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The dramatic locus of most Hitchcock films made between 1940 and 1964 is the mind. Hitchcock is less interested in external reality than in how it is perceived.[1] Thus the chief stylistic tactic of the subjective films is also their major point: to show how easily a character—and the viewer for whom he is a surrogate—can misin-terpret events according to his own preconceptions. Hence, the insecure heroine of Rebecca interprets her husband's silence about his former wife as a sign of still-cherished love; the suggestible wife in Suspicion interprets her husband's inexplicable behavior as a desire to kill her; the naive heroine of Stage Fright supplies rosy explanations for the odd behavior of the man she loves; the roman-ticizing heroine of I Confess makes a false confession of adultery; and in Vertigo a man half in love with easeful death falls in love with a waking dream.[2]

The most persuasive way of demonstrating the seductiveness of such misinterpretations is to let the viewer make the same mistake. Having been seduced into adopting a character's point of view that is later exposed as illusion, we should then be able both to sym-pathize with the character's weakness and to recognize it in our-selves. Thus the most persuasive of Hitchcock's subjective films are also the most realistic in style; Hitchcock would otherwise destroy the illusion by drawing attention to his style. He himself may maintain an aesthetic distance by adding levels of irony, but he requires our total identification at times so that we will acknowl-edge the existence of our darker natures before we render any moral judgments.

Rear Window (1954) is the film that quintessentially presents a subjective point of view within an apparently realistic style. The single obvious distortion is the overloud sound of some approaching

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[IMAGE: Rear Window. James Stewart on the set. "An almost total separation of what we see from what we hear."]

footsteps in the second-to-last sequence of the film. Only at the end of the film do we realize that we have shared the hero's danger-ously distorted perception of events (it is mere accident that in one case his assumption is correct); and we are forced to reinterpret everything that has gone before (including our complicity in the hero's voyeurism) in a new light.

An ideal way to manipulate sound without distorting it is to dissociate it from its source. In Rear Window Hitchcock is able to maintain an almost total separation of what we see from what we hear. The result is a rich sound track that is both realistic in style and yet perhaps the most asynchronous and subjective of Hitchcock's career. The film is one of Hitchcock's experiments with the use of a single location. The set is limited to a courtyard in New York City. By a window in one apartment sits L. B. Jeffries (called

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"Jeff"), confined to a wheelchair with a cast on his leg. The visuals are restricted to one room of the convalescent's apartment and whatever he can see from his window. The sounds are seemingly almost as limited; they can come from within Jeff's own apartment, can emanate from other apartments, or can drift over from the next street, which we can barely glimpse through an alleyway. The sound of a boat whistle or siren may occasionally extend the aural boundaries a bit further than the visual ones. Yet we can rarely distinguish what Jeff's neighbors are saying unless they step onto their fire escapes; all we can normally hear from the neighbors' apartments is the music they play or listen to.

The viewer spends most of the film watching with Jeff as he spies on the activities of his neighbors as seen through their individual windows. Thus the world outside Jeff's apartment is presented as a series of pantomimes. Dialogue is reserved mainly for Jeff's comments on what he sees or for conversations he has with visitors to his apartment. With the exception of those scenes which are filmed within Jeff's apartment, then, there is a split between the world "in here," which is heard but not seen, and the world "out there," which is seen but not heard. The thrust of the film's structure will be to reverse this situation. Let me first consider the worlds as originally distinct and separate.

Less than one-tenth of the time that we.are looking at Jeff's neighbors does the" dominant sound emanate from the particular window under surveillance. Hitchcock was always a proponent of asynchronous sound; he considered it redundant to show the source of dialogue or sound effects. In Blackmail he could avoid talking heads because the stifling conventions of filming dialogue had not yet established themselves. In his forties films he got further from this ideal with his somewhat overproduced, dialogue-heavy talkies. Later in his career he came up with vehicles that eliminated the need for excessively long dialogue sequences. Psycho and Vertigo, for instance, have relatively little dialogue. Rear Window, too, includes many sequences with no dialogue. When characters do speak, their words often provide an added rather than a redundant dimension. What Jeff says to a visitor, for instance, usually applies both to the person he is addressing and to the neighbor he, and we, are watching at the time. The reverse also occurs. On some occasions,

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when Jeff can be lured away from his window watching to participate in discussions with his visitors, sounds from outside may comment on the situation in his apartment.

