1 00:00:00,090 --> 00:00:02,500 The following content is provided under a Creative 2 00:00:02,500 --> 00:00:04,030 Commons license. 3 00:00:04,030 --> 00:00:06,360 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 4 00:00:06,360 --> 00:00:10,730 continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:10,730 --> 00:00:13,340 To make a donation, or view additional materials 6 00:00:13,340 --> 00:00:17,210 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 7 00:00:17,210 --> 00:00:17,835 at ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:26,150 --> 00:00:28,040 PROFESSOR: My intention tonight is primarily 9 00:00:28,040 --> 00:00:33,360 to provide you with some suggestions, framings 10 00:00:33,360 --> 00:00:36,210 that will help in your viewing of these two films. 11 00:00:36,210 --> 00:00:37,930 And we'll also, at the same time, 12 00:00:37,930 --> 00:00:40,330 reinforce and extend some of the things 13 00:00:40,330 --> 00:00:42,420 I was saying this afternoon about Hitchcock's work 14 00:00:42,420 --> 00:00:43,045 more generally. 15 00:00:43,045 --> 00:00:45,550 And about the recurring preoccupations, 16 00:00:45,550 --> 00:00:48,370 themes, obsessions, strategies that 17 00:00:48,370 --> 00:00:50,460 are characteristic of his work. 18 00:00:50,460 --> 00:00:53,957 And I want to begin by adding one note to what I 19 00:00:53,957 --> 00:00:55,040 was saying this afternoon. 20 00:00:55,040 --> 00:00:57,660 You remember I began this afternoon by talking about 21 00:00:57,660 --> 00:00:59,780 the relationship between Hitchcock and what I call 22 00:00:59,780 --> 00:01:02,890 the "Genius of the System"-- borrowing on that famous 23 00:01:02,890 --> 00:01:06,489 passage from Andre Bazin, who said Hollywood is very 24 00:01:06,489 --> 00:01:08,530 interesting, and there are interesting directors, 25 00:01:08,530 --> 00:01:11,750 but why don't we talk about the genius of the system-- 26 00:01:11,750 --> 00:01:16,680 the way the system itself encourages or enables complex 27 00:01:16,680 --> 00:01:18,260 forms of narrative. 28 00:01:18,260 --> 00:01:21,930 And we've already talked several times earlier 29 00:01:21,930 --> 00:01:23,910 in the course about this topic. 30 00:01:23,910 --> 00:01:25,520 But there's another way in which one 31 00:01:25,520 --> 00:01:28,360 can think about this issue with regard to Hitchcock. 32 00:01:28,360 --> 00:01:30,120 And I think it's helpful in clarifying, 33 00:01:30,120 --> 00:01:31,520 so I want to mention it again. 34 00:01:31,520 --> 00:01:33,750 One way to think about Hitchcock is 35 00:01:33,750 --> 00:01:37,880 to think of the Hitchcock film as a kind of genre unto itself. 36 00:01:37,880 --> 00:01:38,380 Right? 37 00:01:38,380 --> 00:01:38,963 The Hitchcock. 38 00:01:38,963 --> 00:01:43,100 Just like the Western, or the screwball comedy. 39 00:01:43,100 --> 00:01:46,080 Broadly, Hitchcock belongs to the broad category 40 00:01:46,080 --> 00:01:50,040 of what might be-- well, of two categories-- the horror film-- 41 00:01:50,040 --> 00:01:53,280 although, he's a strange director of horror. 42 00:01:53,280 --> 00:01:55,450 He certainly is incredibly influential. 43 00:01:55,450 --> 00:01:58,070 In fact, when he made Psycho, he publicly announced, 44 00:01:58,070 --> 00:02:00,150 "This is my first horror film." 45 00:02:00,150 --> 00:02:02,280 Even though there are elements of horror earlier. 46 00:02:02,280 --> 00:02:04,600 And it made something of a publicity splash 47 00:02:04,600 --> 00:02:06,780 when he said that. 48 00:02:06,780 --> 00:02:10,840 So one way to understand Hitchcock 49 00:02:10,840 --> 00:02:13,120 is to think of him as participating 50 00:02:13,120 --> 00:02:16,990 in at least two categories of genre or subgenre 51 00:02:16,990 --> 00:02:19,380 that are more and more widespread than Hitchcock's 52 00:02:19,380 --> 00:02:20,330 work itself. 53 00:02:20,330 --> 00:02:23,860 And we might call that the horror film and the mystery 54 00:02:23,860 --> 00:02:24,670 film. 55 00:02:24,670 --> 00:02:27,590 And even that's a bit of an oversimplification, 56 00:02:27,590 --> 00:02:29,570 because within the category of mystery, 57 00:02:29,570 --> 00:02:33,030 you can have different sort of subcategories. 58 00:02:33,030 --> 00:02:36,140 One of which is the sort of romantic adventure of the sort 59 00:02:36,140 --> 00:02:39,480 that North by Northwest. 60 00:02:39,480 --> 00:02:42,260 The chase film starring Cary Grant 61 00:02:42,260 --> 00:02:45,690 that Hitchcock made that ends with characters 62 00:02:45,690 --> 00:02:49,590 climbing across the face of Mount Rushmore. 63 00:02:49,590 --> 00:02:52,490 So that's one sort of action-adventure version 64 00:02:52,490 --> 00:02:55,830 of a mystery story that Hitchcock makes. 65 00:02:55,830 --> 00:02:59,950 Another version-- other versions are examples of the films 66 00:02:59,950 --> 00:03:01,330 that we're seeing tonight. 67 00:03:01,330 --> 00:03:05,800 But my point is that although one could fit Hitchcock's film 68 00:03:05,800 --> 00:03:09,060 into some sort of larger category-- of mystery 69 00:03:09,060 --> 00:03:12,970 or mystery and adventure, something of that kind-- 70 00:03:12,970 --> 00:03:15,480 it's also the case that once you begin to look closely 71 00:03:15,480 --> 00:03:17,170 at Hitchcock's films, you can see 72 00:03:17,170 --> 00:03:20,530 that there's such a profound, almost obsessional coherence 73 00:03:20,530 --> 00:03:21,030 in them. 74 00:03:21,030 --> 00:03:24,280 They keep returning again and again to those dominant themes 75 00:03:24,280 --> 00:03:25,940 I talked about this afternoon. 76 00:03:25,940 --> 00:03:28,230 That one can see that they, in some sense, 77 00:03:28,230 --> 00:03:31,230 constitute a kind of category of their own. 78 00:03:31,230 --> 00:03:34,430 If we think of-- so if we think of the Hitchcock 79 00:03:34,430 --> 00:03:37,520 as a kind of genre, even within that category 80 00:03:37,520 --> 00:03:40,000 we can discover immense variation. 81 00:03:40,000 --> 00:03:42,340 So that Hitchcock's example itself becomes 82 00:03:42,340 --> 00:03:45,590 a kind of crystallized, or distilled example 83 00:03:45,590 --> 00:03:48,990 of the principle I've been talking about all semester 84 00:03:48,990 --> 00:03:54,510 concerning the way in which a system like the Hollywood 85 00:03:54,510 --> 00:03:58,280 system could engender variation, even as it is also 86 00:03:58,280 --> 00:04:02,155 committed to giving its audience something that seems familiar, 87 00:04:02,155 --> 00:04:04,280 that they recognize, that they're willing to attend 88 00:04:04,280 --> 00:04:06,390 to week after week after week. 89 00:04:06,390 --> 00:04:09,460 I think the primary point is this-- in a system in which you 90 00:04:09,460 --> 00:04:14,280 have any habitual, a regular, a daily, or a weekly relationship 91 00:04:14,280 --> 00:04:18,029 to the material, there have to be elements of familiarity, 92 00:04:18,029 --> 00:04:19,700 of repetition. 93 00:04:19,700 --> 00:04:24,980 Of a return to shared subjects and themes. 94 00:04:24,980 --> 00:04:26,870 Or you wouldn't do it. 95 00:04:26,870 --> 00:04:29,700 You would find it intolerable every time 96 00:04:29,700 --> 00:04:33,340 you made what was a routine or habitual connection to a text, 97 00:04:33,340 --> 00:04:36,970 if what it gave you was a completely new experience which 98 00:04:36,970 --> 00:04:40,120 forced you in some sense to begin at the beginning 99 00:04:40,120 --> 00:04:42,600 to figure everything out for your-- 100 00:04:42,600 --> 00:04:45,090 you would find that you would resist such an experience. 101 00:04:45,090 --> 00:04:47,910 It's one thing to go to a great overwhelming theatrical 102 00:04:47,910 --> 00:04:51,810 experience once or twice a year, or once or twice a month. 103 00:04:51,810 --> 00:04:55,970 It's quite another thing to try to watch King Lear every day, 104 00:04:55,970 --> 00:04:57,680 or even every week. 105 00:04:57,680 --> 00:04:59,290 So part of the difference has to do 106 00:04:59,290 --> 00:05:02,910 with the need to what it means to have a habitual, rather 107 00:05:02,910 --> 00:05:06,074 than an occasional, connection to the artwork. 108 00:05:06,074 --> 00:05:07,490 And one of the fundamental-- well, 109 00:05:07,490 --> 00:05:10,200 maybe the most important thing about the Hollywood studio 110 00:05:10,200 --> 00:05:12,660 film, and later the most important thing 111 00:05:12,660 --> 00:05:15,480 about American television narrative forms, 112 00:05:15,480 --> 00:05:21,370 is the is the intimate, regular, routinized connection 113 00:05:21,370 --> 00:05:24,915 that the viewer has with the material. 114 00:05:24,915 --> 00:05:26,790 And in the case of Hitchcock, what we can say 115 00:05:26,790 --> 00:05:28,440 is, really from the very beginning 116 00:05:28,440 --> 00:05:32,470 of his work to the end, there are these fundamental, 117 00:05:32,470 --> 00:05:36,330 emotional, and strategic, or technical coherences, 118 00:05:36,330 --> 00:05:39,050 resemblances, that made virtually every Hitchcock 119 00:05:39,050 --> 00:05:41,530 film a kind of commentary on an earlier one. 120 00:05:41,530 --> 00:05:43,250 And the two films you are seeing tonight 121 00:05:43,250 --> 00:05:45,500 are a particularly rich example of this. 122 00:05:45,500 --> 00:05:48,390 So I hope you'll think hard about the way in which they 123 00:05:48,390 --> 00:05:50,600 are both profoundly different from each other, 124 00:05:50,600 --> 00:05:53,630 and also at the same time, strangely, mysteriously, 125 00:05:53,630 --> 00:05:54,920 profoundly similar. 126 00:05:54,920 --> 00:05:58,300 How they circle back on the same kinds of obsessions 127 00:05:58,300 --> 00:06:00,650 and the same kinds of problems. 128 00:06:00,650 --> 00:06:03,430 And part of our pleasure in looking at the two films 129 00:06:03,430 --> 00:06:06,720 is the simultaneous recognition of the difference 130 00:06:06,720 --> 00:06:08,080 and similarity. 131 00:06:08,080 --> 00:06:11,660 Well, that is an example in small compass of the larger 132 00:06:11,660 --> 00:06:16,370 principle of popular aesthetics that I was saying needs 133 00:06:16,370 --> 00:06:19,770 to apply to the way in which we understand the audience's 134 00:06:19,770 --> 00:06:22,330 relation to the classic Hollywood film. 135 00:06:22,330 --> 00:06:25,010 So as you're watching these two films and thinking about them, 136 00:06:25,010 --> 00:06:27,390 think both about resemblances and differences. 137 00:06:27,390 --> 00:06:32,090 And you'll get some sense of how much remarkable variation is 138 00:06:32,090 --> 00:06:36,830 possible within what remains certain familiar conventions, 139 00:06:36,830 --> 00:06:44,900 expectations-- not only about the content of the text. 140 00:06:44,900 --> 00:06:47,150 But also about the way the text is organized, 141 00:06:47,150 --> 00:06:49,510 about its formal features. 142 00:06:52,110 --> 00:06:54,320 So what I'd like to do then is say 143 00:06:54,320 --> 00:06:57,580 a couple of introductory things about each of the films you're 144 00:06:57,580 --> 00:06:58,330 going to see. 145 00:06:58,330 --> 00:07:00,760 And if I'm able to keep the time right, 146 00:07:00,760 --> 00:07:03,230 maybe we'll pause for one clip. 147 00:07:03,230 --> 00:07:06,180 Maybe we won't, depending on how concise 148 00:07:06,180 --> 00:07:09,840 I'm able to be in my arguments. 