Paranoia, McCarthyism, and Anxiety in 1950s America

Question for Discussion: Does the voyeurism
and paranoia in Rear Window help us better
understand how McCarthyism, anti-Communism,
and the pressure to conform affect Americans in
the 1950s?

Reading: Levine and Papasotiriou, pp. 72-80;
Quart and Auster, pp. 39-51;
Ebert, Review of Rear Window, 1983" ;
Ebert, Review of Rear Window, 2005" ;
Denby, "Critics Notebook -- Rear Window" ;
"Alfred Hitchcock: The Master of Suspense" ;
Mogg, "Some Notes on Rear Window"

Critical Reviews of Rear Window (1954)

Internet Movie Database: Rear Window

Memorable Quotes from Rear Window
Roger Ebert Review of Rear Window (1983)
Roger Ebert Review of Rear Window (2005)
James Berardinelli Review of Rear Window
Jonathan Rosenbaum Review of Rear Window
Tim Dirks Review of Rear Window
Salon.com Review of Rear Window
Notes on Rear Window

McCarthyism and American
anti-communist hysteria

Even acute observers, noting the numerical
weakness of the Communists, have taken false
hope from this fact. Such people fail to
understand that the Communists are able to
rally into their service multitudes who are
completely unaware that they are serving the
Communist cause. Our purpose here is to study
those attitudes which transform well-meaning,
patriotic, Christian people into the allies of
Communism.
Dr. Fred Singer, You Can Trust the Communists
to be Communists

But Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not about
McCarthyism. It is about giant seed pods taking
over people's bodies. Indirectly, however, it is a
statement about the collective paranoia and the
issues of conformity widely discussed in the
period.
Stuart Samuels, (p. 222)

"Film is one of the products, one of the languages,
through which the world communicates itself to
itself.  Films embody beliefs, not by a mystic
communion with the national soul, but because
they contain the values, fears, myths, assumptions, point of view of the culture in which
they are produced."
  Stuart Samuels, "The Age of Conspiracy
                            and Conformity"

"It is, as everyone knows, a supreme rebuke to the dubious morality of the spectator, who sits in the dark in what he assumes is safety. But it's also one of the great films about sexuality and fear. Everything that Stewart sees across the courtyard—loneliness, marital entrapment, murder—reflects his own fantasies or terrors. The voyeur ends up spying on his own life, and it comes back at him and almost destroys him. "
.............David Denby on Rear Window

See the Movie Poster for Rear Window

Inside his point of view, inside his lack of freedom and his limited options. When he passes his long days and nights by shamelessly maintaining a secret watch on his neighbors, we share his obsession. It's wrong, we know, to spy on others, but after all, aren't we always voyeurs when we go to the movies? Here's a film about a man who does on the screen what we do in the audience--look through a lens at the private lives of strangers.

Hitchcock long ago explained the difference between surprise and suspense. A bomb under a table goes off, and that's surprise. We know the bomb is under the table but not when it will go off, and that's suspense. Modern slasher films depend on danger that leaps unexpectedly out of the shadows. Surprise. And surprise that quickly dissipates, giving us a momentary rush but not satisfaction. "Rear Window" lovingly invests in suspense all through the film, banking it in our memory, so that when the final payoff arrives, the whole film has been the thriller equivalent of foreplay.

Roger Ebert, Review of Rear Window

When this romantic comedy-thriller was made, TV hadn’t yet posed a serious threat to radio, much less to movies, and there’s nary a TV set or TV screen in sight. The movie’s overall narrative form of scanning past windows in a courtyard seems to anticipate channel surfing, but it reflects the way one turns a radio knob, tuning in and out of frequencies while the station indicator moves horizontally or vertically along the dial. The same pattern is apparent in the beautifully calibrated camera movements as well as the brilliantly mixed and nuanced sound recording.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Review of Rear Window

To escape from their romantic tensions, Jeff turns to the window again, while she walks away to get dinner ready. Jeff's neighbors are only known by the names he assigns to them. Across the apartments in Jeff's view, a lonely, middle-aged spinster (Judith Evelyn), dubbed 'Miss Lonelyhearts,' sets a table for two, putting a bottle of wine on the table and lighting the candles. She fantasizes a gentleman caller's entrance and pantomimes his arrival. She ushers him to the table, and then toasts.

[In a parallel to the scene in 'Miss Lonelyhearts' apartment, Lisa prepares their wine and food in the background. He is involved with his own voyeuristic view of other people's lives rather than with Lisa. With his back to Lisa, Jeff raises his glass in a toast to 'Miss Lonelyhearts.' His gesture is unanswered - it is symbolic of his own loneliness, his inability to commit, and his emotional distance from Lisa.] During her entertainment of a phantom lover, Bing Crosby's To See You Is To Love You is heard, ironically, from the radio in a neighbor's apartment. The woman sadly buries her head in her hands at the table, as Lisa returns and joins him to watch and sympathize:

Jeff: 'Miss Lonelyhearts.' Well, at least that's something you'll never have to worry about.

Lisa: Oh? You can see my apartment from here,
all the way up on 63rd Street?

Jeff: No, not exactly

Tim Dirks, Review of Rear Window

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?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lisa Carol Fremont: A murderer would never parade his crime in front of an open window.

Lisa Carol Fremont: I'm not much on rear window ethics.

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Lieutenant Thomas J. Doyle: People do a lot of things in private they couldn't possibly explain in public.

Stella: Baloney! Once, it was see somebody, get excited, get married. Now, it's read a lot of books, fence with a lot of four-syllable words, psychoanalyze each other until you can't tell the difference between a petting party and a civil service exam.

Jeff: People have different emotional levels.