For the most part, the sounds from outside comprise traffic noise, which plays a minor role, and music, which in Rear Window plays a role as important as the dialogue and the visuals. To ignore the music is to eliminate an ironic component essential to the vision of the film. Hitchcock can be unusually free with the music because throughout the film New York City is supposedly undergoing a heat wave, so that all the courtyard windows are wide open. Hitchcock thus is free to use any or all sounds that might plausibly emanate from any of the dozens of windows facing the courtyard.

One can make a case that all the music in the film is source music, although the source is not always identified. Even the title music, arranged in a jazz idiom by Franz Waxman, is provided with a source, if we care to attribute one to it. As the title sequence ends the camera pans to a radio; the music comes to an end and is replaced by a commercial, which a composer, whose radio this is, turns off. From here on in the source of the music is usually, but not always, attributable to a specific window. Yet the music is timed as carefully as scoring; that is to say, it is timed as precisely to the actions of the characters as music written specifically for a film sequence. For instance, when Jeff scratches an itchy leg with a Chinese backscratcher, the music, which presumably emanates from some neighboring apartment window, underscores his feelings by shifting from a nervous sound to a soothing one at the precise moment of relief.

The ambiguity of whether we are listening to source music or music scored specifically for the film is appropriate to the thematic material of Rear Window and relates to the way we respond to the film visually. One of the major, unresolvable issues that Hitchcock dramatizes in the film is the audience's innate voyeurism. We are implicated in Jeff's voyeurism because we, too, cannot refrain from spying on his neighbors; that is, we cannot distinguish whether we are watching the neighbors because Jeff does so or because we are voyeuristic ourselves. This breaking down of the distinction between our actual behavior and our movie-going behavior is analogous to the blurring of the distinction between source music (which

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presumably has some independent existence—and thus corresponds to our innate voyeurism) and scoring (which is a product of the movie-making art and is once removed from reality—and thus corresponds to our movie-going voyeurism).

It is important that we have a sense of the music as source music, because thereby we necessarily associate it with the courtyard. The result is that both the music and the noise help integrate the sense of space in the courtyard. This integration counteracts the effect of the film's editing and mise-en-scene, both of which tend to isolate the neighbors from one another. The set design isolates them by placing each in his separate window. The cutting reinforces that separation when Hitchcock creates transitions from window to window through reaction shots rather than camera movement; for instance, a typical transitional sequence would be a cut from one neighbor in a window to Jeff's face and then to another neighbor in a different window. There is at times some panning between neighbors, and this camera movement helps create a sense of continuity in the courtyard. The tension between separation and continuity in human lives is central to the film, which, as we shall see, expresses in physical terms the metaphysical idea that no person can remain isolated emotionally from other people.

As I have said, the neighbors under surveillance at any given time are rarely the main source of whatever is on the sound track. This aural dissociation emphasizes the idea of the courtyard as microcosm. Regardless of what we are watching, the sound track makes us aware of a larger sphere of activity. In addition, there is often a contrast between the courtyard sounds and Jeff's comments in the foreground. The use of aural deep focus here exemplifies Hitchcock's closed style as opposed to the open style I ascribed in the introduction to Renoir and Altman.[3] Even when Hitchcock has a busy sound track, it is still much more selective than the sound track of a thirties film by Jean Renoir or of almost any Robert Altman work. Renoir and Altman use sound more "democratically," in the sense that Andre Bazin applied the word to visual deep focus, which does not emphasize any element at the expense of any other simultaneously presented. We are not meant to feel that all of Jeff's neighbors or all sounds are equally important but that they are presented only as they pertain to Jeff or his

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[IMAGE: Rear Window. Hitchcock keeping time for the composer.]