149 00:07:09,840 --> 00:07:12,220 You'll notice that Shadow of a Doubt and Rear Window 150 00:07:12,220 --> 00:07:15,070 are 11 years apart. 151 00:07:15,070 --> 00:07:17,509 And I think that's significant because one 152 00:07:17,509 --> 00:07:19,050 of the most interesting ways to think 153 00:07:19,050 --> 00:07:21,040 about comparing the two films is to think 154 00:07:21,040 --> 00:07:25,290 about the way in which Rear Window seizes on many 155 00:07:25,290 --> 00:07:27,030 of the preoccupations and themes that 156 00:07:27,030 --> 00:07:29,410 are at the center of Shadow of a Doubt. 157 00:07:29,410 --> 00:07:33,810 But deals with them in ways that one might say 158 00:07:33,810 --> 00:07:36,460 are even more disturbing and profound, 159 00:07:36,460 --> 00:07:40,940 that press more deeply into the implications that are mobilized 160 00:07:40,940 --> 00:07:42,240 in the earlier film. 161 00:07:42,240 --> 00:07:44,790 And maybe that sounds too general 162 00:07:44,790 --> 00:07:45,980 and abstract and mysterious. 163 00:07:45,980 --> 00:07:48,630 Let me be specific about what I mean. 164 00:07:48,630 --> 00:07:53,450 One example is-- one of the most interesting aspects of Shadow 165 00:07:53,450 --> 00:07:56,260 of a Doubt, if you look down to my next to the last item, 166 00:07:56,260 --> 00:07:57,900 is what I call the subplot. 167 00:07:57,900 --> 00:08:01,050 And the subplot in Shadow of a Doubt 168 00:08:01,050 --> 00:08:08,210 involves essentially a kind of subsidiary story about two 169 00:08:08,210 --> 00:08:09,780 very ineffectual characters. 170 00:08:09,780 --> 00:08:12,550 In this subplot, the husband of the family 171 00:08:12,550 --> 00:08:14,710 has a kind of-- his main preoccupation 172 00:08:14,710 --> 00:08:16,870 when he's not working at his bank-- is 173 00:08:16,870 --> 00:08:22,370 he has an ongoing conversation and sort of reading group 174 00:08:22,370 --> 00:08:27,020 with his friend, played by Hume Cronyn. 175 00:08:27,020 --> 00:08:30,160 Also as a diminutive man, also a man who seems to 176 00:08:30,160 --> 00:08:31,585 lack masculine force. 177 00:08:31,585 --> 00:08:33,830 He's short, he's not aggressive. 178 00:08:33,830 --> 00:08:36,200 And they spend their time reading murder mysteries. 179 00:08:36,200 --> 00:08:40,760 And they spend their time trying to devise the perfect murder. 180 00:08:40,760 --> 00:08:42,380 So part of what's funny about this, 181 00:08:42,380 --> 00:08:44,600 but also macabre in its own way, is 182 00:08:44,600 --> 00:08:46,900 that while these two sort of capon 183 00:08:46,900 --> 00:08:51,080 like older men-- who stand for a kind of impotent maturity, 184 00:08:51,080 --> 00:08:54,330 a kind of useless, unattractive maturity-- 185 00:08:54,330 --> 00:08:56,710 they spend their time and their diversion 186 00:08:56,710 --> 00:08:59,920 is to try to invent or imagine murders and mayhem. 187 00:08:59,920 --> 00:09:02,470 When in fact a real murderer is living 188 00:09:02,470 --> 00:09:03,920 at the heart of the family. 189 00:09:03,920 --> 00:09:06,900 And Young Charlie herself is actually in danger, 190 00:09:06,900 --> 00:09:10,100 even though her father and and no one around her in the world 191 00:09:10,100 --> 00:09:11,900 understands that that's the case. 192 00:09:11,900 --> 00:09:15,160 Although the viewer comes to understand it fairly early. 193 00:09:15,160 --> 00:09:17,410 And even Young Charlie comes to a recognition of it 194 00:09:17,410 --> 00:09:18,920 before the film is over. 195 00:09:18,920 --> 00:09:21,340 So in this subplot, what's going on 196 00:09:21,340 --> 00:09:23,260 is we have two sort of characters 197 00:09:23,260 --> 00:09:25,520 playing at the diversion of murder, 198 00:09:25,520 --> 00:09:30,110 and finding stories about murder a kind of escape. 199 00:09:30,110 --> 00:09:31,610 And in fact, one of them is actually 200 00:09:31,610 --> 00:09:36,460 trying to devise the way to kill someone and get away with it. 201 00:09:36,460 --> 00:09:38,600 And what we're supposed to feel is 202 00:09:38,600 --> 00:09:43,890 that this subplot is a reminder to us about a number of things. 203 00:09:43,890 --> 00:09:46,250 But most disturbingly and subversively, 204 00:09:46,250 --> 00:09:48,237 it should be a reminder to the audience 205 00:09:48,237 --> 00:09:50,320 of what the audience is doing sitting and watching 206 00:09:50,320 --> 00:09:51,890 Hitchcock's film. 207 00:09:51,890 --> 00:09:54,180 Because the equivalent of the audience in the movie 208 00:09:54,180 --> 00:09:58,360 is-- one equivalent of the audience in the movie 209 00:09:58,360 --> 00:10:00,700 are these two sort of foolish people 210 00:10:00,700 --> 00:10:06,410 who, immersed in, and in some degree surrounded 211 00:10:06,410 --> 00:10:11,370 by evil and authentic danger are living out 212 00:10:11,370 --> 00:10:13,820 their silly diversions by reading silly magazines 213 00:10:13,820 --> 00:10:15,530 about murder stories. 214 00:10:15,530 --> 00:10:18,450 So it's a variation on Hitchcock's obsession, 215 00:10:18,450 --> 00:10:23,400 or deep, deep recurring interest in the space of entertainment. 216 00:10:23,400 --> 00:10:27,110 And what it means to want to go to entertainments. 217 00:10:27,110 --> 00:10:30,470 And there's a certain sense in which every single Hitchcock 218 00:10:30,470 --> 00:10:39,600 film enables or is grounded upon this experience of sitting 219 00:10:39,600 --> 00:10:42,660 in the dark-- actually what sort of equivalent 220 00:10:42,660 --> 00:10:44,370 to what the Jimmy Stewart character does 221 00:10:44,370 --> 00:10:47,970 in Rear Window-- sitting in the dark, anonymous peeping 222 00:10:47,970 --> 00:10:50,630 watching the lives of other people. 223 00:10:50,630 --> 00:10:56,064 And the idea is not only that you're anonymous, 224 00:10:56,064 --> 00:10:57,730 but in some sense there's something sort 225 00:10:57,730 --> 00:10:59,170 of illicit about it. 226 00:10:59,170 --> 00:11:00,920 As if in the process of doing it, 227 00:11:00,920 --> 00:11:04,980 you're indulging what are base desires 228 00:11:04,980 --> 00:11:07,440 or at least not totally respectable impulses. 229 00:11:07,440 --> 00:11:13,270 But you're doing it in a space of comparative safety 230 00:11:13,270 --> 00:11:15,550 and a place of anonymity. 231 00:11:15,550 --> 00:11:19,240 So the subplot in Shadow of a Doubt, in a certain sense, 232 00:11:19,240 --> 00:11:22,870 raises self conscious questions about the nature 233 00:11:22,870 --> 00:11:24,570 of the entertainment that we ourselves 234 00:11:24,570 --> 00:11:26,820 are watching as audiences for the film. 235 00:11:26,820 --> 00:11:27,680 All right? 236 00:11:27,680 --> 00:11:31,930 And it's clearly a major dimension of Shadow of a Doubt. 237 00:11:31,930 --> 00:11:35,340 It's one of the things that make Shadow of a Doubt a rich movie. 238 00:11:35,340 --> 00:11:38,300 There's a kind of cunning, cynical complexity in it 239 00:11:38,300 --> 00:11:42,450 that careless viewers, or very superficial viewers 240 00:11:42,450 --> 00:11:43,530 won't pick up on. 241 00:11:43,530 --> 00:11:45,840 And it's really possible, I could really imagine, 242 00:11:45,840 --> 00:11:47,840 that they were viewers who came away from Shadow 243 00:11:47,840 --> 00:11:49,810 of a Doubt fully satisfied. 244 00:11:49,810 --> 00:11:52,280 Thinking, oh yes, evil has been purged. 245 00:11:52,280 --> 00:11:53,890 What a nice mystery story! 246 00:11:53,890 --> 00:11:57,630 Never fully picking up on the dramatized elements 247 00:11:57,630 --> 00:12:00,010 of the text, which put in question 248 00:12:00,010 --> 00:12:03,190 the ease with which we embrace these forms of entertainment, 249 00:12:03,190 --> 00:12:06,880 the ease with which we accept murder and mayhem 250 00:12:06,880 --> 00:12:08,550 as a form of diversion. 251 00:12:08,550 --> 00:12:12,740 And some of the implications of that for human nature 252 00:12:12,740 --> 00:12:16,080 and for our ideas of entertainment itself. 253 00:12:16,080 --> 00:12:23,560 So that moment when in Strangers on the Train 254 00:12:23,560 --> 00:12:26,540 when the merry-go-round goes mad and becomes 255 00:12:26,540 --> 00:12:28,410 an instrument of terror and murder 256 00:12:28,410 --> 00:12:32,310 is another example of Hitchcock's interest 257 00:12:32,310 --> 00:12:37,130 in the complexity and problematic nature 258 00:12:37,130 --> 00:12:40,890 of our connection to what we call entertainment. 259 00:12:40,890 --> 00:12:42,382 And one of the things you can see 260 00:12:42,382 --> 00:12:43,840 when you shift to Rear Window which 261 00:12:43,840 --> 00:12:46,335 you can see how these preoccupations have 262 00:12:46,335 --> 00:12:49,520 been distilled and clarified. 263 00:12:49,520 --> 00:12:52,390 Because the entire field becomes a meditation 264 00:12:52,390 --> 00:12:55,130 on the nature of our voyeuristic impulses. 265 00:12:55,130 --> 00:13:01,180 The entire film becomes a story about seeing and not 266 00:13:01,180 --> 00:13:06,750 being seen, about following-- about shadowing people, 267 00:13:06,750 --> 00:13:13,050 about hidden impulses or potential doubles 268 00:13:13,050 --> 00:13:14,890 of our own respectable nature. 269 00:13:14,890 --> 00:13:17,980 And the way in which Rear Window is 270 00:13:17,980 --> 00:13:21,950 self-reflexive or self-conscious is much more systematic 271 00:13:21,950 --> 00:13:26,880 and much more deeply embedded in the experience 272 00:13:26,880 --> 00:13:29,580 of watching the film than was the case 273 00:13:29,580 --> 00:13:30,790 with Shadow of a Doubt. 274 00:13:30,790 --> 00:13:33,170 The same theme, the same self-consciousness, 275 00:13:33,170 --> 00:13:35,300 the same awareness of the problematic nature 276 00:13:35,300 --> 00:13:37,460 of entertainment, but now much more 277 00:13:37,460 --> 00:13:39,270 systematically and fully integrated 278 00:13:39,270 --> 00:13:42,890 into the formal and thematic nature of the text. 279 00:13:42,890 --> 00:13:44,350 So I love Shadow of a Doubt. 280 00:13:44,350 --> 00:13:46,690 In many ways it's one of my favorite Hitchcocks. 281 00:13:46,690 --> 00:13:48,070 But it's early Hitchcock, and you 282 00:13:48,070 --> 00:13:51,650 can feel the much greater rigor with Hitchcock 283 00:13:51,650 --> 00:13:54,330 has begun to seize on the implications 284 00:13:54,330 --> 00:13:57,420 of his own problematic relation to his material. 285 00:13:57,420 --> 00:14:01,900 And his audience's compromised, complicit relationship 286 00:14:01,900 --> 00:14:06,080 to the material that Hitchcock mobilizes in his film. 287 00:14:06,080 --> 00:14:09,570 So Rear Window was more systematic in some sense, 288 00:14:09,570 --> 00:14:15,340 more coherently conscious of this element of its meaning. 289 00:14:15,340 --> 00:14:17,140 It's almost as if by the time we get 290 00:14:17,140 --> 00:14:22,740 to the mature films of the '50s and beyond-- the period 291 00:14:22,740 --> 00:14:28,710 between, let's say, 1951 in the early '60s, when Hitchcock did 292 00:14:28,710 --> 00:14:31,800 all of his most powerful work-- it's almost as if we can say 293 00:14:31,800 --> 00:14:37,990 that the films of this era have a kind of double significance. 