And Rear Window (1998)

DISABLED BY DESIRE: BODY DOUBLES IN “REAR WINDOW” (1942), REAR WINDOW (1954), AND REAR WINDOW (1998). NANCY STEFFEN-FLUHR In the coded world of the classical Hol- free. It enables the fantasy that there is a lywood cinema, the figure of the ‘disabled’ posthuman escape from “the meat world,” body is always a double body. Especially as William Gibson has phrased it.1 In short, the disabled male body. Haunted by its if there were no disabled people, Holly- uncanny partner, the ‘normal’ body, it is wood would have to invent them (as, in- chained forever to its own doppelganger. deed, it has). Indeed, it is the very spectacle of the dis- Most of the pioneering work on disabil- abled body that creates the spectral ‘normal ity in the cinema has focused on the creation body’ in the first place, as negative space of stigmatizing stereotypes and the nega- creates form. The latter cannot exist with- tive relation of these stereotypes to the ac- out the former. tual life experiences of people who are es- The disabled body (as an abelist fan- pecially challenged by disabilities. (All of us tasy figure) is constructed by an act of have disabilities, but there is a difference in semiotic dismemberment. It is marked as an degree that is a difference in kind, socio- assembly of parts, each of which is vulner- politically.) For example, Martin Norden in able to failure or amputation—an assembly his 1994 book, The Cinema of Isolation, dis- being held together by fetish magic. This tinguishes ten specific disabled character marking and fetishizing creates a fictional types that have evolved over the years in un-marked able body which passes as a Hollywood films, from the Comic Mis- seamless whole. In this manner, the figure adventurer to the High-Tech Guru.2 He of the disabled body gives local habitation demonstrates how these stereotypes “pan- and a name to a site of existential bondage. der . to the needs of the able-bodied ma- My belief in the existence of such a site is jority” by embodying otherwise formless necessary to my belief that I live elsewhere, fears (1,12). that I am unbound. It enables my fantasy In this essay, I am not primarily con- that there is a category of Other People—a cerned with the way in which the reified category to which I do not belong—who are disabled body embodies formless fears, but chained to dying animals, whereas I float rather, how it can be made to embody form- Volume 22, No. 3 69 Post Script less desires. What I am after, however, is bedroom. It contained a sailor suit that he something rather different from what Leslie surreptitiously donned at night, slipping Fiedler meant when he noted that “all out of his marital closet to cruise the docks Freaks are perceived to one degree or an- in search of male sexual partners. The suit- other as erotic” (Fiedler 137). No authentic case also contained a leather-bound diary in disabled bodies, erotic or otherwise, inhabit which he kept blow-by-blow records of his this essay, nor do they inhabit the Holly- couplings. Despising his ‘perversion,’ in- wood cinema, I would argue. There are only creasingly paranoid that his double life social/psychological constructs that feed upon themselves. In those constructs, “the loss of control [is] often represented as in- herent in the experience of disability,” as Paul Longmore has observed (35). For Longmore, this means that disability is in- evitably associated with sexual danger. The flip side of fear is desire, however; and the very Otherness invested in the figure of the disabled body makes it an especially con- venient repository for disowned states of yearning. In his seminal 1988 essay “Vas,” Paul Smith, building on the work of Klaus Theweleit, argues that for many men, the most important of these disowned feelings is “the hysterical desire for somatic loss, the death of the body in an efflux of bodily sub- stance” (1025). In the pages that follow, I propose to analyze how this fear-as-desire has been built into the disabled bodies of three male protagonists: “Hal Jeffries” in Cornell Woolrich’s 1942 short story, “Rear Win- Cornell Woolrich dow”;3 “L.B. Jefferies” in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window, based on the Wool- rich story; and “Jason Kemp” in the 1998 ABC TV remake of Rear Window starring actor Christopher Reeve. Each of these bi- would be disclosed, Woolrich simulta- furcated bodies is doubled by other bodies neously made sure that it was disclosed, (many of them female) within their respec- accidentally leaving the suitcase unlocked, tive texts. Taken together, they suggest an- accidentally forgetting to take the diary other kind of disabled typology: the Limi- with him when he suddenly decided