This post is a considerable reworking of a piece I posted on 3/20/09. It's also a contribution to For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III being led by Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, the Self-Styled Siren, Farran Smith Nehme, and Roderick Heath of This Island Rod.
For movie-watchers with an analytical bent, Alfred Hitchcock provides a wealth of material to dissect. Rear Window is a great example. Much of the analysis focusing on Rear Window highlights the most immediately apparent of the film's metaphors, that of L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) as audience surrogate while the different dramas playing out in each window of his apartment's courtyard serve as his personal movie theater. Laid up with a broken leg, the convalescing photo-journalist—bored with routine visits by his socialite girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) and home care aide Stella (Thelma Ritter)—turns to his window for entertainment. But the movie's titular rear window isn't just a proscenium allowing Jefferies to play peeping tom. Each of the courtyard's individual apartments are a physical manifestation of Jefferies' fears of seriously committing to Fremont.