294 00:14:37,990 --> 00:14:40,720 That all of these films-- all the films 295 00:14:40,720 --> 00:14:44,400 after Shadow of a Doubt are partly about filmmaking. 296 00:14:44,400 --> 00:14:46,520 They're partly self-conscious attempts 297 00:14:46,520 --> 00:14:49,920 to be meditations on the nature of movies. 298 00:14:49,920 --> 00:14:52,560 And it's almost as if there's a kind of separate story, 299 00:14:52,560 --> 00:14:53,530 a separate plot. 300 00:14:53,530 --> 00:14:56,570 There's the traditional kind of mystery story 301 00:14:56,570 --> 00:14:58,470 that, is characteristic of many films. 302 00:14:58,470 --> 00:15:01,870 But then there's this meta story, this separate story. 303 00:15:01,870 --> 00:15:03,320 It's the story of the filming. 304 00:15:03,320 --> 00:15:04,940 The story of the making of the film. 305 00:15:04,940 --> 00:15:08,700 The story or the drama of watching-- 306 00:15:08,700 --> 00:15:11,704 the drama of the watching, we might call it. 307 00:15:11,704 --> 00:15:13,120 The literary version of this would 308 00:15:13,120 --> 00:15:14,620 be the drama of the telling. 309 00:15:14,620 --> 00:15:15,120 Right? 310 00:15:15,120 --> 00:15:16,820 There are literary-- if you think 311 00:15:16,820 --> 00:15:20,152 of a novel like-- a novella like Conrad's Heart of Darkness. 312 00:15:20,152 --> 00:15:22,110 I think I've mentioned this before in the class 313 00:15:22,110 --> 00:15:23,580 because it's such a clear example. 314 00:15:23,580 --> 00:15:27,200 But the story of Heart of Darkness is really two stories. 315 00:15:27,200 --> 00:15:31,010 It's the story of the narrator's trip up the Congo River 316 00:15:31,010 --> 00:15:32,220 when he was a young man. 317 00:15:32,220 --> 00:15:34,550 But it's even more of the story of his struggles 318 00:15:34,550 --> 00:15:36,577 to tell the story 20 years later. 319 00:15:36,577 --> 00:15:38,660 And when you read Heart of Darkness, naive readers 320 00:15:38,660 --> 00:15:41,499 hate it, can't figure out why it's taking so long. 321 00:15:41,499 --> 00:15:44,040 And why it's taking the narrator so long to get to the point. 322 00:15:44,040 --> 00:15:46,570 But of course, the story is not primarily 323 00:15:46,570 --> 00:15:49,610 even about the adventure he's trying to talk about. 324 00:15:49,610 --> 00:15:52,820 It's about the struggle to tell the adventure. 325 00:15:52,820 --> 00:15:55,800 So that there's a kind of double plot in that novella 326 00:15:55,800 --> 00:15:58,880 as there is in a lot of great modernist fiction. 327 00:15:58,880 --> 00:16:00,400 As there is in another way in a lot 328 00:16:00,400 --> 00:16:03,090 of great modernist paintings, where you are aware 329 00:16:03,090 --> 00:16:05,800 not only of the subject of the painting, but of the materials 330 00:16:05,800 --> 00:16:08,330 that go into the making of the painting. 331 00:16:08,330 --> 00:16:10,210 I'm thinking of the great impressionist and 332 00:16:10,210 --> 00:16:11,950 post-impressionist painters, right? 333 00:16:11,950 --> 00:16:13,520 Or of the painters who would paint-- 334 00:16:13,520 --> 00:16:17,097 like Monet who would paint 50 versions of a haystack 335 00:16:17,097 --> 00:16:17,930 in different lights. 336 00:16:17,930 --> 00:16:21,391 Or 32 versions of Rouen Cathedral in different lights 337 00:16:21,391 --> 00:16:22,640 at different times of the day. 338 00:16:22,640 --> 00:16:23,680 Why? 339 00:16:23,680 --> 00:16:25,070 Well, one of the reasons is, he's 340 00:16:25,070 --> 00:16:28,120 trying to say that reality is not stable. 341 00:16:28,120 --> 00:16:30,250 That Rouen Cathedral changes depending 342 00:16:30,250 --> 00:16:32,230 upon the light, depending upon the weather, 343 00:16:32,230 --> 00:16:34,739 depending upon my emotion when I look at it, right? 344 00:16:34,739 --> 00:16:36,780 In other words, reality is much more complicated. 345 00:16:36,780 --> 00:16:39,720 And so that when we look at the Rouen Cathedral paintings, 346 00:16:39,720 --> 00:16:41,120 we're aware of paint. 347 00:16:41,120 --> 00:16:44,300 We're aware not just of the fact that a cathedral 348 00:16:44,300 --> 00:16:45,750 is being represented. 349 00:16:45,750 --> 00:16:49,720 We're aware of the process whereby 350 00:16:49,720 --> 00:16:57,730 Monet went through the terrific labor of capturing the image. 351 00:16:57,730 --> 00:17:00,380 And you can see there's a lot of examples even on painting 352 00:17:00,380 --> 00:17:01,870 of the thickness of the paint. 353 00:17:01,870 --> 00:17:04,020 When you look at Monet's paintings, 354 00:17:04,020 --> 00:17:06,930 very often the paint is so thick that if you see in reality 355 00:17:06,930 --> 00:17:09,069 you want to reach out and touch it. 356 00:17:09,069 --> 00:17:11,819 So you're aware of the materials that go in-- again, 357 00:17:11,819 --> 00:17:13,349 another kind of self-consciousness 358 00:17:13,349 --> 00:17:14,599 or self-reflexiveness. 359 00:17:14,599 --> 00:17:17,829 Well, Hitchcock belongs in that tradition, I think. 360 00:17:17,829 --> 00:17:21,650 And a great many of his mature films have this double plot. 361 00:17:21,650 --> 00:17:22,150 Right? 362 00:17:22,150 --> 00:17:23,920 The second plot is what we might call 363 00:17:23,920 --> 00:17:27,240 the drama of the watching, the drama of watching. 364 00:17:27,240 --> 00:17:30,320 And Rear Window was a particularly austere ingredient 365 00:17:30,320 --> 00:17:32,920 instance of this topic. 366 00:17:32,920 --> 00:17:35,760 Well, let me start over again with Shadow of a Doubt, 367 00:17:35,760 --> 00:17:37,100 set the context. 368 00:17:37,100 --> 00:17:38,990 It's World War II was going on. 369 00:17:38,990 --> 00:17:40,940 I already mentioned that Hitchcock had already 370 00:17:40,940 --> 00:17:43,080 felt ambivalent about leaving England 371 00:17:43,080 --> 00:17:45,460 at the end of the 1930s. 372 00:17:45,460 --> 00:17:50,300 And now, by 1943, this anxiety-- because the war was on, 373 00:17:50,300 --> 00:17:51,780 England was being attacked. 374 00:17:51,780 --> 00:17:53,620 Hitchcock felt ambivalence about that. 375 00:17:53,620 --> 00:17:56,820 His mother was tremendously ill, he kept receiving information. 376 00:17:56,820 --> 00:17:58,320 And she couldn't get back to England 377 00:17:58,320 --> 00:17:59,660 because the war was going on. 378 00:17:59,660 --> 00:18:01,710 You couldn't travel there. 379 00:18:01,710 --> 00:18:05,650 And it was said that he was afflicted 380 00:18:05,650 --> 00:18:10,790 by a kind of a really deep guilt and unhappiness 381 00:18:10,790 --> 00:18:12,840 during the filming of Shadow of a Doubt. 382 00:18:12,840 --> 00:18:16,072 And during the filming of Shadow of a Doubt, his mother died. 383 00:18:16,072 --> 00:18:17,530 Now there are some film critics who 384 00:18:17,530 --> 00:18:19,220 say, Oh well, the port-- well there's 385 00:18:19,220 --> 00:18:22,340 one critic who writes that the portrait of the mother 386 00:18:22,340 --> 00:18:25,170 in Shadow of a Doubt is Hitchcock's 387 00:18:25,170 --> 00:18:27,660 last benign portrait of a mother. 388 00:18:27,660 --> 00:18:30,970 But if this is a benign portrait, 389 00:18:30,970 --> 00:18:34,640 I'm very nervous about what is a mean portrait. 390 00:18:34,640 --> 00:18:36,560 And it's a very bad mistake. 391 00:18:36,560 --> 00:18:37,980 I mean, it can't be that Hitchcock 392 00:18:37,980 --> 00:18:41,229 was trying to memorialize his mother in the primary character 393 00:18:41,229 --> 00:18:41,770 in this film. 394 00:18:41,770 --> 00:18:46,400 Because as you'll see, she's a magnificent airhead. 395 00:18:46,400 --> 00:18:48,930 The only dumber woman in film that I know 396 00:18:48,930 --> 00:18:51,740 is Annabelle Lee in The General, who 397 00:18:51,740 --> 00:18:54,400 sweeps out the engine while they're 398 00:18:54,400 --> 00:18:56,590 trying to escape their enemies. 399 00:18:56,590 --> 00:18:58,740 And as you'll see, she's a figure-- 400 00:18:58,740 --> 00:19:00,180 she's a benign figure in the sense 401 00:19:00,180 --> 00:19:02,340 that she has not a mean bone in her body. 402 00:19:02,340 --> 00:19:03,590 But she's really a dullard. 403 00:19:03,590 --> 00:19:04,840 She's really silly. 404 00:19:04,840 --> 00:19:07,324 And she silly in ways the film is aware of. 405 00:19:07,324 --> 00:19:08,490 But we'll come back to that. 406 00:19:08,490 --> 00:19:12,520 So there are elements in the film of autobiography, 407 00:19:12,520 --> 00:19:14,490 but there are skewed by Hitchcock's 408 00:19:14,490 --> 00:19:17,640 own sour, cynical, disturbed nature. 409 00:19:17,640 --> 00:19:19,850 And this portrait of a family is very far 410 00:19:19,850 --> 00:19:22,930 from being a celebratory portrait, 411 00:19:22,930 --> 00:19:24,290 as will say in a moment. 412 00:19:24,290 --> 00:19:25,730 So Hitchcock's in exile. 413 00:19:25,730 --> 00:19:29,140 He's feeling a bit sour, he's feeling alienated. 414 00:19:29,140 --> 00:19:34,520 So he makes a film in which-- really his first film, or one 415 00:19:34,520 --> 00:19:37,090 of his first films-- in which an American family is 416 00:19:37,090 --> 00:19:40,300 at the very center of the story, right? 417 00:19:40,300 --> 00:19:43,870 But he treats this family with an odd kind of comic irony 418 00:19:43,870 --> 00:19:48,230 or distance that careful viewers immediately see 419 00:19:48,230 --> 00:19:49,940 and lazy viewers might not see. 420 00:19:49,940 --> 00:19:51,800 But the careful viewers definitely see. 421 00:19:51,800 --> 00:19:54,580 And one way to pick up on how subversive 422 00:19:54,580 --> 00:19:56,750 his portrait of the family is, is 423 00:19:56,750 --> 00:20:03,100 to compare him to his great contemporary Frank Capra. 424 00:20:03,100 --> 00:20:08,390 We've seen a Capra film already, of course, that standard 425 00:20:08,390 --> 00:20:10,960 and establishing screwball comedy. 426 00:20:10,960 --> 00:20:13,000 But the more characteristic Capra films-- 427 00:20:13,000 --> 00:20:14,990 all of these kinds of film were also coming out 428 00:20:14,990 --> 00:20:18,040 at the same time-- are even more fundamentally 429 00:20:18,040 --> 00:20:20,090 celebrations of American life. 430 00:20:20,090 --> 00:20:23,681 And maybe the quintessential instances of this as a film, 431 00:20:23,681 --> 00:20:25,430 that anyone who lives in the United States 432 00:20:25,430 --> 00:20:28,190 for a few months around Christmas time 433 00:20:28,190 --> 00:20:30,900 becomes sick of, what's the film? 434 00:20:30,900 --> 00:20:32,570 Starring Jimmy Stewart, who was also 435 00:20:32,570 --> 00:20:37,750 the star of one of tonight's Hitchcock film, Rear Window. 436 00:20:37,750 --> 00:20:39,220 What's the film? 437 00:20:39,220 --> 00:20:40,770 It's a Wonderful Life, yes. 438 00:20:40,770 --> 00:20:44,150 And in fact the title tells-- 439 00:20:44,150 --> 00:20:46,780 Capra-- although there is a dark side to Capra, too. 440 00:20:46,780 --> 00:20:49,860 But Capra's the great American sentimental and optimist. 441 00:20:49,860 --> 00:20:52,820 He celebrates small town virtues, celebrates-- 442 00:20:52,820 --> 00:20:54,710 and the villains in Capra's films 443 00:20:54,710 --> 00:20:56,850 are Big Business and people who are 444 00:20:56,850 --> 00:20:59,820 hostile to the values of small town America. 