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Rear Window has long been recognized for its thematics of watching, connecting the voyeurism of L. B. "Jeff" Jefferies (James Stewart) with the spectator's curiosity about the lives of those one watches on the screen.2 Examinations of the film's reflexive structure have contributed multiple strands to the interpretation of scopophilia in Hitchcock's film and in the experience of cinema. Feminist psychoanalytic readings of the gendered implications of the gaze have called attention to the ways in which Hitchcock's film screens and reinforces the power of the masculine spectator over the feminine spectacle.3 More recently, analyses that place this film in its historical period have also detected interesting resonances with respect to the surveillance of McCarthyism.4 All of this critical interest in the thematics of watching has added a great deal to the appreciation and understanding of Hitchcock's film, and has influenced how we think about the gaze as both an exercise of power and an imposition on those whom it captures. But, too frequently, critics have tended to read the power of the gaze as a unidirectional phenomenon and thus have emphasized how the film positions us with respect to Jeff as a voyeur-one of a "race of Peeping Toms" as his nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), calls him. As much as the film invites us to do so, interpreting it exclusively through the viewer's identification with Jeff fails to recognize that the film's narrative logic also stresses the risk of being seen.
Jeff signals this risk when, fearing that the suspicious neighbor on whom he has been spying may have seen Stella and him, he nervously whispers to her to get back out of sight. She answers, "I'm not shy, I've been looked at before," to which he warns, "That's no ordinary look. That's the kind of look a man gives when he thinks that someone might be watching him." This brief exchange focuses attention on an important-though under-examined-conflict of the narrative, highlighting specifically the role that conditions Jeff's relationships with others, and the danger he attaches to the prospect of being seen, especially but not exclusively by Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr). Jeff is a voyeur who privileges himself as a subject in opposition to those whom he watches as objects. Maintaining these categorical distinctions...