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. As Woolrich knew I, from my window, had to show quite well, the body, bearing its unmistak- them a body. Well, he’d have to show able rebus of desire, needs to be kept hid- me first. . . . den until the coast is clear. The contrary Two minds with but one thought, refusal of the body to be hidden (i.e., the turned inside-out in my case. How to keep ineluctability of desire) appears in its most it hidden, how to see it wasn’t kept hid- arcane form during an “uncanny” tableau den. . . . The main stream of my thoughts that Jeffries witnesses from his window pounded like a torrent against that one ob- shortly after he begins to watch Thorwald’s stacle damming them up (23, 24). “naked back” with his spyglass. Thorwald’s Again, the trope of disability licenses landlord is standing in the living room win- desire. Anna Thorwald’s absent disabled dow of a remodeled apartment on the 6th
Volume 22, No. 3 72 Post Script floor. Two floors directly below him, glitch in the doubling of Thorwald and the Thorwald stands in the living room win- landlord. dow of his own apartment. Having lured Thorwald out of his At one point an odd little bit of syn- apartment on a ruse, Jeffries sends his ‘day chronization, completely accidental of houseman’ Sam to mess up the place as if it course, cropped up. . . . Both parties moved had been searched. Jeffries hopes that onward simultaneously into the kitchen Thorwald will react by disclosing the loca- from there, and, passing the blind spot of tion of the body. The body that is disclosed the wall, appeared next at the kitchen win- is Jeffries’ own, however. After Jeffries stu- dows. It was uncanny, they were almost pidly answers a telephone call without re- like precision-strollers or puppets manipu- alizing who it is, Thorwald is able to locate lated on one and the same string. It prob- his position. In a pivotal moment, Thor- wald’s cruising eyes suddenly recip- rocate Jeffries’ gaze: “I saw him give a glance out the window . . . dead- center at my bay window . . .” (29- 30). At this second uncanny moment of synchronization connecting him to Thorwald along a horizontal axis, Jeffries suddenly realizes the ‘hitch’ in the first uncanny synchronization between Thorwald and the land- lord: “The hitch had been vertical, not horizontal. There had been an upward ‘jump.’ Now I had it, now I knew “(31). What Jeffries doesn’t know is that his front door has just been opened. The sweaty, sinewy body of Lars Thorwald has climbed out of its cage and is about to penetrate the space of Jeffries’ rear bedroom. In- visible in the dark like “a coiling cobra,” pure mindless movement, Thorwald has become the very thing he has hidden: The Body (32). Jeffries is in danger of becoming ably wouldn’t have happened again just another Mrs. Thorwald. In response, he like that in another fifty years. Immediately erects the same defense that has structured afterwards they digressed, never to repeat the entire story (mise-en-abyme). He creates themselves like that again. The thing was, a double—a second head to counter the something about it had disturbed me (24). power of the second body (Thorwald) that Jeffries tries to figure out what it is that has suddenly appeared in his bedroom. is bothering him, but his one-track mind There was a bust of Rousseau or insists on returning to “the main problem Montesquieu, I’d never been able to decide at hand,” the location of the missing body which, one of those gents with flowing of the disabled woman. What he doesn’t manes, topping them. ...[I] brought it realize, of course, is that the answer to the down into my lap, pushing me down into second question (Where?) is hidden inside the chair. . . . I tugged [the steamer rug] out the answer to the first question (Why?), the from under [me] and mantled it around me
Volume 22, No. 3 73 Post Script like an Indian brave’s blanket. Then I floor kitchen and find Anna Thorwald just squirmed far down in the chair, let my head where Jeffries said they would. As the po- and one shoulder dangle out over the arm, lice cart away both “the hot dead and the on the side next to the wall. I hoisted the cold dead,” Boyne reveals that the woman bust to my other, upward shoulder, bal- whom neighbors saw leave the Thorwalds’ anced it there precariously for a second apartment for a trip was really a double, head, blanket tucked around its ears. From Thorwald’s mistress posing as his wife (35). the back, in the dark, it would look—I Boyne leaves, and a new character sud- hoped (32). denly appears in the story for the first time, At the sound of Thorwald’s gunshot, only three lines before the end: “Doc Jeffries’ bedroom explodes in light, and the Preston.” Like the police, his function is to plaster head shatters; Jeffries’ human head, ‘clean things up’ by disclosing the answer wrapped up like a wooden Indian, feels to the one remaining unsolved mystery: nothing. Ironically, it is in Jeffries’ insistence what is wrong with Hal Jeffries? The answer on remaining intact (un-shattered) that he (broken leg in cast) ‘explains’ Jeffries’ fe- most resembles Anna Thorwald. ‘Mantled’ vered passivity. It explains why a man— in a thoroughly secure casing of cement, she and man who is not queer, a man who does doesn’t feel much either. The moral, of not have a dirty mind—would sit in his course, is simply that anxiety/excitement darkened bedroom intently studying the and depression are opposites. The price of body language and gaze of another man. In protection is the diminution of emotional other words, Woolrich removes the hidden acuity. This existential connection is lost on body from its protective shell (Anna’s body Jeffries, however, and perhaps on Woolrich from cement, Jeffries’ body from its plaster as well, who discloses the body hidden in cast) only to hang it up back up in the closet. the text window only after the orgasmic At the very end of the story, Doc danger has passed. Preston comments that Jeffries’ “must be Jeffries’ friend, homicide detective tired of sitting there all day doing noth- Boyne, arrives just in time to shoot the flee- ing”(36). The line is ironic in more ways ing Thorwald as he stands on the roof of his than one. It reminds us, among other things, apartment building. Jeffries positions himself so he can get a good view of Thor wald’s body as it falls to the ground and shatters. In the denouement, Jeffries ex- plains to Boyne (and to us) that Anna Thorwald’s body is cemented into the raised kitchen floor in the remod- eled apartment directly above her own. Once he real- ized that it was an “upward jump” that had marred the otherwise perfect doubling of Thorwald and the land- lord, Jeffries also realized that the kitchen floors of the two apartments (4 and 6) were not identical either. Boyne’s men dig up the 5th
Volume 22, No. 3 74 Post Script that in anal sex, which is what the Woolrich story is not about, the passive-re- ceptive position is where the emotional action is. The Bottom is really the Top, the secret controller who keeps both hands free to drive the desiring ma- chine. With this image in mind, let us segue to one of Woolrich’s many part- ners in the art of disabling desire, Alfred Hitchcock. The ice man critiques Miss Hearing Aid’s “Hunger”. Uni- versal 2001.