445 00:20:59,820 --> 00:21:02,850 Hitchcock-- and one way of understanding what Hitchcock 446 00:21:02,850 --> 00:21:05,380 is doing in Shadow-- so I feel like it's 447 00:21:05,380 --> 00:21:07,920 A Wonderful Life-- also, incidentally, these films 448 00:21:07,920 --> 00:21:11,370 often star Jimmy Stewart-- James Stewart. 449 00:21:11,370 --> 00:21:13,520 But when Hitchcock uses James Stewart, 450 00:21:13,520 --> 00:21:19,790 this upstanding, perfect example of middle American decency 451 00:21:19,790 --> 00:21:24,720 and American honesty is turned into a much more 452 00:21:24,720 --> 00:21:30,340 fearful, damaged, impotent sometimes sexually 453 00:21:30,340 --> 00:21:35,360 perverted or implicitly sexually damaged adult. 454 00:21:35,360 --> 00:21:38,020 And it was Hitchcock's version of Jimmy-- the Jimmy Stewart 455 00:21:38,020 --> 00:21:41,880 that Hitchcock draws out is a much more disturbed and damaged 456 00:21:41,880 --> 00:21:42,560 character. 457 00:21:42,560 --> 00:21:46,690 And part of what makes Stewart's performances in Hitchcock's 458 00:21:46,690 --> 00:21:48,480 films so powerful-- there's some people 459 00:21:48,480 --> 00:21:51,750 say Hitchcock and Stewart's collaboration 460 00:21:51,750 --> 00:21:53,470 was one of the great collaborations 461 00:21:53,470 --> 00:21:57,000 between a director and an actor in the history of movies. 462 00:21:57,000 --> 00:22:00,610 And you could see one great example of it in Rear Window. 463 00:22:00,610 --> 00:22:03,040 But the primary thing to recognize 464 00:22:03,040 --> 00:22:05,660 is that what Hitchcock is doing something so subversive, 465 00:22:05,660 --> 00:22:07,530 because Jimmy Stewart was already 466 00:22:07,530 --> 00:22:08,850 a kind of American icon. 467 00:22:08,850 --> 00:22:13,120 He stood when he-- except in Hitchcock's films-- 468 00:22:13,120 --> 00:22:18,280 he stood for a form of American decency and openness 469 00:22:18,280 --> 00:22:22,890 and honesty and sincerity, goodness and even heroism. 470 00:22:22,890 --> 00:22:25,300 Which Hitchcock undermines in all kinds of-- I don't mean 471 00:22:25,300 --> 00:22:28,740 that he makes Jimmy Stewart an evil character, he doesn't! 472 00:22:28,740 --> 00:22:31,564 And he him his outwardly heroic lineaments. 473 00:22:31,564 --> 00:22:33,980 But then we discover that there are things wrong with him, 474 00:22:33,980 --> 00:22:36,930 as you'll see in Rear Window. 475 00:22:36,930 --> 00:22:39,160 And he does this again in Vertigo, 476 00:22:39,160 --> 00:22:42,120 an even more dramatic example of Jimmy Stewart playing 477 00:22:42,120 --> 00:22:44,600 an impaired or a damaged character. 478 00:22:44,600 --> 00:22:46,850 In Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart has 479 00:22:46,850 --> 00:22:48,520 one leg that's broken, right? 480 00:22:48,520 --> 00:22:51,910 In a cast for all the film. 481 00:22:51,910 --> 00:22:54,700 As you'll see. 482 00:22:54,700 --> 00:22:57,410 At the very end of the film-- one of the outcomes of the film 483 00:22:57,410 --> 00:23:00,410 is what-- in the denouement-- we see Jimmy Stewart 484 00:23:00,410 --> 00:23:04,000 after the action has occurred and now he has two broken legs. 485 00:23:04,000 --> 00:23:06,130 So he's back where he was in the beginning. 486 00:23:06,130 --> 00:23:08,290 He's even more damaged, and impaired, 487 00:23:08,290 --> 00:23:10,287 and immobilized than he was before! 488 00:23:10,287 --> 00:23:12,120 And we'll come back to this, because there's 489 00:23:12,120 --> 00:23:14,930 something very disturbing about this ending in a certain way. 490 00:23:14,930 --> 00:23:17,890 Even though it purports to be a kind of survival tale 491 00:23:17,890 --> 00:23:21,710 and in that sense, a kind of happy ending. 492 00:23:21,710 --> 00:23:23,330 But the important point for the moment 493 00:23:23,330 --> 00:23:26,350 is that Hitchcock was certainly fully aware of the fact 494 00:23:26,350 --> 00:23:28,050 that what he was doing was juxtaposing 495 00:23:28,050 --> 00:23:31,140 his much more sour, unsentimental, even 496 00:23:31,140 --> 00:23:34,910 cynical vision of American life against Capra's more 497 00:23:34,910 --> 00:23:36,350 sentimental one, right? 498 00:23:36,350 --> 00:23:39,070 So it's as if he's against Capra. 499 00:23:39,070 --> 00:23:40,990 Or he's against Capricorn. 500 00:23:40,990 --> 00:23:42,670 The corniness. 501 00:23:42,670 --> 00:23:43,650 Get the pun? 502 00:23:43,650 --> 00:23:45,400 I'm stealing it, I'm stealing it. 503 00:23:45,400 --> 00:23:48,420 But the corniness, the sentimentality 504 00:23:48,420 --> 00:23:51,510 of a characteristic Capra film. 505 00:23:51,510 --> 00:23:54,590 And the characteristic attitude in the Capra film 506 00:23:54,590 --> 00:23:56,620 towards small town American life. 507 00:23:56,620 --> 00:23:58,640 And one of the ways to recognize this 508 00:23:58,640 --> 00:24:00,855 is to recognize a kind of recurring trope of his 509 00:24:00,855 --> 00:24:01,980 that I've mentioned before. 510 00:24:01,980 --> 00:24:03,590 Let's show it, Kristen. 511 00:24:03,590 --> 00:24:07,457 So here is the opening Shadow of a Doubt. 512 00:24:07,457 --> 00:24:09,290 I'm giving you a chance to watch it and then 513 00:24:09,290 --> 00:24:10,664 savor it the second time when you 514 00:24:10,664 --> 00:24:14,840 see it again, in 20 minutes, half an hour or so. 515 00:24:14,840 --> 00:24:18,330 And it dramatizes a scene, a version of which 516 00:24:18,330 --> 00:24:20,330 occurs in many Hitchcock films. 517 00:24:20,330 --> 00:24:21,420 Watch what happens. 518 00:24:21,420 --> 00:24:23,930 In which the effect of the opening 519 00:24:23,930 --> 00:24:26,740 is in some sense to implicate the viewer 520 00:24:26,740 --> 00:24:29,080 right at the beginning in an act of voyeurism. 521 00:24:29,080 --> 00:24:51,745 [MUSIC PLAYING] 522 00:24:51,745 --> 00:24:52,370 PROFESSOR: See? 523 00:24:52,370 --> 00:24:53,820 A benign scene. 524 00:24:53,820 --> 00:24:54,730 A benign cityscape. 525 00:24:54,730 --> 00:25:02,590 [MUSIC PLAYING] 526 00:25:02,590 --> 00:25:04,367 PROFESSOR: We go up to the window. 527 00:25:04,367 --> 00:25:05,825 In Psycho, it's even more dramatic. 528 00:25:05,825 --> 00:25:08,080 The film actually crawls under a window shade 529 00:25:08,080 --> 00:25:09,667 that's almost all the way down. 530 00:25:09,667 --> 00:25:11,000 But you see what the camera did? 531 00:25:17,916 --> 00:25:18,904 [KNOCK ON THE DOOR] 532 00:25:18,904 --> 00:25:19,900 CHARLIE: Come in. 533 00:25:19,900 --> 00:25:21,580 PROFESSOR: OK, stop. 534 00:25:21,580 --> 00:25:24,600 When we first see Young Charlie in the film many, 535 00:25:24,600 --> 00:25:27,750 many scenes later, what we've just 536 00:25:27,750 --> 00:25:30,910 looked at will be replicated, shot by shot. 537 00:25:30,910 --> 00:25:33,340 It's an example of what I call rhyming scenes. 538 00:25:33,340 --> 00:25:35,170 And I'll come back to that in a moment. 539 00:25:35,170 --> 00:25:39,440 So behind any door or window is potential evil. 540 00:25:39,440 --> 00:25:42,500 And the way that we go out in the street, 541 00:25:42,500 --> 00:25:44,450 that then the camera looks up at a window, 542 00:25:44,450 --> 00:25:46,640 then it goes implicitly through the window. 543 00:25:46,640 --> 00:25:48,656 And as I say, in some Hitchcock films, 544 00:25:48,656 --> 00:25:50,030 the slithering through the window 545 00:25:50,030 --> 00:25:51,810 is actually even more explicit. 546 00:25:51,810 --> 00:25:54,930 And you actually feel that the camera has slid in, 547 00:25:54,930 --> 00:25:59,950 as if it's a kind of unwelcome and unobserved witness 548 00:25:59,950 --> 00:26:00,510 to the event. 549 00:26:00,510 --> 00:26:04,420 And the implication is that you are watching something 550 00:26:04,420 --> 00:26:06,430 that you shouldn't be watching, or that you 551 00:26:06,430 --> 00:26:10,080 have access to worlds that normally you would never 552 00:26:10,080 --> 00:26:11,310 have access to. 553 00:26:11,310 --> 00:26:14,220 So behind any door window in Hitchcock's world 554 00:26:14,220 --> 00:26:19,060 can be evil, danger, fright. 555 00:26:19,060 --> 00:26:21,010 An American town, an American family. 556 00:26:21,010 --> 00:26:23,820 I've already mentioned that one of the things that's 557 00:26:23,820 --> 00:26:27,410 going on in this film is a portrait of an American family 558 00:26:27,410 --> 00:26:33,420 that has a kind of ironic undercutting built into it. 559 00:26:33,420 --> 00:26:36,410 We can feel almost from the very beginning 560 00:26:36,410 --> 00:26:37,920 when we first go to Santa Rosa. 561 00:26:37,920 --> 00:26:39,890 Our first shots of Santa Rosa-- which 562 00:26:39,890 --> 00:26:42,190 will occur shortly after the scene you've just seen. 563 00:26:42,190 --> 00:26:44,731 You'll see, there will be a more elaborated scene in which we 564 00:26:44,731 --> 00:26:46,570 learn a little bit more about Uncle Charlie, 565 00:26:46,570 --> 00:26:48,550 and then we shift to Santa Rosa. 566 00:26:48,550 --> 00:26:50,750 And the very opening scene in Santa Rosa 567 00:26:50,750 --> 00:26:54,460 shows a sort of fat, jolly policeman in bright sunlight 568 00:26:54,460 --> 00:26:55,380 directing traffic. 569 00:26:55,380 --> 00:26:57,480 As if nothing could be more wonderful than the job 570 00:26:57,480 --> 00:27:00,490 of directing traffic in a small American town 571 00:27:00,490 --> 00:27:01,850 in sunny California. 572 00:27:01,850 --> 00:27:03,250 What could be more noble? 573 00:27:03,250 --> 00:27:05,010 But there's something excessive about it. 574 00:27:05,010 --> 00:27:07,270 I mean, you almost feel, even before you fully 575 00:27:07,270 --> 00:27:09,970 realize that what the film is going to be doing, 576 00:27:09,970 --> 00:27:12,150 you sort of feel that this is too much. 577 00:27:12,150 --> 00:27:15,460 And this is characteristic of Hitchcock as well. 578 00:27:15,460 --> 00:27:17,610 Almost as if there's an excess of brightness 579 00:27:17,610 --> 00:27:19,090 and an excessive jolliness. 580 00:27:19,090 --> 00:27:22,360 As if it's more than we could possibly believe. 581 00:27:22,360 --> 00:27:28,320 And then, as the family's nature begins to unfold to us, 582 00:27:28,320 --> 00:27:31,470 what we begin to see is these children are horrible, 583 00:27:31,470 --> 00:27:32,590 insipid children. 584 00:27:32,590 --> 00:27:33,980 They're hardly admirable. 585 00:27:33,980 --> 00:27:35,480 The daughter's a nasty little bitch 586 00:27:35,480 --> 00:27:37,630 who is more interested in reading her books 587 00:27:37,630 --> 00:27:42,380 that in speaking civilly to her parents. 588 00:27:42,380 --> 00:27:45,590 Not long Charlie, but Charlie's younger sister. 589 00:27:45,590 --> 00:27:47,110 There are three children the family. 590 00:27:47,110 --> 00:27:50,290 Charlie's the oldest, right? 591 00:27:50,290 --> 00:27:53,327 And then, she has a sister and a younger brother. 592 00:27:53,327 --> 00:27:54,910 And the younger brother and the sister 593 00:27:54,910 --> 00:27:56,889 are insipid, nasty little children. 