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perceptions. One can compare, for example, the use of cacophony in Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939) with its presence in Rear Window. In the Renoir film a key scene takes place in a corridor of la Chesnaye's chateau as his guests retire for the first night of their visit. Like Hitchcock's courtyard, Renoir's corridor, with its guests making their moves in and out of their rooms across a checkered floor, is a social microcosm. We hear fragments of conversations, and at times one guest even walks around or is heard from his (offscreen) room playing random notes on a hunting horn. There is no predominant sound, but rather a sense of babble, in this and .other similar scenes of the film. By contrast. Hitchcock starts each morning scene of Rear Window with a cacophonous sound track comprised of a woman singing scales, dogs barking, traffic noise, and the like. However, these transitional scenes last less than a minute, and the rest of the time Hitchcock prefers to let one sound predominate, usually a piece of source music that is heard not in fragments but from beginning to end. Whereas Renoir's corridor scenes have a unity of space (the above scene is shot in one extensive take) and a multiplicity of sounds. Hitchcock's courtyard scenes usually have a unity of sound (one song at a time) and a multiplicity of spaces (each separate apartment window).

The main function of Hitchcock's aural deep focus is irony. He achieves a depth of meaning that derives from the juxtaposition of one sound against various images. To be more specific, a given song takes on a new and frequently different meaning as it is associated with each neighbor, as well as with Jeff's own situation. For example, the first night's activities are accompanied by the song "Lover," the source of which is unspecified. Its first line— "Lover, when you're near me"—has ironic references to at least three couples. The first is a couple sharing a mattress on a fire escape. The second is Jeff and his fiancee, who has just walked out on him after a quarrel. The third is Thorwald and his wife; it is her perpetual nearness—she is an invalid—that presumably drives him to murder her later the same night.

A second song that refers to several situations is "Waiting for my true love to appear." It is being played at the party of the composer, who lives in the apartment adjacent to Jeff's. The lyrics apply equally well to Jeff, whose fiancee has not yet shown up for

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her evening visit, and a character referred to as Miss Lonelyhearts, who eventually gives up "waiting" and goes to a restaurant to pick up a man. By the time Miss Lonelyhearts returns from the restaurant, the composer's guests are singing "Mona Lisa," a song obviously associated with Jeff's girlfriend, whose name is Lisa. Similarly, Miss Lonelyheart's name (it is Jeff who so dubs her) is linked to the lyrics with the line "Is it only 'cause you're lonely?" Soon the man makes unwelcome advances toward Miss Lonelyhearts. Hitchcock emphasizes the association of the song with her situation by timing the song to end as she throws the man out of her apartment.

One of the most telling songs in the film is a recording played the first evening by Miss Lonelyhearts, which begins, "To see you is to love you, and I see you everywhere." This first line raises the central issue of biased perception. Miss Lonelyhearts has put this romantically crooned song on the record player as part of the setting for a drama she enacts with an imagined dinner guest, for whom she has prepared a candle-lit place setting. However, once she has drunk a toast with her "guest," she sees through her own illusions and breaks down in tears. By contrast, it is Jeff who does not see the truth of his own dissembling behavior. The phrase "I see you everywhere" is the clue to his all-consuming involvement in his neighbors' lives. He interprets every neighbor's situation as a projection of his own fears about marrying Lisa.[4] He assumes that the composer's unhappiness is the result of marital troubles; he sympathizes more than he consciously admits with Thorwald's desire to rid himself of a presumably nagging wife; he scowls disapprovingly at a bride's seemingly insatiable sexual demands. Jeff's preference for a world of illusion is shown by his returning a silent toast to the unthreatening Miss Lonelyhearts across the way rather than face—literally—his own dinner partner. Lisa, who is pouring champagne at the time. Jeff will not see Lisa's finer qualities until she enters his preferred courtyard world; he will finally fall in love with her only when she enters Thorwald's apartment and stands in a window enacting her own pantomime.