2.0 REAR WINDOW (1954) the homoerotic/desiring body of Wool- rich’s subtext under the smooth cement “He’s scattered her all over town, leg floor of Hayes’ heterosexual dialog—buried in the East River. . . .” it and then slowly dug it up again piece by Stella, Rear Window (1954) bloody piece, using the piece-together tech- When asked, director Alfred Hitchcock nique of montage. Even more than in and his screenwriter John Michael Hayes Woolrich’s story, the missing body of Anna generally gave the impression that Cornell Thorwald is the missing body of the text Woolrich’s story was merely the seed idea (mise-en-abyme)—the thing that is said by from which the film Rear Window (1954) not being said, the locked/unlocked suit- grew.7 Most moviegoers have readily case. What is merely hidden in Woolrich agreed. After all, there is no love story in (closeted but intact) has been disassembled Woolrich, no Thelma Ritter, and virtually and disbursed in Hitchcock, however. In no rear window neighbors other than the “Rear/Murder,” the technique of doubling Thorwalds. Closer inspection, however, split-projects desire in order to amplify it as reveals that a surprising amount of Hitch- well as to conceal it. In Rear Window, dou- cock’s film is already present in the Wool- bling amplifies the explosive danger of de- rich story, often in striking specificity, in- sire, fragmenting the male body into an ar- cluding Thorwald’s reciprocal gaze, for in- ray of female shards, each one of which stance. (See Fawell 2-3, e.g.) More impor- mirrors a dismembered dimension of the tantly, both the story and the film are de- imperiled whole (mise-en-abyme). Wool- signed using a mise-en-abyme technique in rich’s story is a dream of the perfect dock- which textual objects double in miniature side ‘cruise’ in which the watcher gets in the structure of the text as a whole. Ulti- and gets out without losing his mind in his mately, it is this technique, and not merely orgasm. Hitchcock’s film is an anal-erotic Jeffries’/Jefferies’ claustrophobic confine- wet dream of another, more haunting sort, ment, that makes both “Rear/Murder” and a Kierkegaardian nightmare of ego dissolu- Rear Window feel so “uncanny”—the exis- tion in which the desiring body “threatens tential dread that comes when one realizes to transform . . . back into the horribly dis- that security is a solipsistic illusion which organized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, is about to shatter into shards of mirrored intestines, and feelings” that constitutes glass. both the beginning and end of its existence In Rear Window, Hitchcock has buried (Theweleit, 160).
Volume 22, No. 3 75 Post Script In “Rear/Murder,” Woolrich protects minute 40 second establishing sequence, his protagonist from the reader’s objectify- filmed without a word of dialog (though ing gaze, as well as from Thorwald’s. He not without sound), is the picture in minia- does not show us Jeffries’ body until the ture. It not only tells us who this man is (an very end of the story, and then only briefly. action photographer named L.B. Jefferies In Rear Window, Hitchcock not only shows who has been disabled in a race track acci- us Jefferies’ body, of course; he makes that dent), it tells us what is really wrong with body synonymous with the closed set in him, which is more than Woolrich ever which it is situated. The first of the two pans does. If we read the opening sequence of that open the film begins with a shot of a images as a hieroglyphic, we will under- black pussycat. The camera tracks past a stand that Jeff embodies a fundamental co- bathroom window, in which we see a nundrum: in trying to protect himself from woman’s head, and settles on Jefferies’ injury—from exploding like a bomb or sweaty, sleeping face [hereafter “Jeff” or coming apart like a crashing car—he has “LBJ” in my text]. The second pan moves walled himself up in a tomb. The entire rest from his face to a thermometer (94 degrees) of the film is mapped onto this existential and then past the windows of three tenants body problem. whom we will come to know later as the A Cubist working in the medium of Composer, the Dog Couple that Sleeps time, Hitchcock has reconstructed the vul- Head to Foot, and Miss Torso, whose head nerable male body along ‘safer’ lines, in ef- we saw in the bathroom window.8 The fect.9 All lower orifices plastered up, his ass camera continues to circle left past the only bound down to an iron-sided chair, Jeff’s chink in the set’s architectural armor, a nar- disabled body is a disassembled body be- row alleyway through which we get a ing held together by decoupage and fetish glimpse of a street and, across it, the win- magic. In the remainder of the film, Hitch- dow of the Albert Hotel bar. (Is a ‘bar win- cock will deconstruct his composition, tak- dow’ really an opening or just another iron- ing apart what he has so carefully put to- barred mirror?) A street cleaning truck gether. The fragility of male ego boundaries crosses the gap as the camera continues its that haunts all of Hitchcock’s work is con- pan past a birdcage and back to LBJ’s sleep- veyed primarily by four female bodies in the ing face. It tracks slowly down his torso and text, each of which subtly doubles LBJ: Miss then down the full length of his rigidly ex- Torso, Miss Hearing Aid, Miss Lonely- tended left leg, lingering on the inscription hearts, and Mrs. Anna Thorwald.10 The four written on the enormous white plaster cast women, all ‘crippled’ in one way or another, that covers it (“Here lie the broken bones of form a kind of silent Greek Chorus, remind- L.B. Jefferies”) as if the cast were a grave ing Jeff (and us) what he/we would like to marker, which, in a sense, it is. The camera forget—that we not only eat and shit; we are pulls back into a medium long shot, reveal- shit, the food/feces of grave worms. (See ing that LBJ is sitting in a wheel chair. It Modleski 79-80.) then moves from his disabled body past a Hitchcock was a notorious neat-freak smashed flash camera to a sequence of pho- who was horrified by the uncontrolled act tos, including: 1) a close-up of a racing car of vomiting, and even by the act of swallow- coming apart in mid-crash, a detached tire ing (Spoto 128, 412). Obsessed with scato- flying straight for the invisible cameraman; logical humor, his idea of a good practical 2) an atom bomb explosion; 3) a negative of joke involved handcuffing a man to a cam- a picture of a woman’s head (in which the era, secretly dosing him with laxatives, and black space defines the form); and 4) a posi- then leaving him to shit in his pants all night tive print of the same negative in which the (Spoto 124).11 The son of a greengrocer, black space has become white flesh. Hitch once told Francois Truffaut that In semiotic terms, this extraordinary 1 he’d . . . like to try to do an anthology on