594 00:27:56,889 --> 00:27:58,430 The boy when we see him is constantly 595 00:27:58,430 --> 00:28:00,740 saying, what-- when he first sees Uncle Charlie, 596 00:28:00,740 --> 00:28:01,906 he says, "What have you got? 597 00:28:01,906 --> 00:28:03,590 What present have you gotten for me?" 598 00:28:03,590 --> 00:28:07,440 And if we don't think that the children are very attractive, 599 00:28:07,440 --> 00:28:09,940 wait till we look more closely at the fact the parents. 600 00:28:09,940 --> 00:28:11,630 I've already mentioned the father, 601 00:28:11,630 --> 00:28:14,180 who spends most of his most of his time 602 00:28:14,180 --> 00:28:18,270 with Hume Cronyn trying to talk about ridiculous diversions 603 00:28:18,270 --> 00:28:19,520 in murder mysteries. 604 00:28:19,520 --> 00:28:21,955 Meanwhile, his family is in danger around him 605 00:28:21,955 --> 00:28:24,790 and he doesn't have any sense of it. 606 00:28:24,790 --> 00:28:27,510 But the wife, as I've mentioned also, 607 00:28:27,510 --> 00:28:29,630 comes across as one of the supreme airheads 608 00:28:29,630 --> 00:28:31,030 in American movies. 609 00:28:31,030 --> 00:28:34,860 There's a certain moment when Uncle Charlie is 610 00:28:34,860 --> 00:28:37,060 under suspicion, so some FBI agents 611 00:28:37,060 --> 00:28:39,170 come to town in disguise. 612 00:28:39,170 --> 00:28:42,940 And they suspect him but they don't have evidence yet. 613 00:28:42,940 --> 00:28:44,710 So they claim they're from a magazine, 614 00:28:44,710 --> 00:28:45,940 and they come into the family and they say, 615 00:28:45,940 --> 00:28:47,439 "What we want to do is we want to do 616 00:28:47,439 --> 00:28:50,380 a story about a typical American family." 617 00:28:50,380 --> 00:28:52,520 And the mother of the family is very proud. 618 00:28:52,520 --> 00:28:55,150 "Oh, isn't it nice to be a typical representative American 619 00:28:55,150 --> 00:28:55,649 family?" 620 00:28:55,649 --> 00:28:57,460 Well, who would want to be the mean, right? 621 00:28:57,460 --> 00:28:59,310 We're the mean, we're the norm, right? 622 00:28:59,310 --> 00:29:01,880 We are the typical-- but she loves this idea. 623 00:29:01,880 --> 00:29:04,110 And then, not only does she love the idea, 624 00:29:04,110 --> 00:29:06,100 she's really rather a silly person. 625 00:29:06,100 --> 00:29:07,600 So at one point when they're getting 626 00:29:07,600 --> 00:29:09,420 ready to sort of-- I don't know whether they're getting 627 00:29:09,420 --> 00:29:11,310 ready to do still photography in the house-- 628 00:29:11,310 --> 00:29:14,090 she insists on completing her cooking 629 00:29:14,090 --> 00:29:16,820 because she wants to finish the pie before the photographer 630 00:29:16,820 --> 00:29:17,420 gets there. 631 00:29:17,420 --> 00:29:19,940 As if completing her cooking has something 632 00:29:19,940 --> 00:29:23,770 to do with what the photographer would find. 633 00:29:23,770 --> 00:29:26,650 And you find repeatedly that she's kind of a little askew. 634 00:29:26,650 --> 00:29:31,950 She certainly has no possible intimation 635 00:29:31,950 --> 00:29:35,350 that her brother is a murderer and in fact 636 00:29:35,350 --> 00:29:39,070 a cynical nihilist that has no respect for anything in life. 637 00:29:39,070 --> 00:29:40,900 And she never learns any better, and that's 638 00:29:40,900 --> 00:29:43,132 part of what makes the film so disturbing. 639 00:29:43,132 --> 00:29:45,340 So what happens in the course of the film essentially 640 00:29:45,340 --> 00:29:49,920 is that this American family is systematically 641 00:29:49,920 --> 00:29:52,180 shown to be sort of silly and foolish, 642 00:29:52,180 --> 00:29:54,180 banal in its ordinariness. 643 00:29:54,180 --> 00:29:56,300 Hardly something that we might fully-- I 644 00:29:56,300 --> 00:29:59,550 don't mean to say that we come away in horror thinking, Oh! 645 00:29:59,550 --> 00:30:01,180 How disgusting this family is! 646 00:30:01,180 --> 00:30:07,190 Just that we think how ordinary, banal, silly, foolish it is. 647 00:30:07,190 --> 00:30:10,350 One of the ways I've talked already 648 00:30:10,350 --> 00:30:13,830 about the way in which Hitchcock is obsessed by doublings. 649 00:30:13,830 --> 00:30:16,110 And by the idea of a self divided. 650 00:30:16,110 --> 00:30:18,140 And one of his richest treatments of that theme 651 00:30:18,140 --> 00:30:20,490 is in the treatment of Uncle Charlie and Young Charlie. 652 00:30:20,490 --> 00:30:23,320 And you'll see how explicit the film is about that. 653 00:30:23,320 --> 00:30:25,180 One of the ways it's explicit about it 654 00:30:25,180 --> 00:30:32,180 is that Hitchcock uses particular visual strategies 655 00:30:32,180 --> 00:30:33,710 to reinforce the connection. 656 00:30:33,710 --> 00:30:37,020 And I've already mentioned the rhyming scene in that opening 657 00:30:37,020 --> 00:30:37,520 scene. 658 00:30:37,520 --> 00:30:39,103 Watch it, because it's quite exciting. 659 00:30:39,103 --> 00:30:42,060 Later, in our first introduction to Young Charlie, 660 00:30:42,060 --> 00:30:44,640 the camera behaves identically to the way 661 00:30:44,640 --> 00:30:46,890 it behaved when we saw Uncle Charlie. 662 00:30:46,890 --> 00:30:49,880 And so even before Uncle Charlie has entered the story, 663 00:30:49,880 --> 00:30:51,720 even before we're fully aware of what 664 00:30:51,720 --> 00:30:55,180 the relationship between Uncle Charlie and Young Charlie is, 665 00:30:55,180 --> 00:30:57,680 the camera has told us that they are linked. 666 00:30:57,680 --> 00:30:59,950 And we can say then that in the doubling 667 00:30:59,950 --> 00:31:02,310 Young Charlie represents a kind of innocence 668 00:31:02,310 --> 00:31:05,610 and part of her night-- one way to understand 669 00:31:05,610 --> 00:31:08,310 the film is to see it as a Bildungsroman, 670 00:31:08,310 --> 00:31:11,260 as a growing up, as an initiation story in which Young 671 00:31:11,260 --> 00:31:14,280 Charlie learns something about the evil 672 00:31:14,280 --> 00:31:15,640 and difficulty of the world. 673 00:31:15,640 --> 00:31:18,700 She has a naive and simplified view of the world, 674 00:31:18,700 --> 00:31:20,340 and before she's done, she comes face 675 00:31:20,340 --> 00:31:23,680 to face, not just with murder, but with the possibility 676 00:31:23,680 --> 00:31:24,180 of murder. 677 00:31:24,180 --> 00:31:27,770 And in fact, Uncle Charlie actually tries to murder her, 678 00:31:27,770 --> 00:31:31,870 because he realizes she knows the truth about him. 679 00:31:31,870 --> 00:31:33,740 So she's in danger for part of the film, 680 00:31:33,740 --> 00:31:35,029 and knows she's in danger. 681 00:31:35,029 --> 00:31:37,570 And part of the issue is that she can't really talk about it. 682 00:31:37,570 --> 00:31:38,070 Why not? 683 00:31:38,070 --> 00:31:39,495 Well, it's her uncle! 684 00:31:39,495 --> 00:31:41,120 Have you ever heard this kind of thing? 685 00:31:41,120 --> 00:31:43,830 There are actually critics who say that although that it's 686 00:31:43,830 --> 00:31:46,230 never made explicit in the film, that one of the ways 687 00:31:46,230 --> 00:31:48,857 to understand the film, and at least in the subtextual way 688 00:31:48,857 --> 00:31:51,440 is to think about the relation between Uncle Charlie and Young 689 00:31:51,440 --> 00:31:55,830 Charlie as that between the sort of perverted uncle man who 690 00:31:55,830 --> 00:31:58,885 manhandles his young niece when his family isn't watching, 691 00:31:58,885 --> 00:32:00,160 right? 692 00:32:00,160 --> 00:32:03,000 And there actually is in the film what 693 00:32:03,000 --> 00:32:08,000 is a scene sometimes called a betrothal scene in which we see 694 00:32:08,000 --> 00:32:09,670 Young Charlie come down a staircase, 695 00:32:09,670 --> 00:32:11,670 like a traditional bride down a staircase, 696 00:32:11,670 --> 00:32:14,130 and Uncle Charlie gives her a ring. 697 00:32:14,130 --> 00:32:17,430 So that's the film does insinu-- and that's really perverted. 698 00:32:17,430 --> 00:32:20,690 The film doesn't actually say anything sexual is going on 699 00:32:20,690 --> 00:32:22,000 between uncle and niece. 700 00:32:22,000 --> 00:32:25,160 That's not-- but there are these suggestions 701 00:32:25,160 --> 00:32:27,560 of illicit or disturbing connections 702 00:32:27,560 --> 00:32:32,290 that are part of the subtext with which we experience 703 00:32:32,290 --> 00:32:35,230 the film and with which we recognize 704 00:32:35,230 --> 00:32:40,480 the tangled, disturbing quality of the connection between Young 705 00:32:40,480 --> 00:32:42,420 Charlie and her uncle. 706 00:32:42,420 --> 00:32:44,510 So the naivete on Young Charlie's part 707 00:32:44,510 --> 00:32:46,540 is her failure to understand or to even to 708 00:32:46,540 --> 00:32:49,600 be able to imagine the extent of evil and duplicity 709 00:32:49,600 --> 00:32:50,440 in the world. 710 00:32:50,440 --> 00:32:52,740 And we could say that what happens 711 00:32:52,740 --> 00:32:56,020 as she comes to recognize what Uncle Charlie really is, 712 00:32:56,020 --> 00:32:57,810 and what Uncle Charlie really stands for, 713 00:32:57,810 --> 00:33:00,230 she is educated into the ways of the world. 714 00:33:03,490 --> 00:33:07,890 But it is in many ways a very terrible and very serious 715 00:33:07,890 --> 00:33:09,420 initiation. 716 00:33:09,420 --> 00:33:15,400 And one of the climactic instances of this 717 00:33:15,400 --> 00:33:16,790 occurs toward the end of the film 718 00:33:16,790 --> 00:33:19,410 when Young Charlie and her uncle meet together 719 00:33:19,410 --> 00:33:24,290 in a bar called the-- think it's called the Till Two because it 720 00:33:24,290 --> 00:33:27,260 closes at 2:00, which is very late. 721 00:33:27,260 --> 00:33:29,610 In the universe of the film, 2:00 AM 722 00:33:29,610 --> 00:33:32,490 is very late in Santa Rosa, California. 723 00:33:32,490 --> 00:33:35,250 They meet in this place, and this 724 00:33:35,250 --> 00:33:38,120 is where Uncle Charlie realizes he 725 00:33:38,120 --> 00:33:39,940 can no longer hide the truth. 726 00:33:39,940 --> 00:33:42,840 And he talks openly to Young Charlie, 727 00:33:42,840 --> 00:33:46,434 and he says at one point this. 728 00:33:46,434 --> 00:33:47,600 "We're old friends, Charlie. 729 00:33:47,600 --> 00:33:49,020 More than that, we're like twins. 730 00:33:49,020 --> 00:33:50,090 You said so yourself. 731 00:33:50,090 --> 00:33:51,881 You think you're the clever little girl who 732 00:33:51,881 --> 00:33:52,920 knows something. 733 00:33:52,920 --> 00:33:55,340 There's so much you don't know, so much. 734 00:33:55,340 --> 00:33:57,150 You're just an ordinary little girl living 735 00:33:57,150 --> 00:33:58,412 in an ordinary little town--" 736 00:33:58,412 --> 00:34:00,120 You hear the contempt for ordinary there? 737 00:34:00,120 --> 00:34:02,420 Hitchcock shares some of this, even though his villain 738 00:34:02,420 --> 00:34:04,650 is saying it, right? 739 00:34:04,650 --> 00:34:06,770 "You go through your ordinary little day at night 740 00:34:06,770 --> 00:34:09,690 and you sleep your untroubled, ordinary little sleep, filled 741 00:34:09,690 --> 00:34:12,179 with peaceful, stupid dreams. 742 00:34:12,179 --> 00:34:13,820 You live in a dream--" 743 00:34:13,820 --> 00:34:14,995 This is a direct quotation. 