Cities imply optionality and that requires privacy: Part 1, the virtue of peeping
Cities are where total strangers live companionably in close proximity – literally on the other side of a wall, floor, or ceiling. Why do we do this, and what does it imply about how we create urban housing?
As housing is the linchpin of cities, all these tensions and choices manifest themselves in our housing configuration choices. Hence the continuing urban fascination with Alfred Hitchcock’s best movie, Rear Window.
Stella: We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes sir. How’s that for a bit of homespun philosophy?
Jeff: Readers Digest, April 1939.
Stella: Well, I only quote from the best.
People live in cities to be physically close to one another – for business, social, religious, political, or intellectual reasons. Draw a half-mile radius around a rural farm and you may touch only livestock. Draw it around a suburban house and you may encircle five thousand people. In a central city, you may englobe fifty thousand people. The physical dimensionality of cities – going up – couples with the densely packed infrastructure of cities – townhouses and apartment flats instead of acre lots – to create human-contact options.
Lots of options.
All the world’s a rear window, the men and women in it merely players
People who live in the city have the option to get face-to-face with many people very quickly. We may find each other in offices, restaurants, movie theaters, museums, cafes, clubs, stores, parks, and sidewalks. We spend our days, and for many of us our evenings, amid the hurly-burly of urban life, and we enjoy that optionality. As such, cities enable the formation of specialized groups.
Meanwhile, even as we are social much of the time, we also value our privacy, especially in the evenings and at night. We need the optionality not to have other people in our faces. We want soundproofing for quiet enjoyment, high-tech ventilation to whisk away the smells of what’s rotten in Elsinore Towers. We want the personal touch of doormen, and the impersonal touch of never-sleeping security cameras.
In short, we want the optionality to see with the privacy of not being seen.
It is human curiosity to wonder at the lives on view
To me, just as The World Inside is a novel of the ultimate urban environment, Rear Window is the ultimate urban movie, for it presents exactly this dilemma between optionality and exposure. Bear with me on this deconstruction, for it reveals, I think, all the challenges of modern urban living.
As Rear Window opens, our protagonist, L. B. Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart, Hitchcock’s ideal everyman) is a photographer – a professional voyeur – recuperating from a broken leg. From the very beginning – the movie’s opening dialog, in fact – Hitchcock sounds his theme: the power of seeing and not being seen:
Jeff:
Like so many Hitchcock jokes, its humor coats the thematic barb.
Restless with immobilization, Jeff trawls with his telephoto lens across the wide-open windows displayed for his examination:
If you’re a professional, it’s not peeping – or is it?
Jeff sees nothing wrong with his snooping, although chided for it by his home-care nurse Stella:
Stella: The
Jeff: Oh, hello, Stella.
Stella: And they got no windows in the workhouse.
– and his stylish society girl friend Lisa (the exquisite Grace Kelly):
Lisa: I’m not much on rear window ethics.
Jeff shrugs off their objections. His peeping is benign, such as when he indulges his distant prurient interest:
Known throughout the movie as ‘Miss Torso’
(As usual with Hitchcock, there is a self-referential element. Moviegoers are voyeurs. We see into a movie, through the invisible and impermeable fourth wall, even as we are not seen in a movie theater. In the fictional light we are shielded by the real darkness, which led, back in simpler times, to going to the movies becoming a euphemism for something else.)
One by one, Jefferies constructs imagined lives for each of his anonymous subjects. There is Miss Lonelyhearts, primping for a gentleman who is never there;
A brilliant character who never speaks
a songwriter who’s creatively blocked:
What songs were they singing?
and salesman Lars Thorwald, rumpled and heavy, almost a reincarnation of Willy Loman, and his bedridden wife.
Devoted husband Thorwald returns
Jefferies cannot sleep – it’s hot and humid and his leg pains him – and one night as he wakes repeatedly.
Jeff: I just can’t figure it. He went out several times last night in the rain carrying his sample case.