Volume 22, No. 3 76 Post Script Mahon . . . [who] mur- dered a woman, cut the body up into pieces . . . carried them in a suitcase and threw them out of the window of a train be- tween Eastbourne and London, but he had a problem with the head. He put the head into the fire and burned it, and the heat of the fire caused the eyes to open, that in- dicated to me, that what- Caption: Miss Torso’s rear window. Universal 2001 ever this murder may be, the murderer would have a problem with the head. . . .13 Hitchcock’s version food, showing its arrival in the city, its of the Mahon case foregrounds the Medusa- distribution . . . how it’s fixed up and ab- like staring head, a condensed image that sorbed. And, gradually, the end of the film fuses accusation/punishment with sexual would show the sewers, and the garbage arousal, as does the semiotic of LBJ’s being dumped out into the ocean. So there’s bound-but-erect body. There is another, a cycle, beginning with the gleaming fresh even more disturbing element in the Mahon vegetables and ending with the mess that’s case that Hitchcock did not mention in his poured into the sewers (320). deposition: Mahon treated his lover’s dead In a sense, Rear Window is that film. body as if it were food, boiling up pieces in When we first see Anna Thorwald, she is a stewpot!14 The Crippen case also involved being offered a tray full of food. When we dismemberment, but what seemed to inter- last see her, in our mind’s eye, she has be- est Hitchcock even more was a transves- come pieces of decomposing organic mat- tite/homoerotic element in the story. In an ter floating in the East River, as if she had effort to elude detection, Crippen had his disappeared up her own intestine and then lover, Ethel, dress up as a boy. The mas- been shitted all away—except for her head. querade fell apart, however, when people In the penultimate version of the script became disgusted by the older man’s ap- (Hayes’ “White Script”), that morsel turns parently perverse sexual attentions to the up in her own icebox, the eater and the ‘boy’ and reported him to authorities eaten at last reunited!12 (Truffaut 222-223.)15 When in the course of a 1974 copyright Unlike Psycho and other Hitchcock infringement lawsuit Hitchcock was asked films in which cross-dressing is overt, trans- to explain the unique ways in which he had vestitism in Rear Window is entirely meta- changed the Cornell Woolrich story, he fo- phorical, accomplished by the doubling of cused primarily on the dismemberment/ LBJ’s body with the anatomized/parti- decapitation motif. tioned bodies of Miss Torso, Miss Hearing I also included the essence of two fa- Aid, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Mrs. Anna mous English cases. One was the case of Dr. Thorwald. Our first view of Miss Torso be- Crippen. . . . He was uncovered because he lies her nickname: she is simply a head, gave his wife’s jewelry to his secretary. . . . framed in a bathroom window. Our second There was also the case of Patrick view moves south. Wearing nothing but a
Volume 22, No. 3 77 Post Script pair of skin-tight short-shorts, she stands The woman who lives in the garden with her naked back to the window and apartment below and to the left of LBJ’s prepares to put on her bra. The camera ze- window view is usually referred to as “The ros in as she bends over deeply, her head Sculptress.” However, in the theatrical almost touching her toes, giving us a clear trailer to Rear Window she is described as view of her parted ass cheeks. That ‘moon’ “Miss Hearing Aid, an artist of a very odd shot announces Hitchcock’s film within the and strange art.” The voiceover is accompa- film: not rear WINDOW but REAR win- nied by a shot of Miss Hearing Aid’s unat- dow. tractive face, peering through the hole in the As a dancer, Miss Torso is really all middle of the torso-like clay figure she is legs. LBJ’s odd nickname for her in effect sculpting. On the ground sits another, amputates those legs, and her arms and smaller sculpture, also pierced by a hole.17 head as well, as if he were acting out a pro- Later in the film, an iceman arrives (perhaps leptic version of Boxing Helena.16 (See to cool down the Medusa sitting in Lars Conrad 77.) These onomastic amputations Thorwald’s refrigerator). We overhear as he transform Miss T into a body double for looks at the big sculpture with the hole in it Mrs. AT, a person who becomes a collection and asks, “What’s that supposed to be, of headless body parts. Torso is synony- Ma’am?” “It’s called ‘hunger’,” she says mous with trunk, which also means con- proudly. The line explicitly links her to the tainer and conduit. LBJ thinks that Thorwald hungry Miss Torso and to the film’s food/ has put Mrs. T’s torso/trunk in his trunk desire imagery in general. Just as her and made it disappear as if he were a “ma- smaller sculpture mirrors the larger, her art gician.” Jeff is wrong, of course. There is no mirrors the art of the film as a whole (mise- trunk in the man’s trunk, only women’s en-abyme). The disabled sculptress doubles dresses. Another magician (Hitchcock) has the disabled photographer, who in turn simply removed the disassembled body doubles two other artists outside the from one text window and redistributed it frame—Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes, piece by piece to many others, like Mahon neither of whom had ‘normal’ male bod- throwing body parts out the train window. ies.18 Hitchcock’s strange Humpty-Dumpty In the Final White Script “ice box” end- form haunted him throughout his life. Once ing (see above), the torso/trunk and the temporarily crippled by rheumatoid arthri- head are patched together, in a manner of tis, Hayes could never count on his legs not speaking. Throughout the film, Miss to betray