Rear Window

“And yet his scrutiny wasn’t held fixedly to any one point, it was a slow, sweeping one, moving along the houses on the opposite side from me first. When it got to the end of them, I knew it would cross over to my side and come back along there. Before it did, I withdrew several yards inside my room, to let it go safely by. I didn’t want him to think I was sitting there prying into his affairs.”

Jeff watches Lars Thorwald scanning the view from his own window. Jeff is “prying,” but he doesn’t want to be caught. Instead, he retreats into the darkness to let the gaze “go safely by.” When confronted with the potential for a reciprocal gaze, he responds to it as a threat, which colors the reader’s interpretation of Jeff’s voyeurism.

“The chain of little habits that were their lives unreeled themselves. They were all bound in them tighter than the tightest straitjacket any jailer ever devised, though they all thought themselves free.”

Jeff portrays his neighbors’ habits as confinement, projecting his sense of being trapped onto them. The line raises the question of what real freedom is. After all, one man does make a huge departure from routine. Thorwald murders his wife, and the disruption of his habits first raises Jeff’s suspicions.

“Suddenly he left it for the first time since the shades had gone up, came out around it to the outside, stooped down into another part of the room, and straightened again with an armful of what looked like varicolored pennants at the distance at which I was […] The ‘pennants’ slung across the V kept changing color right in front of my eyes. I have very good sight. One moment they were white, the next red, the next blue.

Then I got it. They were a woman’s dresses.”

As Thorwald packs his wife’s trunk, Jeff struggles to understand what he is seeing. Sight is not perfectly reliable. The moment also speaks to Jeff’s transgression. He first compares the dresses to “varicolored pennants.” Flags are raised outside to signal others or display allegiances. These are dresses, which are worn against the skin and hung in a person’s closet in the innermost recess of their living space. Jeff’s voyeurism turns spaces inside out, making the private public.

“The night brooded down on both of us alike, the curiosity-monger in the bay window, the chain-smoker in the fourth-floor flat, without giving any answer. The only sound was that interminable cricket.”

Woolrich sets a scene of oppressive and mysterious darkness. The unseen cricket’s chirp feels ominous after Sam’s earlier interpretation of it as a sign of death. The moment also pairs Jeff (the curiosity-monger) and Thorwald (the “chain smoker”). As the story continues, so do these impressions of uncomfortable intimacy and uncomfortable similarity.

“They use the expression ‘delayed action.’ I found out then what it meant. For two days a sort of formless uneasiness, a disembodied suspicion, I don’t know what to call it, had been flitting and volplaning around in my mind, like an insect looking for a landing place. More than once, just as it had been ready to settle, some slight thing, some slight reassuring thing, such as the raising of the shades after they had been down unnaturally long, had been enough to keep it winging aimlessly, prevent it from staying still long enough for me to recognize it. The point of contact had been there all along, waiting to receive it. Now, for some reason, within a split second after he tossed over the empty mattresses, it landed—zoom! And the point of contact expanded—or exploded, whatever you care to call it—into a certainty of murder.”

This is the moment that gives the story its original title, “It Had to Be Murder.” The “delayed action” speaks to the mysterious workings of the mind and casts doubt on the conclusion. Jeff is, of course, right in that it was murder, but did it “have to be”? For much of the narrative, the evidence is against murder. The story leaves it ambiguous whether Jeff’s “delayed action” is a form of superior intuition, or he is a “crank” who happened to be correct in this case.

“For about ten minutes after he stormed out my numbed mind was in a sort of straitjacket. Then it started to wriggle its way free. The hell with the police. I can’t prove it to them, maybe, but I can prove it to myself, one way or the other, once and for all. Either I’m wrong or I’m right.”

This is the second figurative use of the terms “straitjacket” and “free.” In returning to the words, Jeff either doesn’t realize his confinement or believes himself superior to the “objects” of his study. He accepts his fallibility but assumes a degree of free agency that he does not attribute to his neighbors.

“He’s got his armor on against them. But his back is naked and unprotected against me.

I called Sam in. ‘Whatever became of that spyglass we used to have, when we were bumming around on that cabin-cruiser that season?’”

