Still from Rear Window with actors ***James Stewart and Grace Kelly,***

The 1954 Alfred Hitchcock thriller ‘Rear Window’ concerns itself with voyeurism; with the paralysing effect that our curiosity into the lives of others can have on our own relationships. As such it offers a perceptive analysis of a very modern condition.

‘I can smell trouble right here in this apartment. First you smash your leg. Then you get to looking out the window, see things you shouldn’t see. Trouble.’

The film opens with a view of a Greenwich Village apartment building on a hot summer’s morning. A cat runs up the garden stairs. A couple sleeps on the balcony to keep cool. A businessman puts on his tie to go to work. We see a man listening to the radio while shaving, and a young woman exercising while making herself a coffee. There are pigeons perched on the roof.

This scene fascinates professional photographer Jeff Jefferies (James Stewart), who lives opposite and is confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg.

‘Six weeks sitting in a two-room apartment with nothing to do but look out the window at the neighbours.’

The more Jeff watches, the more he is captivated. As day turns to night, he begins to build narratives around each household.

Two amorous newlyweds are handed the keys to their new accommodation and draw the blinds. A glamorous dancer fends off the persistent attentions of gentleman callers. A troubled pianist searches relentlessly for a new hit. There’s a middle-aged couple who lower their small dog to the garden in a basket; a travelling salesman with a bedridden wife; and a sculptor next door who thinks he over-waters his plants. There’s a lonely spinster who prepares dinner for an imaginary sweetheart and greets him with an imaginary kiss.

‘You'd think the rain would've cooled things down. All it did was make the heat wet.’

Jeff is so caught up in the theatre playing out in the building opposite that he cannot pay proper attention to his girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly), a refined society woman who works in fashion. He confides in Stella (Thelma Ritter), the nurse attending to his convalescence, that he doesn’t see much future in their relationship

‘She's too perfect, she's too talented, she's too beautiful, she's too sophisticated, she's too everything but what I want.’

Jeff believes that Lisa’s glamorous lifestyle is incompatible with his own gruelling career as a travelling photojournalist. Stella suggests he’s over-thinking things.

‘When two people love each other, they come together - WHAM - like two taxis on Broadway.’

Still from Rear Window: The Apartment Block

Jeff’s resistance to Lisa’s charms is hard to believe. She’s smart, funny, considerate - and a vision in an embroidered white tulle circle skirt and off-the-shoulder black top; with a chiffon shawl and a pearl choker necklace; with red lipstick, blue eyes and elegantly coiffed blonde hair. (Kelly’s wardrobe was designed by Edith Head.)

‘Well, if there's one thing I know, it's how to wear the proper clothes.’

One night, after a spat with Lisa, Jeff is left alone in his apartment. He hears the sound of breaking glass and a woman’s scream:

‘Don’t!’

Reaching for his binoculars, he sets them aside for his telephoto lens. He observes the salesman in the building opposite making repeated trips back and forth carrying a suitcase. Drifting in and out of sleep, he wakes to see the same man cleaning a large knife and handsaw.

By the time Lisa visits Jeff the next morning, he is convinced that the salesman has murdered his wife.

Jeff: Why would a man leave his apartment three times on a rainy night with a suitcase and come back three times?

Lisa: He likes the way his wife welcomes him home?

The couple then spy the suspect tying a rope around a large trunk and overseeing removal men. Now Lisa too is persuaded of the man’s guilt, and they set about proving it.

‘Tell me exactly what you saw and what you think it means.’

‘Rear Window’ was an extraordinarily inventive production. It was shot at Paramount Studios in an enormous indoor set that replicated a real Greenwich Village courtyard. Hitchcock directed the entire movie from Jeff's apartment, communicating with the actors in the building opposite via radio microphones and earpieces. The film only employed sounds arising from the normal life of the characters and the street: the noise of kids playing and a man whistling; of car horns and a passing barrel organ; of partygoers singing ‘Mona Lisa’ and the pianist practising his new composition.

Lisa: Where does a man get inspiration to write a song like that?

Jeff: He gets it from the landlady once a month.

A core theme of ‘Rear Window’ is voyeurism. Jeff’s obsession with observing other people’s private dramas seems to prevent him from living his own. And since we the viewers share Jeff’s perspective of the apartment block opposite, we are complicit.

‘That’s a secret private world you’re looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn’t possibly explain in public.’

The worldly-wise Stella points out that sometimes our curiosity can be cancerous.

Stella: We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes sir. How's that for a bit of homespun philosophy?

Jeff: Reader's Digest, April 1939.

Stella: Well, I only quote from the best.

Rear Window: ‘Stella and Jeff’: Thelma Ritter and James Stewart

This thought still resonates today. The more we are absorbed in the trivia of celebrity and social media, the more we are subsumed in apathetic torpor. We become incapable of addressing our own real life issues.

Happily Jeff and Lisa’s quest to catch the killer also repairs their fractured relationship. They are united in the fear and excitement of the chase; in shared action. They are a team. And perhaps there’s a lesson here for us all.