him.19 Torso’s body has been one of several loci of Ultimately disabled by his excess desire, expressed as hunger for food. She is weight (desire made flesh), Hitchcock constantly stuffing her face (a chicken leg clearly had a distorted body image, a image here, a big carrot stick there) and constantly that seems to have been built around a de- bending over, ass up, to peer into her ice- nial that he had orifices. “When I leave the box. If we juxtapose the two icebox images, bathroom, everything is so clean you’d we arrive back at Hitchcock’s greengrocer- never know anyone had been in there,” he to-sewer cycle. Miss T eats food from the was fond of saying (Spoto 459). Although icebox; Mrs. T is food in the icebox, waiting he obviously had had sex at least once (see to be eaten. Bending over at her icebox, Miss Patricia Hitchcock), he told Francois Torso maps the (hu)man body as desiring Truffaut, “One thing for sure: I never have machine, a thing with only two orifices, the any erotic dreams!” (261). When pressed on mouth and the anus. She is an ambulatory body matters, Hitchcock tended to describe ‘food chain’. The conjunction of hunger, himself as a “mere torso”: orifice, and torso in her person connects A New York doctor once told me that Miss Torso, in turn, to another of LBJ’s fe- I am an adrenal type. That apparently male body doubles, Miss Hearing Aid.
Volume 22, No. 3 78 Post Script means that I’m all body and only ves- Hitchcock’s anal-sadistic imagination. [See tigial legs. But since I’m . . . [not a] above.] If the cast really wraps entirely dancer and my present interest in my around Jeff’s pelvis, how will he urinate? body is almost altogether from the How will he defecate?20 Perhaps, like waist up, that didn’t bother me much Hitchcock, he has mastered the trick of eat- (Spoto 415). ing without excreting. Even so, he still has another body problem. The cast prevents Although Hitchcock may not have had him from having intercourse. He cannot either wet dreams or a nether orifice, his even touch his penis with his own hands.21 film Rear Window is full of both of them. In Hitchcock makes sure that we are sub- his analysis of the film’s anal eroticism liminally aware of this. Twice during the film, he has LBJ insert a long, thin wooden tool into the gap at his waist between the cast and his flesh and then push it down inside until he can scratch an itch that has been tormenting him. The first time he gets the itch, he is looking at Lars Thorwald. The second time, he talking with his old war buddy, Detec- tive Tom Doyle. The sec- ond itch/scratch se- quence is matched to the Lisa fingers the ring. Universal 2001 sound of an off-screen opera singer reaching a high note, a fairly trans- parent code for orgasm. (“Rear Window’s Glasshole”), critic Lee Much less obviously, it is “Doyle” who Edelman tallies up a long list of asshole onomastically connects LBJ to the third of images that populate the film, the most his female body doubles, Miss Lonely- important of which is the wedding-ring-as- hearts. An aging spinster, Miss L is so emo- sphincter. tionally hungry that she eats dinner with The one asshole we do not see in the imaginary people to whom she talks. She is film is Jefferies’ own. Hitchcock has made buried alive inside her apartment. LBJ is sure of this, and he is at pains for us to no- implicated in both her solipsism and her tice the set up. In the establishing sequence desire. Unlike so many other of the rear at the beginning of the film, the bottom window neighbors, Miss L is not an artist. buttons of Jeff’s brown PJ top are left un- She is, however, a work of art—Miss Lonely- done, and the fabric is pulled open in a V, hearts (1933). disclosing that the white plaster cast comes In Nathanael West’s black-comic no- all the way up to his waist. Jeff describes the vella, Miss Lonelyhearts is a male writer cast as his “cocoon,” an image that suggests who pens a newspaper advice column un- protection. The backside of protection is der a transvestite byline. Disabled by his limitation, however—dis-ability. The co- own lack of emotional armor, he internal- coon creates the very kind of bathroom izes the wounds of his anguished letter- bondage situation that obviously tickled writers, many of whom are horribly
Volume 22, No. 3 79 Post Script maimed (e.g. “Desperate,” a sixteen-year scene’ aura by virtue of their parallelism old girl who worries that boys won’t like with the first assault, which is clearly her because she was born without a nose.) sexual. In the first, Miss Lonelyhearts brings One of these unfortunates comes to him in home a young man who subsequently tries person, an impotent gas-meter-reader to rape her. In the second scene, Jeff is cursed with a bad leg and a hen-pecking forced to watch helplessly as Lars returns wife. Seeing the ‘cripple’ as a grotesque and assaults Jeff’s girlfriend, “Lisa,” who collection of bodily fragments (“like one of has been searching Thorwald’s apartment those composite photographs used by for Anna’s missing wedding ring. Jeff’s screen magazines in guessing contests,” anxiety (the other face of desire) is ampli- Lonelyhearts is at once repelled and at- fied a few minutes later when he is forced tracted. (45).22 He holds to change places with Lisa in Lars’ arms. the man’s sweaty hand under the table as they talk, as if trying to hold him together (47). Af- ter a bizarre encounter during which he grov- els like a dog, a rolled newspaper in his mouth, as he tears open Lonelyhearts’ fly, the cripple becomes convinced that Lonely- hearts has raped his wife (48). At the end, he shoots Lonelyhearts to death as the colum- nist rushes to embrace him. Lonelyhearts’ body falls down the stairs, entangled inex- tricably with the body of the cripple, his abject doppelganger. Interestingly enough, the name of Lonelyhearts’ crippled The male figure in Miss L’s text win- double is “Doyle,” the same name as LBJ’s dow—the lover who is also an attacker—is police detective friend. This transtextual split into two figures in LBJ’s window, in conjunction fuses two apparently separate effect: Tom Doyle and Lars Thorwald. cinematic storyspaces: “(Tom) Doyle and Doyle and Jefferies are intimate war bud- the Cripple (LBJ)” in one window and dies, with Doyle performing the dominant “Miss Lonelyhearts and her Lover-Rapist” protective role. Doyle loves LBJ but does in the opposite window. Jeff’s apartment is not embrace him. In contrast, Thorwald thus transformed again into a hall of mir- embraces LBJ but does not love him. As in rors, setting up the film’s climax in which West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, an image of ‘nor- apparent opposites (LBJ and LT) come to- mal’ brotherly love is superimposed over an gether in a final shattering embrace.23 image of illicit desire, a desire so forceful it We witness a series of three assaults in threatens to annihilate its source. sequence. The latter two acquire a ‘primal Predictably, it is a female body that