This quotation directly follows the preceding one. It portrays voyeurism as a violent act, hitting an opponent where he lacks “armor.” The moment also marks an escalation as Jeff has Sam retrieve the “spyglass,” which will allow him to see more detail. Jeff has moved beyond being a curious watcher to being a spy and voyeur.

“He shifted in, away from the door, nearer the window. He thought danger lay near the door, safety away from it. He didn’t know it was the other way around, the deeper into his own rooms he retreated the greater the danger.”

Jeff’s comments on Thorwald’s actions upon receiving Jeff’s note reinforce the inversion of private and public spaces. Jeff comments on a corresponding inversion of safety and danger. In hiding himself from the world, Thorwald reveals himself to Jeff.

“It took hours before I got it. I kept pegging away at it, pegging away at it, while the afternoon wore away. Meanwhile he was pacing back and forth there like a caged panther. Two minds with but one thought, turned inside-out in my case. How to keep it hidden, how to see that it wasn’t kept hidden.”

Jeff portrays Thorwald as his mirror image, the same but inverted. Thorwald’s physical pacing externalizes Jeff’s “pegging away” at the mystery. One tries to keep the crime (and body) hidden, and the other works to uncover it.

“At one point an odd little bit of synchronization, completely accidental of course, cropped up. Landlord and tenant both happened to be near the living room windows on the sixth at the same moment that Thorwald was near those on the fourth. Both parties moved onward simultaneously into the kitchen from there, and, passing the blind spot of the wall, appeared next at the kitchen windows. It was uncanny, they were almost like precision-strollers or puppets manipulated on one and the same string. It probably wouldn’t have happened again just like that in another fifty years. Immediately afterwards they digressed, never to repeat themselves like that again. The thing was, something about it had disturbed me. There had been some slight flaw or hitch to mar its smoothness. I tried for a moment or two to figure out what it had been, and couldn’t.”

This moment later illuminates the location of the body for Jeff. Once again, the disruption of the pattern reveals something important. The passage also returns to the conceit of people as mechanical and constrained objects. He refers to them as puppets manipulated by a string.

“I watched him at it. There wasn’t any way I could protect him, now that he was in there. Even Thorwald would be within his rights in shooting him down—this was break and entry. I had to stay in back behind the scenes, like I had been all along. I couldn’t get out in front of him as a lookout and shield him. Even the dicks had had a lookout posted.”

Jeff sends Sam to break into Thorwald’s house, another escalation of his peeping activities. The passage illustrates the lengths to which he goes in his quest and narrows the gap between Thorwald and Jeff. Thorwald was willing to kill his wife, but Jeff is willing to risk Sam’s. There’s also an air of menace in the statement, “I had to stay in back behind the scenes, like I had been all along.” It hinders the reader’s ability to pinpoint the danger.

“My mind no longer distracted by having him to look at, I turned to trying to recapture something else—that troublesome little hitch in synchronization that had occurred this afternoon, when the renting agent and he both moved simultaneously from one window to the next. The closest I could get was this: it was like when you’re looking at someone through a pane of imperfect glass, and a flaw in the glass distorts the symmetry of the reflected image for a second, until it has gone on past that point. Yet that wouldn’t do, that was not it. The windows had been open and there had been no glass between. And I hadn’t been using the lens at the time.”

This meditation on perspective reminds readers that they experience the entire story through the “imperfect glass” of Jeff’s narration. They rely entirely on what he chooses to tell and cannot be sure what he omits.

“Something about it struck me as different from any of the others I’d seen him give in all the time I’d been watching him. If you can qualify such an elusive thing as a glance, I would have termed it a glance with a purpose. It was certainly anything but vacant or random, it had a bright spark of fixity in it. It wasn’t one of those precautionary sweeps I’d seen him give, either. It hadn’t started over on the other side and worked its way around to my side, the right. It had hit dead-center at my bay window, for just a split second while it lasted, and then was gone again. And the lights were gone, and he was gone.

Sometimes your senses take things in without your mind translating them into their proper meaning. My eyes saw that look. My mind refused to smelter it properly.”

Jeff interprets Thorwald’s gaze multiple times. He classifies the intentions behind it and guesses at the objects in front of it. Here, his interpretation fails—just when he is the object of Thorwald’s malevolent gaze. Readers return to the idea that there is something about Jeff that he cannot see.