744 00:34:14,995 --> 00:34:15,870 "You live in a dream. 745 00:34:15,870 --> 00:34:16,790 You're a sleepwalker. 746 00:34:16,790 --> 00:34:17,810 Blind. 747 00:34:17,810 --> 00:34:20,070 How do you know what the world is like? 748 00:34:20,070 --> 00:34:23,500 Do you know the world is a foul sty? 749 00:34:23,500 --> 00:34:25,860 Do know that if you rip the fronts off houses 750 00:34:25,860 --> 00:34:28,409 you'd find swine? 751 00:34:28,409 --> 00:34:30,100 The world's a hell. 752 00:34:30,100 --> 00:34:33,120 What does it matter what happens in it?" 753 00:34:33,120 --> 00:34:36,050 Now what an extreme nihilistic statement. 754 00:34:36,050 --> 00:34:38,810 That's what Uncle Charlie stands for. 755 00:34:38,810 --> 00:34:41,699 That's the full ugliness and disturbance 756 00:34:41,699 --> 00:34:43,540 that Young Charlie-- and, of course, 757 00:34:43,540 --> 00:34:45,210 a murder is speaking to her. 758 00:34:45,210 --> 00:34:47,270 This is also implicitly a confession to her. 759 00:34:47,270 --> 00:34:50,480 "Yes, I have killed people." 760 00:34:50,480 --> 00:34:54,060 So it's a tremendously disturbing moment in the film, 761 00:34:54,060 --> 00:34:56,270 and it represents in a certain way 762 00:34:56,270 --> 00:34:57,970 Young Charlie's coming of age. 763 00:34:57,970 --> 00:35:03,050 But the irony, or one tremendous irony of this tale, 764 00:35:03,050 --> 00:35:06,510 of this story, is that when we get to the end of the film, 765 00:35:06,510 --> 00:35:08,970 there is a profound kind of ambiguity. 766 00:35:08,970 --> 00:35:11,150 Yes, the evil has been purged. 767 00:35:11,150 --> 00:35:13,340 I won't go into the details of the plot 768 00:35:13,340 --> 00:35:15,750 so as not to spoil your experience of the film, 769 00:35:15,750 --> 00:35:19,370 but Uncle Charlie is eliminated from the scene in a-- 770 00:35:19,370 --> 00:35:20,890 and Young Charlie survives. 771 00:35:20,890 --> 00:35:22,870 It's a kind of reassuring or happy ending. 772 00:35:22,870 --> 00:35:24,300 But what undercuts it? 773 00:35:24,300 --> 00:35:26,640 As all, remember all, of Hitchcock's endings 774 00:35:26,640 --> 00:35:28,980 are undercut, they're never really happy. 775 00:35:28,980 --> 00:35:30,454 They're never really reassuring. 776 00:35:30,454 --> 00:35:31,620 They go through the motions. 777 00:35:31,620 --> 00:35:34,050 They're conventionally reassuring, but they're not. 778 00:35:34,050 --> 00:35:36,880 The moral ambiguity on which this film ends 779 00:35:36,880 --> 00:35:38,960 is maybe it's most disturbing aspect. 780 00:35:38,960 --> 00:35:42,630 Because what it says-- because Young Charlie never 781 00:35:42,630 --> 00:35:44,730 tells her mother, never tells her father, 782 00:35:44,730 --> 00:35:47,800 never reveals to the community that Uncle Charlie 783 00:35:47,800 --> 00:35:50,940 was this evil figure, was the Merry Widow murder. 784 00:35:50,940 --> 00:35:51,720 Why not? 785 00:35:51,720 --> 00:35:54,110 Well, maybe she sparing her mother. 786 00:35:54,110 --> 00:35:56,530 Uncle Charlie's no longer there, what's the difference? 787 00:35:56,530 --> 00:35:58,030 There's no discussion of this. 788 00:35:58,030 --> 00:35:59,090 But what does it mean? 789 00:35:59,090 --> 00:36:00,630 It means that when the film is over, 790 00:36:00,630 --> 00:36:03,170 the idea that evil might lurk at the heart 791 00:36:03,170 --> 00:36:05,700 of the American family remains a reality 792 00:36:05,700 --> 00:36:08,130 that no one has acknowledged. 793 00:36:08,130 --> 00:36:11,300 In other words, it's as if the implications of the story 794 00:36:11,300 --> 00:36:14,220 are denied bye Charlie's silence. 795 00:36:14,220 --> 00:36:16,090 And we're left in the situation at the end 796 00:36:16,090 --> 00:36:18,770 of the film in which the implications 797 00:36:18,770 --> 00:36:21,840 or meaning of Uncle Charlie's life has been suppressed. 798 00:36:21,840 --> 00:36:26,630 And therefore, the significance of his pervasive nihilism 799 00:36:26,630 --> 00:36:29,850 and of what it means that such nihilism could exist 800 00:36:29,850 --> 00:36:32,600 at the heart of a typical American family 801 00:36:32,600 --> 00:36:36,640 is never acknowledged or known by anyone inside the film. 802 00:36:36,640 --> 00:36:38,820 Even though it's a disturbing knowledge 803 00:36:38,820 --> 00:36:40,710 that we take away from the film. 804 00:36:40,710 --> 00:36:43,080 So to conclude on this film, one of the things 805 00:36:43,080 --> 00:36:44,830 to think about as you're watching the film 806 00:36:44,830 --> 00:36:47,290 is how remarkably Hitchcock is able to give us 807 00:36:47,290 --> 00:36:49,080 what might be thought in many ways to be, 808 00:36:49,080 --> 00:36:51,720 and what is in many ways, a light entertainment. 809 00:36:51,720 --> 00:36:55,410 A humorous and very well put together mystery story 810 00:36:55,410 --> 00:37:02,720 about an American family full of the wit and scene by scene 811 00:37:02,720 --> 00:37:04,990 richness and complexity. 812 00:37:04,990 --> 00:37:10,210 A film that even naive film goers can enjoy fully. 813 00:37:10,210 --> 00:37:12,060 And yet the full implications of it, 814 00:37:12,060 --> 00:37:14,670 the moral ambiguity with which the film ends, 815 00:37:14,670 --> 00:37:16,940 and the moral ambiguity that's a really implicit all 816 00:37:16,940 --> 00:37:19,530 the way through the film, the sense of the ominous 817 00:37:19,530 --> 00:37:26,700 and the sense of disturbance remains with the viewer 818 00:37:26,700 --> 00:37:27,830 after the film is over. 819 00:37:27,830 --> 00:37:33,920 It's a characteristic way for Hitchcock to end films. 820 00:37:33,920 --> 00:37:35,440 Rear Window, as I've suggested, is 821 00:37:35,440 --> 00:37:37,610 an even more rigorous exploration 822 00:37:37,610 --> 00:37:42,030 of some of Hitchcock's deepest preoccupations and obsessions. 823 00:37:42,030 --> 00:37:43,930 Let me remind you to really savor 824 00:37:43,930 --> 00:37:47,540 the opening scene of the film. 825 00:37:47,540 --> 00:37:50,600 It starts under the titles, and you get the title sequence, 826 00:37:50,600 --> 00:37:53,950 and onto the title-- it's a sequence that lasts 827 00:37:53,950 --> 00:37:55,830 three or almost four minutes. 828 00:37:55,830 --> 00:37:57,510 And it's completely wordless. 829 00:37:57,510 --> 00:38:00,460 There is no dialogue. 830 00:38:00,460 --> 00:38:02,970 Watch how much what happens. 831 00:38:02,970 --> 00:38:08,070 It's a complicated moment in a certain way. 832 00:38:13,480 --> 00:38:16,360 But if you are attentive to it, you can see what's happening. 833 00:38:16,360 --> 00:38:19,310 Essentially, what we see the camera do-- first, 834 00:38:19,310 --> 00:38:22,974 we see the blinds go up on two open windows. 835 00:38:22,974 --> 00:38:24,890 And then we realize that they're open windows, 836 00:38:24,890 --> 00:38:27,740 they're encasement windows that are open unscreened. 837 00:38:27,740 --> 00:38:30,720 And after the blinds-- the camera is stable, 838 00:38:30,720 --> 00:38:34,800 it doesn't move-- three separate blinds go up one time. 839 00:38:34,800 --> 00:38:38,860 They reveal the other side of an apartment 840 00:38:38,860 --> 00:38:42,780 complex being seen through the window of another apartment. 841 00:38:42,780 --> 00:38:45,200 And then, what we see-- the camera then goes on and sort 842 00:38:45,200 --> 00:38:48,180 of elaborate journey. 843 00:38:48,180 --> 00:38:53,690 You're caught in the camera's gaze, as a viewer. 844 00:38:53,690 --> 00:38:57,775 Once the shades go up, then the camera begins to move. 845 00:38:57,775 --> 00:39:01,190 It moves toward the window, then it moves out the window, 846 00:39:01,190 --> 00:39:02,960 and then it looks down and it does 847 00:39:02,960 --> 00:39:05,770 a kind of circuit of the-- essentially, 848 00:39:05,770 --> 00:39:09,520 it shows you what can be seen from this window. 849 00:39:09,520 --> 00:39:14,990 It does a kind of circuit of the physical spaces that 850 00:39:14,990 --> 00:39:18,270 are open it if it looked at this world from this window. 851 00:39:18,270 --> 00:39:22,260 And you see it might make a kind of circle, 852 00:39:22,260 --> 00:39:25,590 it's not a 360 degree turn but it's more than 180. 853 00:39:25,590 --> 00:39:28,790 The camera turns like this, it pans, it turns around, 854 00:39:28,790 --> 00:39:31,870 and then it comes back into the room. 855 00:39:31,870 --> 00:39:34,454 And when it comes back into the room-- it goes out of the room 856 00:39:34,454 --> 00:39:36,870 and it looks around, and then it comes back into the room, 857 00:39:36,870 --> 00:39:38,700 through the same windows, backs up further, 858 00:39:38,700 --> 00:39:40,200 and then you see Jimmy Stewart lying 859 00:39:40,200 --> 00:39:41,820 there, sweating in the heat. 860 00:39:41,820 --> 00:39:45,695 The camera then looks up a wall at a thermometer, 861 00:39:45,695 --> 00:39:47,320 and you see the thermometer is hovering 862 00:39:47,320 --> 00:39:50,270 in the mid 90s someplace, explaining why Jimmy Stewart is 863 00:39:50,270 --> 00:39:51,200 sweating so much. 864 00:39:51,200 --> 00:39:53,500 But then, the camera moves outside again 865 00:39:53,500 --> 00:39:57,060 and does another circle of the space that you just looked at. 866 00:39:57,060 --> 00:40:00,010 It's almost as if it wants you to look at a second time, 867 00:40:00,010 --> 00:40:03,140 to remind you of the space of the action in the film. 868 00:40:03,140 --> 00:40:06,620 And of course, we don't fully realize it at the time, 869 00:40:06,620 --> 00:40:08,680 but this is a rehearsal for the whole movie, 870 00:40:08,680 --> 00:40:10,860 because we are going to be confined in exactly 871 00:40:10,860 --> 00:40:12,791 this way for the entire film. 872 00:40:12,791 --> 00:40:14,540 We're never going to get out of this room. 873 00:40:14,540 --> 00:40:17,640 Everything we see will be seen through this window. 874 00:40:17,640 --> 00:40:19,930 Then the camera come pulls back in again, 875 00:40:19,930 --> 00:40:21,520 we see Jimmy Stewart again-- so it's 876 00:40:21,520 --> 00:40:23,710 almost as if that opening sequence does 877 00:40:23,710 --> 00:40:25,760 the same thing twice. 878 00:40:25,760 --> 00:40:28,870 What it mostly does, of course, is trap the viewer 879 00:40:28,870 --> 00:40:30,630 in an act of voyeurism. 880 00:40:30,630 --> 00:40:33,600 It traps the viewer completely in an act of spying. 881 00:40:33,600 --> 00:40:36,850 And then, almost the very first words of the film, the camera 882 00:40:36,850 --> 00:40:38,650 pulls back, it looks at a few items 883 00:40:38,650 --> 00:40:40,580 to tell us a little more about the fact 884 00:40:40,580 --> 00:40:42,800 that Jimmy Stewart is a photographer who 885 00:40:42,800 --> 00:40:46,290 works for a magazine, who was injured taking 886 00:40:46,290 --> 00:40:47,989 one of his action photos. 887 00:40:47,989 --> 00:40:49,780 He can't wait to till he's out of his cast, 888 00:40:49,780 --> 00:40:53,890 but he has another week to go and he's going stir crazy. 889 00:40:53,890 --> 00:40:56,320 And then he has a conversation on the telephone 890 00:40:56,320 --> 00:40:58,560 with his editor. 