Volume 22, No. 3 80 Post Script discloses the nature of this deadly desire. As eyes glow like jewels in his head. In effect, the police question Thorwald, Lisa stands Jeff’s ‘flash’ mirrors Thorwald’s piercing with her back facing his rear window, that gaze, acknowledging in gesture what can- is, facing the gaze of LBJ’s telephoto lens not be owned in words. With the flashgun across the courtyard. She has put Anna substituting for his covered eyes, Jeff has Thorwald’s missing wedding ring on the become a monocular beast, no longer fully ring finger of her left hand, which she holds human. As he explodes in light, his eyehole palm out, just below her waist, over her ass. is transformed into a pulsating red asshole, Crossing over, the index finger of her right a nether mouth. hand points at the impaled ring. Reading The entire film has been driven by anal- the strained body language, Thorwald’s inflected masturbatory bondage rhythm in eyes decode the hieroglyphic of the hand which both sexual tension and the con- gesture—a gesture that says, not “I want to straints against release of tension are in- get married,” as most critics have argued, creased in parallel. That rhythm now inten- but rather “I want to get fucked in the sifies, as Jeffries repeats the flashgun ges- ass.”24 Realizing that someone has been ture several times, pleasurably delaying the fucking him in the rear window for quite inevitable moment of release.25 Release al- some time, Thorwald is more than willing ways carries the fear of disintegration, how- to return the favor. His cruising eyes follow ever; and it is to that motif that Hitchcock the wiggling finger to its target across the returns as the two male bodies finally court, Jefferies. Thorwald reciprocates the smash together. He films the entire se- gaze. It’s a date! quence as a montage of fragmented ana- Standing in the darkness of LBJ’s room, tomical close-ups, pieced together in the Thorwald asks, rather politely under the editing room.26 circumstances, what Jeff desires: “What do Ultimately, LT knocks LBJ out of his you want from me?” This is the moment protective chair (releasing him), turns him toward which Hitchcock has built the entire upside down, and stuffs him out the win- film, the moment in which uncontrollable dow. Jeff hangs on by his fingertips, delay- desire is disclosed. The anal-sadistic nature ing his fall, until Doyle, Lisa, and Stella ar- of that desire is made clear in a 1963 inter- rive to get a good view of his backside, sus- view with Peter Bogdanovich: pended in air. Then, he just has to let go.27 He ends up with his head in Lisa’s lap. AH: It’s the climax of peeping While Lisa tends to one head, Nurse tomism, isn’t it? What can [Stewart] Stella attends to another: Anna Thorwald’s. say? He’s caught. Throughout the dialog script, Stella, LBJ’s PB: Caught with his pants down. wry Dom Mom, has carried the motif of AH: Caught with his plaster down. dismemberment—a motif that seems to be As Hitchcock’s last interjection reveals, a comic sidebar but is really at the core of the plaster cast—indeed, the state of dis- Hitchcock’s dark double vision.28 It Stella ability in general—is designed to function who gets us to imagine the gore on Lars as a kind of anal plug. His plaster down, Thorwald’s bathroom walls, although those Jefferies is ready for his ‘little death.’ walls are as spotless as if Hitchcock himself Not much for conversation, Jeff an- had just left. As Jefferies is cutting up his swers Thorwald’s question (“What do you breakfast bacon earlier in the film, it is Stella want?”) by discharging his camera’s flash- who wonders out loud “where he cut her gun, covering his eyes as he does. This up.” A woman of flesh and blood, Stella move is usually interpreted as a logical de- doubles all the other rear window women fense against Thorwald’s coming assault, as a bearer of the ineluctable body, its prod- but metaphorically it is more complex. In ucts and its flow. “Do you want to have a the noir lighting, Thorwald’s sapphire-blue look?” Doyle asks Stella, after he tells her
Volume 22, No. 3 81 Post Script where the head is (in a hatbox). “No, I don’t he can command by sipping through a want any part of it!” she replies vehemently, straw attached to his electric wheel chair. then does a comic double take, seeing in her (The computer’s password—its name—is mind’s eye the very thing that Hitchcock first Achilles then Icarus.) The love interest has made us see, the thing that is not there: is a young female architect, “Claudia Anna Thorwald’s dismembered body. Henderson” (Daryl Hannah), who becomes In the earlier White Script it is Jeff, not Jason’s surrogate legs. The Thorwalds are Stella, who is concerned about the missing replaced by the “Thorpes:” Ilene, a part- head. When Doyle tells him it has been in time dancer and full-time alcoholic, and her Thorwald’s icebox all the time, he replies: abusive husband Julian, a sculptor. The “That reminds me—two heads are better basic plot premise is the same as in than one.” The two heads reference splices Woolrich and Hitchcock: Trapped in his Hitchcock’s parable back into Woolrich’s apartment by his disability, JK becomes a story in which Hal Jeffries’ transformation voyeur, observing JT fighting with his wife. into a two-headed beast protects him from When she disappears, he suspects murder becoming a ‘beast with two backs’—which, ironically, is the very thing he desires. In the final pan shot down LBJ’s sleeping body, we see that he, too, has redoubled his protec- tion against desire: Both of his legs are in thick plaster casts this time. He is ready to start the cycle all over again.