It is at the point when Jeff watches Lisa in Thorwald's bedroom window that the film's most important song, "Lisa," is first heard all the way through, its completion marking Jeff's realization that he loves Lisa. Hitchcock spoke to Truffaut about this song: "You

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remember that one of the characters in the yard was a musician. Well, I wanted to show how a popular song is composed by gradually developing it throughout the film until, in the final scene, it is played on a recording with a full orchestral accompaniment. Well, it didn't work out the way I wanted it to, and I was quite disappointed."[5] Two years later Hitchcock was a bit more specific about his dissatisfaction: "I was a little disappointed at the lack of a structure in the title song. I had a motion picture songwriter when I should have chosen a popular songwriter." It is hard to tell what Hitchcock would have considered a stronger structure. He may possibly have had in mind a song in which the various parts are more distinctive; Waxman develops the middle third of the song simply by elaborating on the principal theme after transposing it into another key. Judging from Hitchcock's use of songs in other films, he probably was looking for the immediacy and clarity of popular music.

In neither of the above interviews does Hitchcock give away the full significance of the song; its creation is made analogous to both the creation of a love relationship and the creation of the movie. Although we do not know until the last notes of the film that its title is "Lisa," the tune is carefully associated with the fiancee and the progress of her relationship with Jeff. The first time we hear part of the song, the notes arise from a cacophony of morning sounds in the courtyard as we are looking at a photograph of Lisa on the cover of a national magazine. (Just before we see the magazine cover we see a negative of the photograph, so that the unfinished song is linked with photography in an unfinished state.) Lisa stops to admire the tune every time it is played. When she first hears it, she says that it "sounds almost as if it were being written especially for us" (which, of course, it is, on one level). Jeff, characteristically deflating her romantic intentions, says, "No wonder he's having so much trouble with it." Later that evening the composer drunkenly returns to his apartment and knocks the music sheets off the piano, presumably while suffering from a creative block. His discouraged mood parallels the setback in the couple's relationship, for Lisa has just stalked out of the apartment after quarreling with Jeff. By the next evening the couple have temporarily reconciled their problems. Lisa is humming the song when Jeff's detective friend discovers

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her intention to stay the night with Jeff—a major step forward in their relationship; and she hums along with it again when she first believes Jeff's story that Thorwald has murdered his wife—the second major advance in Jeff's approval of her. At this point the song stops, while Lisa says, "Tell me everything you saw"; the sound track thus underscores with sudden silence the , importance of her finally believing in Jeff's interpretations of the actions he has been watching in Thorwald's apartment.

Most important, the same song is playing when Lisa enters Thorwald's apartment. It is being rehearsed by a small combo and is heard from start to finish for the first time. Because this scene is the riskiest part of the action so far in the film, one might expect that Hitchcock would prefer scoring that heightens the tension, but instead we hear the song in its most wistful arrangement; as Lisa enters the apartment, it is being played with romantic vibrato on a harmonica. The effect of the song here is to unite the ideas of romance and danger, two inseparable emotions in Jeff's mind, and to allow him to fall in love with Lisa. His main worry had apparently been that Lisa was too soft to accompany him on his assignments as a professional photographer of physically and politically dangerous situations. Now that Lisa appears to welcome danger, he realizes that she can fit into his world—a world that during his convalescence has been represented by his projections and interpretations of danger in his own backyard.

A second drama reaches its climax while the song is heard at this point. Directly below Thorwald's apartment is that of Miss Lonelyhearts. While Lisa breaks into Thorwald's home. Miss Lonelyhearts prepares to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. (Indeed, when Jeff dials the phone to call the police, he is intending to save Miss Lonelyhearts. He gets sidetracked, how-ever, by Lisa's danger.) Both Lisa and Miss Lonelyhearts have presumably heard the "Lisa" theme before, but at this point it supposedly sounds strikingly beautiful. Miss Lonelyhearts puts down her glass and pills and walks to her picture window; the beauty of the music dissuades her from killing herself. Meanwhile, Lisa, in Thorwald's identically laid-out apartment on the floor directly above, also approaches the window and stands in the same position in the window frame as Miss Lonelyhearts below her. Lisa

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too, is struck by the music's beauty, but, ironically, rather than save her life, it endangers her; Thorwald arrives home while she pauses to enjoy the music.