891 00:40:58,560 --> 00:41:01,560 And at the same time engages in various acts of voyeurism, 892 00:41:01,560 --> 00:41:04,390 including especially a young woman 893 00:41:04,390 --> 00:41:09,200 who is scantily clad across the courtyard in her room 894 00:41:09,200 --> 00:41:14,730 wearing shorts and a very revealing brassiere 895 00:41:14,730 --> 00:41:17,090 doing sort of exercises and so forth while she's 896 00:41:17,090 --> 00:41:18,430 eating her breakfast. 897 00:41:18,430 --> 00:41:21,140 And you see the Jimmy Stewart character voyeuristically 898 00:41:21,140 --> 00:41:24,320 savoring her as he's talking to his friend. 899 00:41:24,320 --> 00:41:27,390 And then he hangs up the phone, a knock comes on the door, 900 00:41:27,390 --> 00:41:28,170 a woman enters. 901 00:41:28,170 --> 00:41:32,640 It's his cleaning lady played by the great actress-- 902 00:41:32,640 --> 00:41:36,110 what's her name?-- Thelma Ritter. 903 00:41:36,110 --> 00:41:39,670 And Thelma's almost first words are, 904 00:41:39,670 --> 00:41:42,922 "We've become a nation of peeping Toms." 905 00:41:42,922 --> 00:41:44,380 And I mention this just to show you 906 00:41:44,380 --> 00:41:47,720 how aware the film is, how much the film wants 907 00:41:47,720 --> 00:41:50,900 us to be aware of the fact, that voyeurism is one 908 00:41:50,900 --> 00:41:52,480 of its deep subjects, right? 909 00:41:52,480 --> 00:41:56,130 Why do we have this desire to watch the illicit? 910 00:41:56,130 --> 00:41:57,880 What is it about us that wants to make 911 00:41:57,880 --> 00:42:00,110 us sort of look through key holes and peep at people 912 00:42:00,110 --> 00:42:03,000 and watch the intimate lives of people? 913 00:42:03,000 --> 00:42:05,760 So they saw the opening scene is a scene that 914 00:42:05,760 --> 00:42:09,010 dramatizes the confinement and the voyeurism that 915 00:42:09,010 --> 00:42:11,340 are at the very heart of what the movie is about. 916 00:42:11,340 --> 00:42:14,230 We can say that the whole essay, the whole film in some sense, 917 00:42:14,230 --> 00:42:17,270 is a kind of essay on seeing. 918 00:42:17,270 --> 00:42:19,270 And in that three or four minute sequence 919 00:42:19,270 --> 00:42:21,000 in the beginning without dialogue, 920 00:42:21,000 --> 00:42:23,980 the camera is the star, in a certain sense. 921 00:42:23,980 --> 00:42:26,400 We become aware of the camera, as Hitchcock 922 00:42:26,400 --> 00:42:28,250 wants us to be, in a way we would never 923 00:42:28,250 --> 00:42:31,090 be in another kind of film. 924 00:42:31,090 --> 00:42:33,210 There are other forms of elegance in the film. 925 00:42:33,210 --> 00:42:35,510 And I hope you'll watch the way the camera behaves, 926 00:42:35,510 --> 00:42:39,984 because it's a marvel of complexity and intelligence. 927 00:42:39,984 --> 00:42:41,650 But there's another way in which there's 928 00:42:41,650 --> 00:42:43,200 an elegance of structure in the film. 929 00:42:43,200 --> 00:42:44,730 As the camera in the very beginning 930 00:42:44,730 --> 00:42:46,900 makes its tour of the building, what 931 00:42:46,900 --> 00:42:49,900 begins to emerge in a very elementary way at first, 932 00:42:49,900 --> 00:42:53,130 and then as the film precedes becomes more fleshed out, 933 00:42:53,130 --> 00:42:56,920 is that there are three or four basic stories about people 934 00:42:56,920 --> 00:43:00,280 who live in the apartments that Jimmy Stewart is looking into. 935 00:43:00,280 --> 00:43:02,500 And each of them tells a separate kind of story. 936 00:43:02,500 --> 00:43:05,020 There's a Miss Lonely Heart story 937 00:43:05,020 --> 00:43:07,310 about a woman who was pining for a boyfriend 938 00:43:07,310 --> 00:43:09,660 and who feels very lonely and maybe toying 939 00:43:09,660 --> 00:43:11,530 with the idea of suicide. 940 00:43:11,530 --> 00:43:14,200 Then there's a story about a composer who's 941 00:43:14,200 --> 00:43:15,470 having trouble with his work. 942 00:43:15,470 --> 00:43:18,590 They're a series of sort of subplots, mostly trivial ones. 943 00:43:18,590 --> 00:43:21,366 Except for the primary one-- what's the primary one? 944 00:43:21,366 --> 00:43:23,740 A murder may have been committed in one of the apartments 945 00:43:23,740 --> 00:43:26,440 to Jimmy Stewart has been prying into. 946 00:43:26,440 --> 00:43:28,290 And he begins to investigate the murder 947 00:43:28,290 --> 00:43:30,374 and that puts him in danger himself. 948 00:43:30,374 --> 00:43:32,790 And the people involved with him, including his girlfriend 949 00:43:32,790 --> 00:43:34,970 Grace Kelly, get involved in the danger 950 00:43:34,970 --> 00:43:37,022 as well because he's a immobile. 951 00:43:37,022 --> 00:43:39,230 And Grace has to be the one who walks across the way, 952 00:43:39,230 --> 00:43:40,930 and does-- 953 00:43:40,930 --> 00:43:44,880 So the elegance of the structure of the film 954 00:43:44,880 --> 00:43:47,490 has partly to do with the way in which these subplots work 955 00:43:47,490 --> 00:43:48,440 themselves out. 956 00:43:48,440 --> 00:43:51,220 And at the end of the film, each of these little subplots 957 00:43:51,220 --> 00:43:53,960 that we'd seen being played out in these different apartments-- 958 00:43:53,960 --> 00:43:56,590 only watching them through the windows of the apartments-- 959 00:43:56,590 --> 00:43:58,420 each of them is resolved in some way. 960 00:43:58,420 --> 00:44:02,610 And I want to suggest that their resolution, while from one 961 00:44:02,610 --> 00:44:06,020 angle is very satisfying-- there's a kind of elegance 962 00:44:06,020 --> 00:44:06,640 of structure. 963 00:44:06,640 --> 00:44:09,130 We're very satisfied by this sense of completion. 964 00:44:09,130 --> 00:44:11,710 But at the same time, I think the very fact 965 00:44:11,710 --> 00:44:13,150 that these stories are all tied up 966 00:44:13,150 --> 00:44:16,160 in such neat knots makes us feel that there's something 967 00:44:16,160 --> 00:44:19,342 a little too neat, a little too perfect about it. 968 00:44:19,342 --> 00:44:20,800 In other words, the very perfection 969 00:44:20,800 --> 00:44:23,080 with which these subplots are tied up at the end 970 00:44:23,080 --> 00:44:25,740 suggests a kind of excess that Hitchcock 971 00:44:25,740 --> 00:44:27,200 wants us to be suspicious of. 972 00:44:27,200 --> 00:44:29,470 As if of this is just too perfect. 973 00:44:29,470 --> 00:44:31,140 And of course, there are other ways 974 00:44:31,140 --> 00:44:33,790 in which the ending of this film is deeply ambiguous. 975 00:44:33,790 --> 00:44:37,060 And I'll come back to that in a moment. 976 00:44:37,060 --> 00:44:39,300 I also ought to mention the way it 977 00:44:39,300 --> 00:44:41,970 which, in a quiet, subtle way, this film is 978 00:44:41,970 --> 00:44:45,320 an exploration of both class and gender issues. 979 00:44:45,320 --> 00:44:48,010 Because there's a kind of little sort of contest going on. 980 00:44:48,010 --> 00:44:50,360 Grace Kelly, who's this elegant upper class 981 00:44:50,360 --> 00:44:55,730 woman who gets her clothes at the fanciest fashion stores 982 00:44:55,730 --> 00:45:01,520 and has food catered from the fanciest restaurants 983 00:45:01,520 --> 00:45:04,360 in the city and who reads magazines like Vogue 984 00:45:04,360 --> 00:45:07,630 and so forth-- she stands for sort of moneyed elegance. 985 00:45:07,630 --> 00:45:11,210 And there's a kind of tension between them. 986 00:45:11,210 --> 00:45:15,070 She wants to marry Jimmy Stewart and Jimmy Stewart's resisting. 987 00:45:15,070 --> 00:45:17,730 One reason is that he doesn't belonged to her class. 988 00:45:17,730 --> 00:45:19,450 He's more of a working class type, right? 989 00:45:19,450 --> 00:45:22,054 He's a down to earth sort of guy, 990 00:45:22,054 --> 00:45:23,220 and he's worried about that. 991 00:45:23,220 --> 00:45:25,860 And he's also nervous because like many American males, 992 00:45:25,860 --> 00:45:29,220 especially in the movies, he's nervous about being entrapped 993 00:45:29,220 --> 00:45:31,540 by marriage, as if he isn't already entrapped 994 00:45:31,540 --> 00:45:34,060 in all kinds of ways. 995 00:45:34,060 --> 00:45:36,910 And in an odd kind of way, we could 996 00:45:36,910 --> 00:45:38,920 say that the Thorwald marriage-- that's 997 00:45:38,920 --> 00:45:41,295 the name of the murderer and the wife 998 00:45:41,295 --> 00:45:43,630 he supposedly murders and chops up, at least that's 999 00:45:43,630 --> 00:45:45,930 what Jimmy Stewart comes to suspect. 1000 00:45:45,930 --> 00:45:47,610 We could say that the Thorwald marriage 1001 00:45:47,610 --> 00:45:50,080 is a kind of double of the marriage 1002 00:45:50,080 --> 00:45:53,320 that the Jimmy Stewart character fears he will have. 1003 00:45:53,320 --> 00:45:55,900 That his resistance to Grace Kelly 1004 00:45:55,900 --> 00:45:59,730 is partly a class resistance. 1005 00:45:59,730 --> 00:46:04,140 He feels uneasy around this aristocratic woman 1006 00:46:04,140 --> 00:46:06,720 because her tastes seemed to him banal and trivial. 1007 00:46:06,720 --> 00:46:11,530 In any case, they seem to him to involve values and commitments 1008 00:46:11,530 --> 00:46:14,070 that are at odds with a sort of rough 1009 00:46:14,070 --> 00:46:16,590 and tumble life of a traveling photographer who 1010 00:46:16,590 --> 00:46:20,160 goes to war zones and other dangerous places. 1011 00:46:20,160 --> 00:46:23,440 But that's his image of himself. 1012 00:46:23,440 --> 00:46:28,720 So his resistance to her is partly a desire 1013 00:46:28,720 --> 00:46:31,090 to maintain his freedom, right? 1014 00:46:31,090 --> 00:46:32,960 And it's partly a class issue. 1015 00:46:32,960 --> 00:46:36,800 So that both issues of class and gender are involved. 1016 00:46:36,800 --> 00:46:44,050 The gender issue has to do with how men and women, especially 1017 00:46:44,050 --> 00:46:47,100 in the stereotyped way of the '50s and '60s, 1018 00:46:47,100 --> 00:46:49,800 regarded the question of marriage. 1019 00:46:49,800 --> 00:46:55,070 And there are other marriages or relationships 1020 00:46:55,070 --> 00:46:57,690 that are alluded to in the film, and we 1021 00:46:57,690 --> 00:47:00,200 can say that those marriages and relationships also 1022 00:47:00,200 --> 00:47:03,110 double the relationship between Stewart and Kelly. 1023 00:47:03,110 --> 00:47:05,810 So there's a kind of low level, not exactly hostility, 1024 00:47:05,810 --> 00:47:11,410 but a low level badinage and argument going on between Kelly 1025 00:47:11,410 --> 00:47:14,110 and Stuart all the way through the film. 1026 00:47:14,110 --> 00:47:17,210 Which is in some sense resolved, but not fully resolved. 1027 00:47:17,210 --> 00:47:20,950 Or resolved in a typically unsatisfying Hitchcockian way 1028 00:47:20,950 --> 00:47:22,330 at the end of the film. 1029 00:47:22,330 --> 00:47:26,480 So the very ending of the film. 1030 00:47:26,480 --> 00:47:29,800 There is the tradition-- the murderer is caught, is exposed. 1031 00:47:29,800 --> 00:47:33,390 The danger to which the Jimmy Stewart character was exposed 1032 00:47:33,390 --> 00:47:34,714 is purged by the end. 1033 00:47:34,714 --> 00:47:37,130 Again I won't go into details if you've not seen the film, 1034 00:47:37,130 --> 00:47:39,588 but I need to say this much in order to explain the ending. 