3.0 REAR WINDOW (1998) In the work of Hitchcock and Woolrich, the figure of the disabled body double serves a sexual game. In Christopher Reeve’s 1998 ABC-TV remake of Rear Window, the stakes are much higher. The missing body in the text window is Reeve’s own. In 1995, Reeve, Holly- wood’s Superman, broke his neck in a riding accident that left him para- and becomes obsessed with “nailing” lyzed from the shoulders down and unable Julian. There is one major difference be- to breathe without a ventilator. Rear Window tween the 1998 and 1954 and 1942 versions has been re-crafted to fit his circumstances. of Rear Window, however. In the Reeve film, Photographer “L.B. Jefferies” becomes ar- the missing body is never found. chitect “Jason Kemp,” injured in an auto ac- Throughout the film, mirror imagery cident that leaves him a quadriplegic. His adumbrates the uncanny doubling inherent New York brownstone is retrofitted as a in “Jason’s” quadriplegic body, a body that computer-controlled ‘smart house’ which is continually haunted by Reeve’s quad- riplegic body, which in turn is haunted by
Volume 22, No. 3 82 Post Script the missing body of Superman. In Hitch- lieves that Ilene has been buried inside a cock’s film, the fear of losing one’s self is distinctive bronze sculpture that Julian expressed as dismemberment, which also completed, crated, and shipped off shortly expresses the desire to lose one’s self in after Ilene disappeared from view.29 Argos- jouissance. In Reeve’s film, the fear is being eyed Jason spots a distinctive mark on the buried alive inside the prison of one’s own crate that allows Claudia to track it to Ver- unresponsive flesh. Jefferies’ plaster cocoon mont, but there the trail ends. Like Ilene’s has become Jason’s whited sepulcher. body, and Jason’s body, the sculpture has Although she is not an invalid like gone missing. Then, at the very end of the Anna Thorwald, Ilene Thorpe subtly mir- film, it miraculously seems to reappear. rors Jason. (He continually drinks water to The office building that Jason and soothe the pain in his throat; she drinks Claudia have been designing throughout booze to soothe the pain in her mind.) The the film is finally dedicated. Tarps are cer- doubling of Jason and Julian is even more emoniously removed from three large obvious. The violent JT acts out the rage, lobby sculptures, one of which turns out to and the lust, that JK must repress. Both are be Julian’s missing piece. Jason himself had structural artists who bend hard material to purchased it just before he was paralyzed their will; Julian works in bronze, Jason in in the car accident but then lost all memory steel and concrete. Both have a body prob- of the event because of the trauma to his lem: Julian needs to hide a body; Jason head. Julian’s ‘thing’ is Jason’s thing, too. needs to find the one he has lost. Like his He has thought he was looking through a mythological namesake, this Jason is on a window when he was really looking in a quest. mirror. What Jason sees in the Thorpes’ win- Unfortunately, the police see nothing dow is a reverse mirror image of his own when they X-ray the sculpture, however. trajectory, his ‘real body’ having gone miss- The tomb is empty. Jason has been deluded. ing and been replaced by a dysfunctional Or perhaps not. As he kisses Claudia, double. Ilene begins the story as dysfunc- Reeve’s enduringly sensual face doing a tional, unable to walk straight, spending snuggle on behalf of his absent body, ‘Jason’ most of her time lying inert in bed. She is still full of faith. “Right now I can’t, you never leaves her apartment. Then one night, know...but I’m going to be on my feet she is suddenly transformed into someone again in a few years.” At this moment of who is alive with libidinous energy. Except intimacy, the camera moves through the for the absence of a small facial mole, the rear window, and up into an art gallery new body is exactly the same as the old across the away. A crate that has been sit- body. Yet Jason is convinced that this ting there in plain sight all along has finally body—the fully functional Ilene—is an illu- been opened, revealing another sculpture sion, a double, and that the real body is an by Julian Thorpe, a virtual double of the one entombed corpse. In fact, he’s so sure that in the lobby of Jason’s building.30 Surely, he is willing to stake his life on it. that is where the missing body has been hid- In one of the film’s most original den, and surely, in time, it will be found. moves, we never really learn for sure Despite this upbeat ending, or, rather, whether he is right or not. At the climax, the because of it, Reeve’s version of Rear Win- police arrest Julian for assaulting Jason; and dow supports the inherently problematic we assume that the story is over. The loose concept of the ‘normal’ male body much ends are not tied up in the coda, however. more strongly than the other two versions The libidinous blonde admits to being do.31 Reeve tries to give his character some Ilene’s near-twin sister, but neither she nor complexity and darkness. He makes Jason Julian will confess to Ilene’s murder; and smug and bossy but lets us see beneath that the missing body is still missing. Jason be- smugness a man who has been strip-mined
