprets, and ultimately invades the space of the other. Hal Jeffries breaches ordinary manners and morality by watching people at their most intimate moments without their permission, but this transgression leads to the greater good of identifying and solving a murder.

Jeff watches Lars Thorwald and the rest of his neighbors through his rear window, which provides him with a perspective that is at once remote and intimate. As Jeff is confined to his apartment by an injury, the window serves as a literal boundary that marks his relative distance and isolation. When he later uses a spyglass to look at Thorwald, he remarks, “A face leaped up, and I was really seeing him for the first time. Dark-haired, but unmistakable Scandinavian ancestry” (37). Until this point, Thorwald has been a mere silhouette colored in by Jeff’s imagination. Jeff later reminds the reader of the potential distortions caused by windows: “It was like when you’re looking at someone through a pane of imperfect glass, and a flaw in the glass distorts the symmetry of the reflected image for a second” (44).