Stella: Well, he’s a salesman, isn’t he?
Jeff: Well, what would he be selling at three o’clock in the morning?
Stella: Flashlights. Luminous dials for watches. House numbers that light up.
What we imagine by night we dispel by day
All of us who live in cities have experienced, if not the mystery of a man leaving house three times in one night, the unexpected glimpse into our neighbors’ personal lives. The late-night argument and crash of broken crockery. The door opened unexpectedly by a neighbor who thought we were someone else. The tiptoeing departing guest not our neighbor’s spouse. We learn to live in this proximity, seeing and not acknowledging.
The next time you stand with stranger in an elevator, observe how our eyes slide away. Physical proximity must be compensated by visual distance.
Yet we cannot stop ourselves from making a furtive glance (an idea echoed in American Beauty).
So beguiling are Jefferies’ fantasies of his neighbors’ lives that he turns away from the most beautiful woman he can or could ever imagine even as she presents herself for his admiration:
For this he is roundly chastised by the story’s practical voice:
Jeff: Would you fix me a sandwich, please?
Stella: Yes, I will. And I’ll spread a little common sense on the bread.
Hitchcock understood that in an urban setting, our spying is both psychologically irresistible and morality unjustifiable unless it is in the public interest. From childhood we are taught to hate the snitch, the tattler. In slums, where people live in unbelievable proximity to one another, and with heartbreaking poverty, the psychological and symbolic boundaries are observed. I have been in homes where a blanket serves as a privacy screen, slums where an outdoor squat is such a commonplace necessity that all who pass by look away out of delicacy for the evacuator.
In the home is our privacy, and if we have no privacy in our outer lives, how much more essential it is in our inner, home life. This is how we live, and we wish to feel at home.
Feel at home, Mavoko slum,
In cities, what Jane Jacobs called it eyes on the street are essential to our common safety. Eyes on the street are what make cities into neighborhoods and communities. Think how the MBTA subway announces, if you see something, say something. It’s seeking to break down our natural reluctance to peep that we have built up as a psychological defense to intrusion – others’, and our own.
Nevertheless, in an urban culture, if you want privacy, draw the shades.
Intimacy is required, and Hitchcock’s shades are drawn
Windows open signal nothing to hide, the defense of openness:
Lisa: A murderer would never parade his crime in front of an open window.
Seeking to justify his spying, Jeff inveigles Lisa into his puzzle, tempting her with what Hitchcock would have called womanly clues. First she will not be drawn:
Jeff: Why would a man leave his apartment three times on a rainy night with a suitcase and come back three times?
Lisa: He likes the way his wife welcomes him home.
He persists with evidence:
Lisa: A woman never goes anywhere but the hospital without packing makeup, clothes, and jewelry.
A voyeur of voyeurs: Jeff contemplating Lisa, who is contemplating the open window
Jeff draws her in to his theorizing:
Lisa: What’s a logical explanation for a woman taking a trip with no luggage?
Jeff: That she didn’t know she was going on a trip and where she was going she wouldn’t need any luggage.
Lisa: Exactly.
Comes then the most suspicious action:
Lisa: What’s he doing? Cleaning house?
Jeff: He’s washing and scrubbing down the bathroom walls.
Stella: Must’ve splattered a lot.
[both Jeff and Lisa look at Stella with disgust]
Stella: Come on, that’s what were all thinkin’. He killed her in there, now he has to clean up those stains before he leaves.
Lisa: Stella… your choice of words!
Stella: Nobody ever invented a polite word for a killin’ yet.
Must’ve splattered a lot
Finally there is one last bit of circumstantial evidence – Thorwald wiping his brow over a rope-tied wooden chest – and she is convinced:
Lisa: <Staring across at the open window> Tell me exactly what you saw and what you think it means.
This moment is the story’s hinge, for it shifts the peeping from a pleasure to a burden.
“Tell me exactly what you saw and what you think it means”
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
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