During the codalike ending of the film, the song will be heard once more; this time it is arranged for male vocalist and full orchestra, and the composer is playing the new record for Miss Lonelyhearts, who is in his apartment. She tells him that he will never know how much the song meant to her. Parallel to this blossoming friendship in the background is that of Jeff and Lisa in the foreground. Although the happy ending for their love story is somewhat qualified, the primary clue to the state of the couple's relationship is, as Robin Wood argues, that Jeff has turned his back to the window and presumably his face to reality.[7] The last word of the song is "Lisa," and the camera ends on Lisa—the film, the song, and the various relationships in this apartment and those in the courtyard all having been resolved for the time being, on the same happy note, as it were.

Throughout the film, therefore. Hitchcock does not use "Lisa" simply as a gimmick to motivate the action but to raise the issue of the value of art. It is appropriate that the composer is writing a song, a form of music roughly analogous to a Hitchcock movie because it is a popular rather than an elite art form. Hitchcock's ambivalence about his own work is reflected in his treatment of the composer's behavior and of the various responses to the song. For instance. Hitchcock poses the problem of whether his own motivations as a filmmaker are commercial or artistic when he has Lisa ask Jeff, "Where does a man get the inspiration to write a song like that?" Jeff answers, "He gets it from the landlady twice a month," whereas Lisa wishes that she could be "creative like the composer." The film makes a strong statement about the positive value of the song by having it save the life of Miss Lonelyhearts, just when Jeff forgets about her predicament. Its development, as I have shown, also accompanies the growth of two relationships.

If the moral assessment of song is positive in Rear Window, however, the treatment of photography is deliberately more ambiguous. As critics have shown, there is clearly a reason that Jeff is a photographer. His profession links him to the filmmaker, and his behavior during the movie links him to the film-goer.[8] As a

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viewer-surrogate, Jeff passively watches actions take place in little frames that he responds to but does not affect. His behavior is not altruistic; it helps neither Mrs. Thorwald nor Miss Lonelyhearts. Rather, it is voyeuristic; he escalates from the use of the naked eye to binoculars and finally to a telephoto lens. However, the tele-photo lens is a part of his camera, a fact that suggests that photographers and filmmakers are not only voyeuristic themselves but that their work caters to the voyeurism of the audience. I do not propose to settle here the complex issues raised in Rear Window about the psychology and morality of filmmaking and film-going.[9] Rather, I have wished to indicate how Hitchcock uses music to develop the argument.

Actually, a distinction should be made between the arts them-selves and the act of creation. The composer is at his worst when he is unable to work. When suffering a creative setback he comes home drunk and destructive. Jeff is seen at his worst throughout the film because he is not able to get out and actively take pictures. In a sense his neurotic voyeurism can be seen less as an extension of his photographic work than as the result of the denial of that creative outlet. In fact. Hitchcock separates the dancer from the dance, as it were. The composer writes the song out of creative impulses; he does not knowingly stop a suicide or promote a romance. Similarly, a photograph or a film has a value separate from the factors that went into its creation. The very fact that the song arises out of the cacophony that begins Rear Window and is heard in final form at the same time the film itself ends suggests that their simultaneous completion marks a corresponding transformation of the chaos of life into the order of art.