At the end of the movie we see that the pianist has finally cracked his song and a romance with the spinster is blossoming. The dancer has been reunited with her devoted partner, a soldier who has been away on active service; and the newlyweds have begun to bicker.

The still convalescing Jeff sleeps contentedly, blissfully unaware of all this. Lisa reclines on a nearby chaise longue in red button-down shirt, blue jeans and loafers. She sets aside her book – ‘Beyond the High Himalayas’ - and picks up her copy of Harper’s Bazaar – the Beauty Issue.

‘Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you.
You're so like the lady with the mystic smile.
Is it only because you're lonely they have blamed you
For that Mona Lisa strangeness in your smile?
Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa?
Or is this your way to hide a broken heart?
Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep,
They just lie there and they die there.
Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?
Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art?’

Nat King Cole, ‘Mona Lisa’ (R Evans, J Livingston)

No. 438

‘A lie can be halfway round the world while truth is putting on its shoes.’
Attributed to Mark Twain and Winston Churchill among others…

In the splendid 1959 courtroom drama ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ James Stewart plays a lawyer defending an army lieutenant charged with murder. When cross-examining a medical expert, Stewart asks a question that impugns the integrity of the prosecuting officers. He knows this is improper, admits it and withdraws the remark.

The lieutenant is confused, and asks Stewart: ‘How can a jury disregard what it's already heard?’

Stewart shakes his head and replies: ‘They can't, lieutenant. They can’t.’

This is a relatively benign use of a tactic that is not uncommon in the fields of law, journalism and politics: alluding to something that may not be relevant, provable or even true, and trusting that people will remember.

In his 1972 magazine series, ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail’, Hunter S Thompson related a sinister tale of Lyndon Johnson canvassing in Texas:

'The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumour campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows.

‘Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-f****r,’ the campaign manager protested. ‘Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.’

‘I know,’ Johnson replied. ‘But let’s make the sonofab****h deny it.’'

We can all recall stories, gossip and rumours that attach themselves to modern politicians and celebrities. Hearsay and innuendo, suggestions of scandal, tend to endure, despite their being unsubstantiated and unproven. We can’t un-hear what we have heard; un-see what we have seen; un-think what we have thought.

Of course, this is nothing new. We’re familiar with the cancerous effect of Iago’s lies in Shakespeare’s Othello.

‘I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear.’

In 1710 the essayist Jonathan Swift wrote:

‘If a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.’

The problem is that the more scurrilous, extraordinary and unlikely a story is, the more it lends itself to re-telling; the more we want to share it, regardless of whether we know it to be true. A lie is generally more compelling than the truth. It disperses by chain reaction, with incredible velocity. Indeed, as Vladimir Lenin said:
‘A lie told often enough becomes the truth.'

Sadly the social media age seems to have amplified and accelerated this phenomenon. The dice are increasingly loaded in favour of half-truths and misrepresentation. Lies are faster, more nimble, more addictive than ever before. And we are all complicit. We like to gossip, to spread the news, to pass on a story. We freely re-tweet, share and endorse. We may occasionally pause to question sources, or reflect on impacts. But we often unwittingly participate in the distribution of falsehood.

‘I can prove it’s rumour. I can’t prove it’s fact.’
Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York and now President Donald Trump’s lawyer

And so inevitably we arrive at the era of fake news, alternative facts and ‘would’ meaning ‘wouldn’t’. And our heads are endlessly spinning because, as Rudy Giuliani recently observed, ‘Truth isn’t truth.’

The Ancient Cretan philosopher Epimenides once stated that all Cretans are liars. Was he lying or telling the truth? This is the Liar’s Paradox, and it feels sometimes that we all now inhabit one gigantic, all-consuming Liar’s Paradox. We’re trying to navigate a maze of untruth. Fiction and fabrication tie us in knots, confuse and confound us. They sow doubt and erode trust. They gnaw away at the ties that bind us. We become suspicious, paranoid. We don’t know who to believe.

'I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.'
Friedrich Nietzsche

So what can we do?

'Trust, but verify’
President Ronald Reagan

Of course, we need Governments and the digital titans to play their part and embrace this challenge of our times. We need a New Deal for Publishing, something that recognizes the realities of contemporary platforms and behaviours.

Brands too have a part to play. They need to rekindle their age-old association with trust and reliability; become once again a source of credible claims and dependable commitments.

But perhaps more broadly we need a new ethical code more suited to the modern age. We need to adapt our behaviour at work and in life: to place a greater premium on facts; to demand verification and substantiation; to support institutions and publications that stand up for truth. We should be subscribing to reputable news platforms. (Maybe we could even buy a newspaper!)

We should also consider moderating our natural propensity to spread rumours; curtailing our inclination to share and pass on. We can no longer excuse slander and defamation as idle chat or locker room banter. We can no longer defend falsehood in the name free speech. Gossip must become less socially acceptable.

Ultimately we may need to take a stand. As George Orwell is reputed to have said:

'In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’

No. 196

Rear Window: A Race of Peeping Toms?

Anatomy of a Rumour: How Do We Protect Truth in an Environment that Favours Falsehood?