Study Questions: Week Three

Voyeurism, Domination, and Constructing Reality

Rear Window (1954)

Vertigo (1946)

Voyuerism is a familiar subject in Hitchcock's films. His camera invites the audience to become watchers, as in the opening shot of Psycho. In Rear Window, however, voyuerism becomes the subject of the film itself, encouraging viewers to do more than watch. Through the central character, they must examine the moral and psychological ambiguities of the voyuer himself. Then, in Vertigo, another watcher seeks to make real the object of his gaze with disastrous results.

Rear Window: The Dangers of Looking.

1. What is the thematic significance significance of Jeff's (Jimmy Stewart) immobility? How does it refer to his emotional as well as his physical state?

2. How does Hitchcock employ mise-en-scene to tell the story of Jeff's broken leg? How does it also serve as a visual version of his biography?

3. In what ways do the lives of the characters across the courtyard observed by Jeff enact variations of romantic and domestic entanglements (or lack of them)?

4. How might these little dramas also serve as projections of Jeff's fears and desires?

5. How does the first appearance of Lisa (Grace Kelly) suggest that she might be a threatening presence in Jeff's life. (Note that her shadow passes over his sleeping face in the same way the shadow of the alien space ship passes over the moon in Independence Day.)

6. In what ways does Hitchcock associate cameras with weapons?

7. How does the film suggest that Jeff's voyeurism and his voyeuristic profession give him a sense of detached control while, at the same time reflecting his sexual immaturity (and anxieties)?

8. Could you argue that the the manifest plot, the discovery of the fate of Thorwald's (Raymond Burr) wife is less important than the resolution (if there is one) of Jeff's psychological conflicts?

9. What is the symbolic significance of Lisa's clothes? How do they both express and restrain her sexuality ( theme central to Vertigo)? Why is the statement made by her wearing jeans on the film's closing sequence? What book is she reading, and what is the significance of exchanging it for a copy of Harper's Bazaar?

10. Finally, the big question: How are the three narrative threads of the film (Jeff's professional life, his romantic involvement with Lisa, and the discovery of a murder) related thematically? Or, how might the three all express the film's ambivalent attitude toward sexuality and domestic life?

Vertigo: Creating Dreams.

1. In what ways are Rear Window's Jeff and Vertigo's Scottie (both played by Jimmy Stewart) similar in their psychological difficulties and in the dilemmas they must confront?

2. How does Scottie's meeting with Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) not only set the plot in motion buy also defines the power relationship between the two old friends. Read the relevant section in Kolker.

3. The title of the film refers specifically to Scottie's fear of heights, but it also refers the increasing instability of his world. How does the confused identity of Madeline/Judy express this instability? Consider the significance of his response to Madeline, her apparent death, the discovery of Judy, and Scottie's attempt to recreate an illusory woman.

4. Why does Hitchcock spend so much time having Scottie drive around San Francisco? Is the setting of any specific narrative significance? Or is Hitchcock incorporating effects which characterized American films of the mid-1950s? Particularly the tendency toward spectacle?

5. Two of the film's major sequences take place at San Juan Bautista, an old Spanish mission south of San Francisco. Does this setting suggest and religious themes in the film?

6. Describe the way visual indicators define character differences between Madeline and Judy. How do their clothes point up these differences?

7. Why is Scottie driven to transform Judy into Madeline? What does he hope to achieve?

8. How does this transformation manage to exchange Judy's sexuality for Madeline's glamour? Why might he be seen as trying to control his anxieties by constraining her sensual nature?

9. What parallels can you see between Scottie's destruction of the real Judy and Elster's murder of his wife?

10. What is the meaning of the final shot of Scottie? How does it express his fate, and what is that fate?