Volume 22, No. 3 83 Post Script of everything but desire. He is a libido with- Notes out a habitation. Hal Jeffries and L.B. 1In his ground-breaking 1984 cyber- Jefferies use their disabilities as disguises, punk novel Neuromancer, Gibson describes to cover themselves; Jason yearns only to be the ‘disability’ of his cyborg-like protago- uncovered, discovered, disinterred. nist who can no longer escape from his The double nature of Jason, his visible body by “jacking into” cyberspace: “In the vulnerability and his buried power, is sug- bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, gested by the recurrent allusions to Achil- the elite stance involved a certain relaxed les, whose armored warrior body and na- contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. ked baby body are linked forever at the Case fell into the prison of his own flesh” heel—and to the falling body of Icarus, sub- (6). sumed into the maternal sea. Ultimately, 2Norden’s ten types are: The Comic this Rear Window cares more about Misadventurer, The Elderly Dupe, The Daedalus than Icarus, however. Plugged Tragic Victim, The Sweet Innocent, The into “Achilles,” Jason is transformed from Obsessive Avenger, The Saintly Sage, The a passive-dependent Clark Kent into a cy- Noble Warrior, The Civilian Superstar, The 32 borg Superman. The climax, in which Ja- High-Tech Guru, and The Techno-Marvel. son foils Julian by making his ‘smart house’ 3The Woolrich story was submitted as work like a giant prosthesis, is an advertise- “Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint” but pub- ment for Better Living through Technology. lished as “It Had to be Murder” (February Like the Techno-Gurus and Techno-Mar- 1942) in Dime Detective (Nevins 245). It was vels that Martin Norden discusses in his reprinted as “Rear Window” in the 1944 Cinema of Isolation, Jason ceases to be a vic- collection After-Dinner Story under Wool- tim only by virtue of becoming a machine rich’s pseudonym, “William Irish” (Nevins (292-299). 531, Curtis 22). “Perhaps not since the Middle Ages 4“Rear Window” is itself a mirror-im- has the fantasy of leaving the body behind age double of an earlier Woolrich story, been so widely dispersed through the “Wake Up with Death” (1937), originally population, and never has it been so entitled simply “Binge.” A man named Don strongly linked with existing technologies,” Stewart wakes up in a hotel room with a Katherine Hayles reminds us (173). Rear terrible hangover and no memory of the last Window uses Jason’s body—indeed, Reeve’s 24 hours. Beside his bed is the dead body body—to canalize this fantasy: existential of a woman he has never seen before, a escape through technological will power. woman he may or may not have married After all, there is money in transcendence. during his binge. He gets an anonymous (“I have sold more books on physics than phone call from a man who insists that he Madonna has on sex,” Stephen Hawking saw Stewart murder the woman as he was 33 likes to say.) Substituting control for de- watching Stewart’s window with binocu- sire, as all these Rear Window parables do in lars from his own window in the opposite the end, the film ultimately buries a living wing of the hotel. The caller wants money actor inside the plaster cast of his own to keep Stewart’s secret hidden (Nevins heroism . . . and, in the process, posits a 158). In this story, unlike “Rear Window,” posthuman future in which neither loss nor it is the watcher who turns out to be guilty jouissance is real. one, the pervert, the punk. In Woolrich’s stories in general and these stories in par- ticular, the fear about being watched is clearly linked to its mirror image—the fear of being caught watching. 5At least 36 feature films have been
Volume 22, No. 3 84 Post Script based on Woolrich works, most of them little less extreme, to Robert Donat and Hollywood noirs made during the 1940’s. Madeline Carroll while filming The 39 Steps Woolrich’s stories have also generated (1935). He handcuffed them together, as more than 118 radio and TV shows. (See required by the script, then pretended to Nevins, 557-594.) lose the key, leaving them that way all day. 6In traditional Hollywood iconogra- He was especially interested in how each phy, the impairment of a man’s leg or arm would manage to go to the bathroom while (via paralysis, amputation, etc.) functioned chained to a body of the opposite sex (Spoto as a code for impotence, one ‘member’ sub- 163-64). stituting for another. After 1934, when Pro- 12Hitch apparently changed the ending duction Code Czar Joseph Breen began rig- a week before filming began. In the release orously to police cinematic subtexts, how- print, the head ends up in a hatbox. (See ever, cagey auteurs began to double the code Khron 143.) The Hayes White Script is against itself in order to smuggle in forbid- quoted in an extended analysis of the film den sexual content. The stiff, limping leg script’s structure available online at the and its accompanying fetishes (the cane, Dramatica Website. (See “Storytelling Out- e.g.) were positioned in montage to suggest put Report” in my Works Cited.) perverse ‘inversion’—impotence-with- 13See DeRosa’s Webpage “Hitchcock women-as-sexual-potency-with-men. Cf. on the Record.” Hitchcock gave Truffaut the penis-like sword/cane that George (222) an even more melodramatic version of Macready (“Ballin Mundson”) displays to the case, probably borrowed from Edgar young Glenn Ford (“Johnny Farrell”) as he Wallace’s 1928 The Trial of Patrick Mahon cruises him on the docks at the opening of (Famous Trials series). Interviewed in the 1946 film noir, Gilda. (“ …It looks like one Laurent Bouzereau’s recent video docu- thing, and right in front of your eyes it mentary film, Rear Window Ethics: Remem- changes.”) bering and Restoring a Classic, Hitchcock’s 7“I would say that [Rear Window] is daughter retells the story of the Crippen twenty percent Cornell Woolrich and and Mahon murders, citing them as a cen- eighty percent Hitchcock,” the director tral source of her father’s inspiration for opined in a 1974 legal deposition. See Rear Window. DeRosa (219) and the deposition transcript 14See Eastbourne’s “Murder on the published on DeRosa’s Writing with Hitch- Crumbles” Webpage. cock.com Website: < http://members. 15See also “Hitchcock’s Favorite aol.com/vistavsion/ontherecord.html>. Crime” on the DeRosa Website. 8Miss Torso’s hands and arms are also 16In the 1993 film, a successful surgeon visible in the miniature frame-within-the- expresses his obsessive love by imprisoning frame as she brushes her long blonde hair his beloved in his house, amputating her and arranges it in a tight chignon. arms and legs, and then solicitously caring 9A little later in the film, Hitchcock will for her. It turns out she likes her new situa- appear for his patented cameo inside the tion. composer’s studio, winding up a clock as he 17The “ theatrical trailer” included on advises him, sotto voce, what key to use for the 2001 Universal Collector’s Edition DVD the new song he is trying to write. The com- was apparently produced for Paramount’s position of the song and the composition of 1962 re-release of Rear Window. The origi- Rear Window mirror each other, the former nal trailer has been revised to include men- ending only when the latter does. tion of Hitchcock’s 1960 blockbuster, 10LBJ’s love interest “Lisa Freemont” Psycho. Neither the phrase “Miss Hearing also doubles him, especially during the Aid” nor the shot of her looking through the scene in which Thorwald assaults her. hole appear in the release print of the film. 11Hitchcock did something similar, if a Her disability is clearly indicated, however,
