Analysis Of Rear Window, By Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock loved playing with genders and sexuality. In several of his films he castrated and demasculinized the man, such as Jefferies (James Stewart) being confined to a wheelchair without the opportunity to move and save a damsel in distress, Lisa (Kelly Grace), when the plot suggests it in Rear Window (1954). In other films, Hitchcock would implicitly place two male leading stars sharing an odd dynamic that suggests of a gay couple in Rope (1948), which turned out to be egregious for such conservative times—prior to the Sexual Liberation movement that began in the 60s. In fact, Hitchcock perpetuated it more than once, bringing back the subject in his 1951 Strangers on a Train, with Bruno (Robert Walker) and Guy (Farley Granger), as

two strangers who swap murders, but whose background characters depict the existing stereotypes of homosexuals at the time. Not to mention that there is a strange interaction between both characters that has led to many critics and viewers to speculate on the subject of their sexuality. The role of women is another questionable debate, some even arguing that Hitchcock was a misogynist director because of his sometimes depiction of women in film, such as in Vertigo (1958) or their mistreatment, such as Psycho (1960) or Marnie (1964). Yet, many female characters in Hitchcock’s films turn out to be the valiant and strong.

In Rear Window, Lisa has enough courage to break into Thordwald’s apartment to find out if he is a murderer who killed his own wife. Lisa is also the one chasing after Jefferies and the one that seems to wear the pants in the relationship. Marnie is another example of a strong female character who has the abilities to deceive men and then rob from them through the exploitation of her beauty and intellect. I will like to examine two films closely, Vertigo and The Birds (1963), for the reason that both of the films’ endings are very much open to the viewer’s interpretation. Furthermore, I believe that Hitchcock’s long fascination regarding the gender’s role in society is suggested in both of the films’ endings. He wanted to say that just as his characters live in an all-male dominated world, so are humans. I will like to argue that in both films, the beautiful female characters yearn or already have certain independence and dominion over their own lives, yet both of the films’ endings suggests that these female characters live in a world where women are constantly dominated and castrated by men. In other words, for as hard as they thrive to be independent, they

can’t. The blond icy actresses in Hitchcock’s films are always subjected to his directions and so are the female characters in his films, despite their willingness to gain some kind of autonomy. The natural art of Hitchcock is to use violence against all of them, as a form of castration, in order for them to be docile.
In real life, Hitchcock had an obsessive history for wanting to control the working and private lives of his leading ladies.

He thought Grace Kelly was the ideal woman: “[She is] sensitive, disciplined and very sexy.” As a matter of fact, the director wanted Kelly to do a comeback to Hollywood through his film Marnie, a role she eventually did not accept and was then given to Tippi Hedren instead, with whom Hitchcock worked in The Birds. Yet, subsequently after Marnie, Hedren was looking to do other kinds of jobs, outside of Hitchcock’s horror films, but was impeded by Hitchcock’s contract. In 2012 HBO released a television film, titled The Girl (2012), which is about the making of The Birds. In the TV film, Hedren grows increasingly uncomfortable with Hitchcock’s attentions and wants to find a way out, yet her exclusive contract does not allow her to get work anywhere else in Hollywood, which ultimately ends her career. The movie is an account of real life events in the life of the actress, Hedren. Hitchcock in a way castrated Hedren and her career after she requested work freedom and liberty to do other projects outside of Hitchcock’s. But Hedren wasn’t the only actress that Hitchcock wanted to control, many of his leading ladies, he wanted total control over them. And he did it in other ways by selecting the proper clothes to wear, the right makeup, demanding their voices to sound certain way, etc. Some argue that he was sexually repressed since his childhood, it

developed and morphed into an odd fetish to rape and murder women. He followed French playwright, Victorien Sardou’s suggestions, to “Torture the women!” as part of any play’s, or in this case screenplay, construction. Sardou’s advice is something that Hitchcock does in most of his films, and effectively does in Vertigo and The Birds.