1035 00:47:39,588 --> 00:47:41,320 And at the end of the film, as I said, 1036 00:47:41,320 --> 00:47:46,682 there's a moment where we see him-- the murder finds out 1037 00:47:46,682 --> 00:47:47,640 that he's watching him. 1038 00:47:47,640 --> 00:47:51,017 And after a while, he comes to Jimmy Stewart's apartment 1039 00:47:51,017 --> 00:47:52,350 apparently to try to murder him. 1040 00:47:52,350 --> 00:47:54,120 Because he thinks he's going to reveal 1041 00:47:54,120 --> 00:47:55,430 that he's a murderer himself. 1042 00:47:55,430 --> 00:47:56,840 And it's a terrifying scene. 1043 00:47:56,840 --> 00:47:59,610 The great climax of the scene-- Stewart-- 1044 00:47:59,610 --> 00:48:04,460 his physical limitations some critics 1045 00:48:04,460 --> 00:48:07,900 have seen as a symbolic embodiment of what might 1046 00:48:07,900 --> 00:48:10,400 be seen as a form of impotence. 1047 00:48:10,400 --> 00:48:14,450 Both a sexual impotence and sort of broader kind of impotence, 1048 00:48:14,450 --> 00:48:16,700 an incompetence because he's crippled, he can't fight, 1049 00:48:16,700 --> 00:48:17,820 he can't defend himself. 1050 00:48:17,820 --> 00:48:19,835 He can't behave like a traditional man 1051 00:48:19,835 --> 00:48:21,610 in a traditional movie. 1052 00:48:21,610 --> 00:48:24,110 And again, remember, this is characteristic of Hitchcock. 1053 00:48:24,110 --> 00:48:25,730 His men are almost always like this. 1054 00:48:25,730 --> 00:48:30,460 It's amazing, in fact, how weak, vulnerable, damaged, fearful, 1055 00:48:30,460 --> 00:48:32,900 frightened his protagonists are. 1056 00:48:32,900 --> 00:48:35,930 So there's this climactic moment at the end where 1057 00:48:35,930 --> 00:48:39,030 Thorwald, the murderer, is trying to kill Jimmy Stewart, 1058 00:48:39,030 --> 00:48:39,780 and he pushes him. 1059 00:48:39,780 --> 00:48:40,990 And Jimmy Stewart is holding on. 1060 00:48:40,990 --> 00:48:42,100 He's on the second story window. 1061 00:48:42,100 --> 00:48:43,510 He's holding on like this, looking up. 1062 00:48:43,510 --> 00:48:45,020 The camera's looking down at him. 1063 00:48:45,020 --> 00:48:47,660 You see the fear and horror in his face. 1064 00:48:47,660 --> 00:48:48,980 He lets go. 1065 00:48:48,980 --> 00:48:50,760 There's a critic, a brilliant critic, 1066 00:48:50,760 --> 00:48:54,170 a French critic, who talks about the idea of letting go, 1067 00:48:54,170 --> 00:48:59,462 of losing your grip as central action in Hitchcock's films. 1068 00:48:59,462 --> 00:49:00,420 You lose your gripping. 1069 00:49:00,420 --> 00:49:02,190 You fall into a void. 1070 00:49:02,190 --> 00:49:04,490 And that moment that is, as I said this afternoon, 1071 00:49:04,490 --> 00:49:07,830 could be said to be an iconic moment in Hitchcock's movie. 1072 00:49:07,830 --> 00:49:10,500 So when Jimmy Stewart actually lets go and falls. 1073 00:49:10,500 --> 00:49:13,249 You see his face as if he's falling to his-- 1074 00:49:13,249 --> 00:49:15,040 you think he might be falling to his death. 1075 00:49:15,040 --> 00:49:16,120 But of course, he's not. 1076 00:49:16,120 --> 00:49:17,710 He just breaks his other leg. 1077 00:49:17,710 --> 00:49:20,240 And at the end of the film then we have a final scene. 1078 00:49:20,240 --> 00:49:22,140 And this is where the ambiguity comes in. 1079 00:49:22,140 --> 00:49:23,550 We see him with both legs, now. 1080 00:49:23,550 --> 00:49:24,820 He's back where he was. 1081 00:49:24,820 --> 00:49:29,230 But the Grace Kelly character is sitting happily in the room. 1082 00:49:29,230 --> 00:49:34,080 She pretends that she's reading material that 1083 00:49:34,080 --> 00:49:35,470 would please Jimmy Stewart. 1084 00:49:35,470 --> 00:49:36,940 But in fact, if you look closely, 1085 00:49:36,940 --> 00:49:40,910 she has a copy of Vogue hidden inside the material 1086 00:49:40,910 --> 00:49:42,280 that she's reading. 1087 00:49:42,280 --> 00:49:45,900 And there's a very deep sense that in this gender 1088 00:49:45,900 --> 00:49:49,570 conflict between Grace Kelly-- and also we discover at the end 1089 00:49:49,570 --> 00:49:50,960 but they're now engaged. 1090 00:49:50,960 --> 00:49:54,660 So Jimmy Stewart has become engaged to this woman, right? 1091 00:49:54,660 --> 00:49:57,305 So it's almost as if he's sort of lost the battle. 1092 00:49:57,305 --> 00:49:58,680 Or at least he's agreed to marry. 1093 00:49:58,680 --> 00:50:01,290 But what we feel that the end is that his agreement to marry 1094 00:50:01,290 --> 00:50:05,420 her is still full of the same ambiguities 1095 00:50:05,420 --> 00:50:06,890 that were present before. 1096 00:50:06,890 --> 00:50:09,720 And many people watching the film have said, 1097 00:50:09,720 --> 00:50:11,380 you know the Grace Kelly character is 1098 00:50:11,380 --> 00:50:14,190 very beautiful and very elegant, but she's not a very attractive 1099 00:50:14,190 --> 00:50:15,590 person morally. 1100 00:50:15,590 --> 00:50:18,830 She tries to manipulate the Jimmy Stewart character. 1101 00:50:18,830 --> 00:50:21,810 She doesn't seem fully to appreciate him. 1102 00:50:21,810 --> 00:50:23,950 She doesn't see why he wants to run 1103 00:50:23,950 --> 00:50:26,120 around the world in corduroys and sneakers 1104 00:50:26,120 --> 00:50:29,040 instead of living the high life in New York and go 1105 00:50:29,040 --> 00:50:31,240 and going to Le Cirque for dinner. 1106 00:50:31,240 --> 00:50:33,560 She can't really understand that. 1107 00:50:33,560 --> 00:50:36,637 So the conflict between them is a kind of lifestyle conflict. 1108 00:50:36,637 --> 00:50:38,470 At the end of the film, none of those things 1109 00:50:38,470 --> 00:50:39,780 have been resolved. 1110 00:50:39,780 --> 00:50:42,420 And there's the sense that he's more entrapped than ever 1111 00:50:42,420 --> 00:50:44,130 at the end of the movie. 1112 00:50:44,130 --> 00:50:46,100 Now, I don't want to make too much of this. 1113 00:50:46,100 --> 00:50:48,300 This is a light entertainment at one level. 1114 00:50:48,300 --> 00:50:50,300 But these subjects that I've been talking about, 1115 00:50:50,300 --> 00:50:53,180 the sense of loosing your grip, of being caught 1116 00:50:53,180 --> 00:50:56,870 in a confined space and being terrified by forces far larger 1117 00:50:56,870 --> 00:51:00,620 than you, that you're too weak or damage to resist. 1118 00:51:00,620 --> 00:51:02,620 Those moments of horror and terror 1119 00:51:02,620 --> 00:51:06,130 are dramatized with profound authority 1120 00:51:06,130 --> 00:51:07,630 in this remarkable film. 1121 00:51:07,630 --> 00:51:10,380 So what Hitchcock repeatedly does, and especially 1122 00:51:10,380 --> 00:51:12,906 in these two films, and if you can see them 1123 00:51:12,906 --> 00:51:14,280 in a conversation with each other 1124 00:51:14,280 --> 00:51:16,750 you'll understand more fully, the fascination 1125 00:51:16,750 --> 00:51:19,480 of Hitchcock's career and the fascination of his work. 1126 00:51:19,480 --> 00:51:23,142 Because he keeps returning with these remarkable variations 1127 00:51:23,142 --> 00:51:30,530 again and again to the same set of problems and of subjects. 1128 00:51:30,530 --> 00:51:32,720 So there's even more ambiguity and uncertainty 1129 00:51:32,720 --> 00:51:36,200 at the end of Rear Window than there was when it began. 1130 00:51:36,200 --> 00:51:38,230 And one final point and then I'll stop. 1131 00:51:38,230 --> 00:51:40,850 One of the things that we notice in the course of the film 1132 00:51:40,850 --> 00:51:47,480 is there's one moment in the movie where the Jimmy Stewart 1133 00:51:47,480 --> 00:51:50,360 character responds to Grace Kelly with a kind of excitement 1134 00:51:50,360 --> 00:51:50,860 and allure. 1135 00:51:50,860 --> 00:51:52,920 It's almost the moment where you see suddenly 1136 00:51:52,920 --> 00:51:57,330 really desires her, really sees her as a possible partner. 1137 00:51:57,330 --> 00:51:59,210 And it's the moment in which she has 1138 00:51:59,210 --> 00:52:01,330 entered the voyeuristic drama. 1139 00:52:01,330 --> 00:52:03,080 It's the moment in which he's watching her 1140 00:52:03,080 --> 00:52:05,130 through his lens when she's gone across 1141 00:52:05,130 --> 00:52:09,260 to try to do some detective work in the murderer's apartment. 1142 00:52:09,260 --> 00:52:11,190 And there's a kind of excitement and adventure 1143 00:52:11,190 --> 00:52:12,650 that goes on there. 1144 00:52:12,650 --> 00:52:15,040 And it's actually the moment when they bond. 1145 00:52:15,040 --> 00:52:17,620 When they realize-- and there is some sense that they're both 1146 00:52:17,620 --> 00:52:21,120 engaged in a morally exciting, in a mutually exciting 1147 00:52:21,120 --> 00:52:22,270 adventure. 1148 00:52:22,270 --> 00:52:24,980 But there's also the sense, very disturbing in a way when 1149 00:52:24,980 --> 00:52:28,000 you reflect on it later, that the moment in which Grace 1150 00:52:28,000 --> 00:52:31,070 Kelly became truly attractive to the Jimmy Stewart character 1151 00:52:31,070 --> 00:52:34,290 was the moment in which he had entered the voyeuristic drama. 1152 00:52:34,290 --> 00:52:36,640 In which Kelly was now distant from, 1153 00:52:36,640 --> 00:52:39,620 which he was attracted to her because he was seeing her 1154 00:52:39,620 --> 00:52:41,720 as if he were a peeping Tom. 1155 00:52:41,720 --> 00:52:43,460 So now this is a subtext. 1156 00:52:43,460 --> 00:52:46,110 I don't mean that I don't mean that the film is 1157 00:52:46,110 --> 00:52:50,600 using a megaphone to remind us of these implications. 1158 00:52:50,600 --> 00:52:53,420 But the number of them build for the course of the film. 1159 00:52:53,420 --> 00:52:57,310 And as with Shadow of a Doubt, what seems on the surface 1160 00:52:57,310 --> 00:53:00,410 to be a kind of light diversion, once we 1161 00:53:00,410 --> 00:53:02,630 begin to press its details becomes 1162 00:53:02,630 --> 00:53:05,830 a much more disturbing and powerful meditation 1163 00:53:05,830 --> 00:53:08,960 on our human impulse to watch what we're not 1164 00:53:08,960 --> 00:53:11,160 supposed to watch, to participate 1165 00:53:11,160 --> 00:53:14,280 in illicit activities without being punished for it, 1166 00:53:14,280 --> 00:53:16,460 especially if we, like Jimmy Stewart, 1167 00:53:16,460 --> 00:53:18,580 are able to do so in the dark. 1168 00:53:18,580 --> 00:53:23,110 And in that sense, when we step away from Rear Window, 1169 00:53:23,110 --> 00:53:25,020 one of the things we might recognize 1170 00:53:25,020 --> 00:53:28,540 is that we in the audience have been engaging 1171 00:53:28,540 --> 00:53:31,140 in the same activity that Jimmy Stewart is 1172 00:53:31,140 --> 00:53:32,490 engaging in the movie. 1173 00:53:32,490 --> 00:53:37,800 That we are complicit as viewers in the immorality 1174 00:53:37,800 --> 00:53:42,760 and in the murderous tendencies of these forms 1175 00:53:42,760 --> 00:53:44,070 of entertainment. 1176 00:53:44,070 --> 00:53:47,500 So it's not possible if you're an alert and self-conscious 1177 00:53:47,500 --> 00:53:53,060 film goer to watch these apparent light entertainments 1178 00:53:53,060 --> 00:53:56,110 without recognizing their deeper and more disturbing 1179 00:53:56,110 --> 00:53:56,710 implications. 1180 00:53:56,710 --> 00:53:58,260 [NO SPEECH]