Volume 22, No. 3 85 Post Script both by the amplifier she wears around her print that we see at the opening of the film. neck and the fact that the neighbor who Hitchcock stirs the moral mix by giving the owns the caged bird often has to say things apparently negative figure (Thorwald) a twice in a loud voice before the sculptress white hat to wear. responds. 24See Edelman, 84-86. 18Of all the characters in the film, the 25See Edelman, 86-91. facially ugly, dumpy Miss Hearing Aid 26Hitch told Truffaut that he first looks the most like Alfred Hitchcock. In the filmed a master shot, which was “weak,” opening shot of the trailer, a rear view of and then re-shot the entire sequence as a Hitch (or his body double) directing is fol- series of anatomical close-ups—“a close-up lowed by a shot of what ‘Hitch’ sees: Miss of a waving hand, a close-up of Stewart’s Hearing Aid. face and another one of his legs” (265). 19For screenwriter John Michael Hayes, 27The sphincteral nature of Jeff’s final Woolrich’s seed story about a temporarily release move is telegraphed in Stella’s com- disabled man mirrored two traumas in his ment early in the film that “When General own life. The first was a near-fatal auto ac- Motors has to go to the bathroom 10 times cident in which he watched helplessly as a day, the whole country’s ready to let go.” the unconscious body of his girlfriend, 28In a recent filmed interview (Screen- high-fashion model “Mel Lawrence,” was writer John Michael Hayes on Rear Window), thrown out onto the glass-strewn highway Hayes acknowledges that Hitch created the (DeRosa 21). The second was a sudden, rear window neighbors (Miss Torso and the crippling attack of rheumatoid arthritis that others)—characters that Hayes regards as left him hospitalized and unable to walk for merely unimportant “side bar stories” de- 18 months shortly after WWII and forced signed solely as “comic relief.” For Stella as him to use a pair of canes even after he was a Dominatrix, see Conrad, 202. released (DeRosa 72-73). His biographer, 29Early in the film, Jason describes him- Steven DeRosa, says that Hayes was even- self as “damaged goods, contents broken tually “cured”; however, rheumatoid ar- during handling and shipping”—a line that thritis (if, indeed, that is what really dis- implicitly equates his body with the ship- abled Hayes) is a chronic autoimmune dis- ping crate in Julian’s apartment. order in which the body periodically attacks 30Like Ilene Thorpe and her look-alike itself. Its symptoms may disappear, but the sister, the two sculptures are similar enough threat of renewed disability always re- to fool the eye without being identical in mains. every detail. Ironically, although Jason 20John Fawell makes this point inad- prides himself on being the God of details, vertently when he writes, “Jeff—a voyeur he has missed the obvious. paralyzed from the waste down” (sic) (11). 31As does Reeve’s much-publicized 21Edelman’s analysis runs along simi- crusade for a cure. Many disability rights lar lines, although he tends to see Jeff’s chair activists see the media’s celebration of as a metaphorical toilet (78). Reeve’s desire to recover his “lost body” as 22West also describes Doyle as “a par- distracting attention from crucial issues of tially destroyed insect,” as if his body were public access. Reeve insists that his paraly- being consumed. West’s preoccupation sis is merely “a temporary setback” that can with the vulnerability of the male body to be overcome by a combination of will maiming and fragmentation is one of the power and medical technology. Critics ar- hallmarks of his work. See Lemuel Pitkin in gue that this stance not only distances A Cool Million (1934), a man who literally Reeve from other, less privileged people goes to pieces, e.g. with disabilities; it also reinforces the old 23LBJ and LT are equivalent to the pho- notion that disability is a solely a personal tographic negative and its paired positive medical problem rather than a problem of
Volume 22, No. 3 86 Post Script institutionalized prejudice and discrimina- Well-Made Film. Carbondale: Southern tion. (See Brown and Scarlet.) Illinois UP, 2001. 32At one point, Jason refers to his Fiedler, Leslie. Freaks: Myths and Images of memory as a “hard drive,” emphasizing his the Secret Self. New York: Simon and identification with his computer, Achilles. Schuster, 1978. 33The full quote, from the forward to A Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Brief History of Time, is, “As Nathan Ace, 1984. Myhrvold of Microsoft (a former post-doc Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. of mine) remarked: I have sold more books The Updated and Expanded Tenth Anni- on physics than Madonna has on sex (vii).” versary Edition. 1988. New York: Ban- tam Doubleday Dell, 1998. Hayles, N. Katherine. “The Seductions of Works Cited Cyberspace.” Rethinking Technologies. Bogdanovich, Peter. “1963 Interview.” Mu- Ed. seum of Modern Art Collection: Alfred Verena Andermatt Conley on behalf of the Hitchcock Exhibit. Online. Web. 15 Oc- Miami Theory Collective. Minneapolis: tober 2002.
Volume 22, No. 3 87 Post Script Rear Window DVD. Universal, 2001. “Storytelling Output Report for “Rear Win- Scarlet, Mik. “Media Miracles.” Ouch! “that dow.” Dramatica. Online. Web. 14 Oct. site for disabled people.” BBC. Online. 2002.
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