that he nal Man whose protective, spliced-together had had enough of Gloria (Nevins 76). wholeness marks the fragile boundary “Rear Window” (1942) is that locked/ where ‘normal’ and ‘not-normal’ come to- unlocked suitcase. Buried beneath a care- gether. fully constructed concrete floor of plausible deniability, the story riffs on the art of male- male cruising, the dance of the eyes that 1.0 REAR WINDOW (1942) precedes the disclosure of the body, the dis- During his brief, unconsummated mar- closure of desire.4 Whether or not the riage to Gloria Blackton, author Cornell reader catches on to the sexual game de- Woolrich kept a locked suitcase in their pends a lot on who the reader is. That is, Volume 22, No. 3 70 Post Script Woolrich cruises us in the same guarded to desire but not free to perform. The func- way that his disabled protagonist, “Hal tion of the cast is thus expressive, disciplin- Jeffries” cruises his double, “Lars Thor- ary, and protective at once. The rigidity that wald.” discloses arousal creates both a bondage Jeffries lives in a house across the back restraint and a closet in which to hide. In yard from Thorwald’s apartment building. this manner, the figure of the disabled body A broken leg has restricted Jeffries’ mobil- enables disabling desire—the itch that can ity, confining him to his rear bedroom never be scratched. This semiotic exploita- where he watches his neighbors to pass the tion of disability is characteristic, not only time. Jeffries sees Thorwald staring out his of Woolrich, of course, but of the postwar window as if he is afraid he is being Hollywood cinema that his fictions fueled.5 watched. After using a spyglass to scruti- In film noir in particular, the visible nize Thorwald’s body language for some “cripple” invariably doubles the invisible time, Jeffries concludes that Thorwald has “pervert.”6 murdered his wife and hidden her body. He Significantly, the leg cast that makes becomes obsessed with finding the hidden Jeffries a ‘cripple’ does not appear until the body and establishing Thorwald’s guilt. penultimate line in the story. The opening Jeffries’ temporary disability is an ex- paragraphs disclose the fact of Jeffries’ im- cuse for voyeurism, specifically his desire mobility but not its cause or duration. This to look at the muscular, semi-clothed body gap is the first of four mysteries that the of his ‘rear window neighbor’. The obses- narrative exists to explain: sive, ‘fixated’ nature of that desire is tele- What is wrong with Hal Jeffries? graphed clearly in Woolrich’s original Where is Anna Thorwald’s body? working title, “Murder from a Fixed View- What is the meaning of Lars Thor- point” [hereafter “Rear/Murder”]. In effect, wald’s gaze? Woolrich splits the body of his male pro- What caused the ‘uncanny synchro- tagonist into two mirror-image forms: the nization’ of two men that Jeffries saw ‘normal’ body, from which Jeffries came from this window? and to which he will return, and a second, ‘abnormal’ body that he has acquired by These questions are nested in each accident. The normal body, without the cast other like a set of Chinese Boxes. The an- on its leg, is free to perform but constrained swer to # 4 leads to the answers to #3 and by homosocial regulations from looking #2 which, in turn, suggest the answer to #1 with desire. With the cast, the body is free that lies hidden in the subtext. This mise-en- abyme technique permeates the story, as it will permeate Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film version in a slightly different way. Woolrich calls atten- tion to the mirror image doubling of Jeffries and Thorwald by making Jeffries almost paranoid in his insistence that he is very different from Thorwald. Why is he so interested in other people’s windows, I wondered detachedly. Reaching for a high note. Universal 2001. And of course an effective Volume 22, No. 3 71 Post Script brake to dwell on that thought too linger- female body doubles her husband’s very ingly clamped down almost at once: Look present “sinewy” male body. Jeffries’ desire who’s talking. What about yourself? An to look for the former permits him to look important difference escaped me. I wasn’t at the latter with impunity, as if Thorwald worried about anything. He, presumably, were a hooker in a whorehouse window on was (10). the Hamburg docks. The problem, of As Jeffries becomes increasingly frus- course, is that Lars Thorwald is cruising, trated by his inability to nail Thorwald, too. Woolrich makes the sexual nature of the In the dance of the eyes that constitutes doubling more and more explicit: gay cruising, the moment of disclosure is fraught with danger.

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