So far my discussion of Rear Window has concerned the essentially static situation of the first two-thirds of the film, which maintains the separation between Jeff and his neighbors and between dialogue and pantomime. However, that separation is eventually destroyed; indeed, it is the interpenetration of the two worlds that results in Jeff's shift from passive voyeurism to emotional involvement, the "therapeutic" experience that Robin Wood finds at the heart of the film.'" Wood rightly puts that shift in terms that explain why the film's setting is ultimately a psychological one: "The Hitchcockian hero typically lives in a small enclosed world of his

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own fabrication, at once a protection and a prison, artificial and unrealistic, into which the "real" chaos erupts, demanding to be faced."[11] By the end of the film not only have Jeff's emissaries (his nurse and his girlfriend) invaded Thorwald's apartment, but Thorwald has invaded Jeff's. Reality, in the form of Thorwald, has intruded on Jeff's private world. The nonthreatening two-dimensional character has left his movie-screen-like frame and joined his viewer's world. When Jeff hears Thorwald approaching in his hallway he turns out the lights in his apartment. Thorwald turns out the hall light, enters the apartment, and confronts Jeff in the darkness. As Wood demonstrates, because of the parallels established between Jeff and Thorwald, "the scene carries over-tones of a confrontation with a doppelganger: ... we have to accept [Thorwald] as representative of potentialities in Jefferies and, by extension, in all of us."[12]

Wood's contention that Thorwald is Jeff's alter ego can be supported not only by the structure of the film but also by the reversals in the sound pattern. When Jeff first notices Thorwald, he can see but not hear him. At the end of the film he can hear but not see him. Sight is associated with security in Jeff's mind, sound with menace.13 All the interactions that lead to the confrontation of Thorwald and Jeff involve an increase in aural communication and a lessening of visual communication. A detailed look at the climatic events in the film will show a shift from visual to aural evidence.

Jeff's first suspicions that Thorwald has killed his wife are based purely on visual and circumstantial evidence. Through Thorwald's window Jeff sees only what appears to be bickering, some suspicious nocturnal activities, and, finally, the absence of the wife. Jeff must supply an interpretation of their behavior. This is not the first or last time that Hitchcock will film an argument through a window. His television short One More Mile to Go, for example, begins with an exterior tracking shot up to the picture window of a quarreling couple. The camera does not cut inside until immediately after the husband has struck and killed his wife with a poker. The effect, in both instances, of filming so that we can see but not hear the quarrel is to universalize it; Hitchcock leaves it for each viewer to supply the particulars of the fight from his imagination. Fighting

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between spouses is universal; to specify the issue would eliminate audience identification. The effect of filming all the neighbors in Rear Window in pantomime is not to reduce their value as characters but to render them as archetypes, with which we, and Jeff, can all identify. Later in Rear Window, when Jeff switches to telephoto lenses to watch the Thorwalds, we can actually hear the sounds of their voices; the visual magnification of the image is accompanied by aural magnification. Yet we still cannot make out their actual words; we can only hear their angry tones, and so the argument remains abstract.

With no verbal proof of murder, the only possible aural evidence is one scream, but its source remains unidentified. During the first night, which we retrospectively fix as the time of the crime, a scream and a crash are heard while the camera is panning across some darkened windows, with the camera movement presumably representing Jeff's viewpoint. The camera does a double take, as it were, stopping on a window of a corner building, as if to imply that it is the location of the source of the sound.

Thorwald cannot be heard, so Jeff supplies words and motivations for him, narrating what he takes to be Thorwald's thoughts. He has Lisa push under Thorwald's door an anonymous note that reads, "What have you done with her?" When he sees Thorwald's reactions, he says excitedly, "You did it, Thorwald, you did it!" However, Hitchcock makes Thorwald's reactions neutral enough to make us wonder if Jeff is not reading too much into Thorwald's behavior. Next, Jeff escalates from sending a silent note to making telephone contact with Thorwald. As he watches Thorwald contemplating whether to answer the ringing phone, he again puts thoughts into Thorwald's head: "You're curious, Thorwald . . ."he begins. When Thorwald answers the phone, Jeff poses as a blackmailer and tells Thorwald to meet him at a hotel (so that Lisa and the nurse can have time to dig for evidence in Thorwald's garden). The fact that we can hear Thorwald ourselves and that he is frightened enough to be willing to meet with the blackmailer gives us more objective evidence that Jeff's interpretations of Thorwald's actions are justified. Thorwald returns while Lisa is in his apartment and catches Lisa sending pantomimed signals to Jeff. Now the tables are turned. Jeff becomes Thorwald's victim. First, as Jeff

