Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]

 

Yesterday’s speculation on the relationship in cities between optionality (our ability to see others) and privacy (our desire to prevent them seeing us) used housing, the linchpin of cities, and the seminal study of peeping, Rear Window:

 

Wholesome or unhealthy?  Milk, a sandwich, and a telephoto lens

 

As we saw yesterday, the movie hinges when our skeptical audience surrogate, the ultra-refined Lisa, finally overcomes her well-mannered aversion of curiosity in favor of a civic duty:

 

“Tell me exactly what you saw and what you think it means”

 

Citizens must see, as Jane Jacobs would have said it, but citizens may not be vigilantes.  So they take their suspicions to authority, personified by crusty old Lieutenant Doyle:

 

Lt. Doyle: Lars Thorwald… is no more a murderer than I am.
Jeff: [stunned] You mean that you can explain everything strange that has been going on over there, and is still going on?

Doyle’s is the voice of etiquette:

 

Lt. Doyle: No, and neither can you. That’s a secret private world you’re looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn’t possibly explain in public.

 

Doyle’s is the voice of reason and restraint:

 

Lisa: Like killing their wives?
Lt. Doyle: Get that idea out of your head. It will only lead you in the wrong direction.

 

In cities, we owe each other the duty of not speaking ill, however much we may think it, until we are certain:

 

Jeff: What about the knife and saw I saw him wrapping up in newspaper?
Lt. Doyle: Do you own a saw?
Jeff: Well… yeah. At home in my garage, I keep…
Lt. Doyle: How many people did you cut up with it?

 

Citizens or criminals?  Or both?

 

Their dialog is reminiscent of a grand jury, with Jeff as prosecutor, seeking probable cause to indict, or at least to investigate:

 

Lt. Doyle: You didn’t see the killing or the body. How do you know there was a murder?
Jeff: Because everything this fellow’s done has been suspicious: trips at night in the rain, knifes, saws, trunks with rope, and now this wife that isn’t there anymore.
Lt. Doyle: I admit it does have a mysterious sound. But it could be any number of things for the wife disappearing. Murder is the least part.
Jeff: Now, Doyle, don’t tell me that he’s just an unemployed magician amusing the neighborhood with his sleight of hand. Don’t tell me that.

 

Reluctantly, Doyle investigates, and discovers that Thorwald put on a train to Pennsylvania a woman he represented as his wife.  Our citizens voyeurs’ reaction is characteristic and human:

 

Lisa: Jeff, you know if someone came in here, they wouldn’t believe what they’d see? You and me with long faces plunged into despair because we find out a man didn’t kill his wife. We’re two of the most frightening ghouls I’ve ever known.

 

Long ago, I lived for six months in Amsterdam, a community of the nicest, most pleasant, amiable, reserved urban dwellers I have ever known.  My coworker Joe Galloway lived in an attractive apartment in the near suburbs, on the second floor of a long line of two-story flats, with his balcony overlooking back yards from left to right as far as the eye could see.  All was tranquility – children playing on swing sets, barbecuing sausages, laundry hanging.  “Just once,” he said to me one evening, “I’d like to see somebody fall down drunk, or smack his wife, or scream with rage.”  Joe wanted to see drama – if only to drop the veil of pretense for a moment and see that the Dutch were as human as all of us.

 

Jeff is like that, digging for knowledge of what he is convinced must have happened:

 

Jeff: Those two yellow zinnias at the end, they’re shorter now. Now since when do flowers grow shorter over the course of two weeks? Something’s buried there.

 

What’s buried in the garden?

 

The morning after a neighbor’s dog paws at the zinnias, the sun rises to a dead dog on the patio:

 

Jeff: He killed a dog last night because the dog was scratching around in the garden. You know why? Because he had something buried in that garden that the dog scented.
Lt. Doyle: Like an old hambone?
Jeff: I don’t know what pet names Thorwald had for his wife.

 

Joke, yes – but echo of private intimacy.

 

Because Jeff sees but is not seen, he has the stalker’s advantage.  He can provoke Thorwald, which he does. 

 

The weapon: one-way knowledge

 

He has Lisa slip a note under Thorwald’s door – observe how Jefferies the protagonist plays with the other characters as director Hitchcock plays with his actors, himself never moving but ordering them about and filming their actions and responses. 

 

Triumph and terror in one shot

 

When Thorwald is reading it, he dials the phone:

 

Go ahead, Thorwald – pick it up.  <Venomously.>  You’re curious.  You wonder if it’s your girl friend calling.  The one you killed for.  Pick it up, Thorwald!

            Hello.

Did you get my note?

Well, did you get it, Thorwald?

            Who are you?

I’ll give you a chance to find out.  Meet me in the bar at the Brevoort, and do it right away.

            Why should I?

For a little business meeting – to settle the estate of your late wife.

            <Pause>  I don’t know what you mean.

Now stop wasting time, Thorwald, or I’ll hang up and call the police.

 

Thorwald has almost no dialog – less than a hundred words total, and his character is carried entirely by Raymond Burr’s ominous body language and heavy-footed stride, as if with every breath he is knifed anew by his crime. 

 

Where is my tormenter?

 

In his response to Jeff we hear the cracking of panic:

 

            <Breathing heavily>  I only have a hundred dollars or so.

That’s a start.  I’m at the Brevoort now.  I’ll be looking for you.  <Hangs up>

 

Now that he has embarked on intervention, Jeff cannot stop.  When Thorwald is away, Lisa burgles Thorwald’s apartment, finding Mrs. Thorwald’s jewelry.  Thorwald returns as she is signaling to Jeff, and though the police arrive, Jeff pays the price of peeping: Lisa signals, and Thorwald looks across the courtyard into Jeff’s rear window:

 

In the moment of our seeing, anonymity is lost

 

The rear window is thus symbolically the window into our private soul.  In our work environments, everybody likes an office, but we learn to accommodate workstations and partitions.  We sacrifice a bit of our privacy because we can afford to do so during our daylight, public hours.

 

By contrast, Thorwald has had his privacy violated.  Murderer though he be, his scraps of dialog ring with the bewilderment of the urban dweller suddenly denuded of the veil of his privacy.  As he stalks Jeff in Jeff’s apartment, out from his comes a monolog of lamentation:

 

What do you want from me? …  Your friend – the girl – could have turned me in.  Why didn’t she?

What is it you want?  A lot of money?  I don’t have any money.

Say something.

Say something!  Tell me what you want!

 

Our first non-jeff POV; his tormenter as seen by Thorwald

 

He is not so much vengeful, nor even murderous, as genuinely outraged and fittingly, he seeks to defenestrate Jeff:

 

I’ll give you a good look out the window!

 

That’s the climax – the price of peeping, the price of one-way seeing is that when you are seen, you are culpable, and vulnerable.

 

 

In cities, the privacy we want is a one-way mirror, where we can see out but no one can see in.  This is impossible, but we seek it.

 

Miss Torso’s loving husband comes home

 

No one ever said we were consistent.

 

Consistency would be so dull

 

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