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did to him, Thorwald simply looks at Jeff—he stares out his window, following the direction implied by Lisa's gestures. Next, having figured out Jeff's name from his mailbox, as Lisa had Thorwald's, he phones Jeff. Jeff answers, thinking that it is his friend Tom, and by mentioning Thorwald's name, he confirms Thorwald's suspicions aurally, just as Thorwald had confirmed Jeff's suspicions when Jeff phoned him. Thorwald hangs up without speaking.

A moment later Jeff hears a door crashing shut in his own corridor. Thorwald's footsteps are long, slow, exaggerated, reverberated—in short, expressionistic—to convey a sense of their impact on Jeff. (We have never heard the approaching footsteps of Jeff's previous visitors as they walked down the same corridor.) Hitchcock here observes the dictum of the horror movie that an unseen threat is more terrifying than a visible one—a convention he develops furthest in The Birds. Thorwald enters the apartment and stands in the dark by the door, confronting his harrasser, Jeff. "What do you want from me?" he asks. Now it is Thorwald who is talking and Jeff who is silent, for Jeff has no good explanation for why he has spied on his neighbor. Jeff pops four successive flash-bulbs in Thorwald's eyes, temporarily blinding him. The result for a moment returns Jeff to his original advantage; he can see Thorwald but Thorwald cannot see him. Jeff is stalling for time, and, sure enough, he has just enough time before Thorwald's attack to scream for help from Lisa and the policemen who have just arrived at Thorwald's apartment. They do not arrive in time to prevent Thorwald from throwing Jeff out of his window, but they do manage to break Jeff's fall to the ground.

Jeff's scream for help is a crucial sound reversal in the film. Lisa had screamed for help to Jeff from Thorwald's apartment. Now it is Jeff who screams to Lisa for help while she is at Thorwald's apartment. This cry for help is essential to the theme of Rear Window. As Wood has said, Jeff's apartment is no longer a place of protection but a place of vulnerability. The penetration of his room by Thorwald is actually the penetration of his emotionally detached psyche by dangerous reality. With the scream Jeff is acknowledging that he needs help from others, that he is not self-reliant, that we are all part of a universe and must depend on one another.

If we read the actions of the film as all leading to Jeff's confrontation

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with Thorwald and his cry for help, it is possible to consider the entire sound track as a subjective extension of Jeff's feelings. The sounds gradually become more and more focused. During the opening titles of the film we are presented with a relatively random selection of sounds, from neighbors chatting to cats meowing. As Jeff becomes more and more preoccupied with Thorwald's affairs, the sounds become more and more selective. Just as he concentrates his telephoto lens more and more on Thorwald, so he concentrates his aural attention on relevant sounds. They are selected and magnified in proportion to his interests. Only when Jeff is on our end of the telephone do we hear the speaker on the other end.[14] Even the traffic noise may reflect his feelings. When Jeff concentrates on what goes on within his own apartment, we hear relatively little noise from outside. However, when Lisa walks out angrily on him, for example, there is a loud rumbling noise that may physically be attributed to a truck going by on the next street but that emotionally works to suggest Jeff's disturbance as he sits and thinks in his upset state. When he watches Lisa and the nurse digging in Thorwald's garden plot, there is no sound of music in the courtyard. The courtyard itself is at this point a safe place, whereas the street from which Thorwald will return is a threat. Therefore, the sound track concentrates on street noise, not courtyard noise. Even the songs that emanate from windows may only be those which are relevant to Jeff's interests (although he misses the ironic component). In the sense that Thorwald shifts from visual non-threat to aural threat, the loudness of Thorwald's footsteps is appropriate. If the whole film is seen as a progression from the presentation of random noises and random windows to a concentration on. ,the neighbor who psychologically threatens Jeff and the footsteps that bring terror to him, then they are the logical culmination of the stylistic choices of the film. Subjectivity has looked and sounded realistic; now reality looks and sounds distorted; the intrusion of reality on Jeff is conveyed paradoxically through an expressionistic technique. As a result Hitchcock undermines audience identification with Jeff just at the point when he is most threatened. The patently unreal sound forces this emotional withdrawal just before Thorwald enters the room, so that the viewer can see him not as a monster but as a somewhat bewildered victim of Jeff's harassment.

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(Soon, we even see the results of Jeff's blinding flashes from ThorwalcTs point of view.) The sudden shift to an expressionistic presentation of Jeff's subjectivity creates an emotional distance that encourages the viewer to judge Jeff's behavior and to recognize retrospectively the subjectivity (and therefore the culpability) of Jeff's earlier perceptions as well.

Notes (p 123 - 124)

1. John Belton persuasively defends Hitchcock's "perceptual approach to cinematic narrative" during this period in "Hitchcock: The Mechanics of Perception." Cambridge Phoenix, 16 October 1969. Belton finds "a disparity of perception which culminates in a psychological breakdown of one or more of his characters" in Rebecca, Suspicion, The Paradine Case, Dial M for Murder, The Wrong Man, Under Capricorn, Vertigo, and Mamie; the "use of objects to illustrate changes in perception" in Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train; "change or loss of identity" associated with misperception in Spellbound, To Catch a Thief, North & Northwest, Psycho, and Vertigo; and the mise-en-scene as a subjective projection of the world in Rear Window, The Birds, and Mamie. To these titles I would add Notorious, I Confess, and the later Man Who Knew Too Much for a complete list of films made in the subjective style. I would not include The Birds for reasons to be explained in chapter 8.

2. The identification of Scottie's love for Madeleine with his death yearning is made by Robin Wood in Hitchcock's Films (London: A. Zwemmer; Cranbury, N.j.: A. S. Barnes, 1965, rev. 1969), p. 80.

3. I defined aural deep focus in chapter I as the interplay between sounds made by foreground and background sources, to keep the term analogous with the visual definition of deep focus. In Rear Window the term could be extended to include any juxtaposition of background and foreground noises regardless of whether the sources are visible or not because the relation between foreground and background is both clear and constant.

4. Wood, Hitchcock's Films, p. 64.

5. Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967; originally published as Le Cinema selon Hitchcock [Paris: Robert Laffont, 1966]), p. 160.

6. Alfred Hitchcock, "Rear Window," Take One 1 (November/December 1968):18.

7. Wood, Hitchcock's Films, p. 15. Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol in Hitchcock (Paris: Editions L'niversitaires, 1957), p. 131, had argued that there was no improvement iri the relationship.

8. Rohmer and Chabrol, Hitchcock, p. 126.

9. A condemnation of Jeff's voyeurism can be found in Jean Douchet, "Hitch et son public," Cahiers du Cinema, no. 113 (November I960), pp. 7—15. A defense can be found in Raymond Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock: or The Plain Man's Hitchcock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), pp. 235-44. Peter Wollen suggests that Hitchcockian voyeurism—and he sees spying as an aspect of voyeurism—invites Freudian analysis that goes beyond "the 'psychology of perception'" to the "rhetoric of the unconscious": "Hitchcock's Vision," Cinema, no. 3 (June 1969), pp. 2-4.

10. Wood, Hitchcock's Films, p. 63.

11. Ibid., p. 68.

12. Ibid., p. 67.

13. I am speaking here only of sound Jeff notes consciously. He rarely acknowledges the presence of the music. His fiancee points out the sonp "Lisa" to him, and he does indeed feel threatened by it until he comes to accept the woman with whom it is associated.

14. Actually, after Jeff hands the phone over to his friend once, we do hear the caller's first three words: "Lieutenant Doyle, Sir?

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