Stella: When I married Miles, we were both a couple of maladjusted misfits. We are still maladjusted misfits, and we have loved every minute of it.

While she kisses, hugs and caresses him, she is overlooked and romantically ignored as Jeff becomes more and more obsessed by his neighbor's activities. They are on totally different wavelengths: he is more interested in his theories and in telling her about what he witnessed the previous night - than kissing her.

Tim Dirks

Lisa: Maybe he's leaving his wife, I don't know, I don't care. Lots of people have knives and saws and ropes around their houses and lots of men don't speak to their wives all day. Lots of wives nag and men hate them and trouble starts. But very very few of them end up in murder if that's what you're thinking.

Jeff (thoughtfully): You know, much as I hate to give Thomas J. Doyle too much credit, he might have gotten ahold of something when he said that was pretty private stuff going on out there. I wonder if it is ethical to watch a man with binoculars and a long-focus lens. Do you, do you suppose it's ethical even if you prove that he didn't commit a crime?

Lisa: I'm not much on rear-window ethics.

Apartment Neighbor: Which one of you did it? Which one of you killed my dog? You don't know the meaning of the word 'neighbor.' Neighbors like each other, speak to each other, care if anybody lives or dies, but none of you do. But I couldn't imagine any of you bein' so low that you'd kill a little helpless, friendly dog - the only thing in this whole neighborhood who liked anybody. Did ya kill him because he liked ya? Just because he liked ya?

[Pointing to the wedding ring on her finger, she courageously reveals that she has discovered the crucial evidence - it is also an expression of her symbolic wish and proposal to be married to Jeff. By wearing the ring, she fulfills her own fantasy. And by daringly placing herself in serious danger and causing him masochistic excitement at the same time, she inspires Jeff toward love, commitment, concern, and marriage in multiple ways, as he watches her through his long telephoto lens.]

The backyard world of "Rear Window" isn't a neighborhood -- merely a collection of people living in close proximity. The neighbors barely speak to one another. Jeff's voyeurism is simply the most extreme form of that detachment. Hitchcock brings that to the fore in an excruciating sequence where Jeff and Lisa and Stella are so intrigued by what's going on in Thorvald's apartment that, despite the urgent evidence in front of their eyes, they nearly allow a woman to commit suicide. And Hitchcock ups the ante just a few minutes later when Jeff almost allows Lisa to be killed as he watches, acting as if he were a man watching a movie instead of a person with the power to prevent a murder.

It doesn't do away with any of the ambiguities that Hitchcock raises in "Rear Window" that Jeff turns out to be right. The worlds we have looked into are still private ones, the moments he has turned to for amusement are often too raw to be amusing to anyone but the wholly callous. Standing in for all the people who have been watched, Thorvald asks Jeff a question he is unable to answer, the unsolved mystery that hangs over "Rear Window" and the one that we may be no more able to answer: "What do you want from me?"
Salon.com

1. Do you agree with Brian Koller when he
argues that "While the plot has these people's
bodies possessed by alien pods from outer space,
the screenplay may be a thinly disguised jab at
cold war paranoia in the U.S., and the general belief
that communists were around every corner and
out to subvert the country."

2. What are the psychological and emotional traits
of the "pod people"?3. Do you agree with Tim
Dirks who argues that "the disturbing theme of
the film [The Invasion of the Body Snatchers] was
open to varying interpretations, including paranoia
toward a harmful ideology such as Communism
or the sweeping McCarthyism of the 1950s, the
spread of an unknown malignancy or virulent
germ, or the numbing of our psyches through
conformity." Is one of the strengths of this film
that the larger symbolic cause of this "epidemic
mass hysteria" and paranoia isn't clearly
revealed?

4. Do you think there is any symbolic significance
in the residents of Santa Mira no longer attending
a once popular night club? Does this help us
better understand the nature of the pod people?

5. Is the real fear at the center of The Invasion of
the Body Snatchers the fear and paranoia that
there are larger forces in our society trying to
take over our minds and stunt our humanity?

6. What does Miles mean when the tells Becky:

In my practice, I've seen how people have
allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it
happened slowly instead of all at once. They
didn't seem to mind...All of us - a little bit - we
harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when
we have to fight to stay human do we realize
how precious it is to us, how dear.

7. What is the relationship between Miles'
observation about the pod people-- "It's a
malignant disease spreading through the whole
country"--and the director of the FBI J. Edgar
Hoover's statement that "Communism is an
disease, and just like in an epidemic, a
quarantine may be necessary"?

8. What is the significance of Miles trying to
call the FBI when he first discovers the larger
plot of the pod people? Does the contacting
of the FBI at the end of the movie represent
a possible triumph over the pod people?

9. What is the larger significance of Miles' losing
Becky to the pod people? How does Miles
discover that Becky isn't Becky anymore but in
fact a pod person?10. Why don't the people on the
highway believe Miles when he tells them: "Look,
you fools. You're in danger. Can't you see? They're
after you. They're after all of us. Our wives, our
children, everyone. They're here already. You're
next!"

11. How is madness, hysteria, paranoia, and
suspicious contained by mental health and
psychiatry in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
Does the film want the audience to believe that if
there is anything wrong with these people that it's
probably all in their minds?

12. Do you agree with CGK who argues that "using
the police and the psychiatrist, who is supposed
to understand the human mind and its desires, as
the main propagators of the pods' logic adds a
degree of insidiousness to their conspiracy and
seems to suggest that authority, physical and
intellectual, cannot be trusted"?

13. Does Stuart Samuels' characterization of
podism as "a malignant evil, as a state of mind
where there is no feeling, no free will, no moral
choice, no anger, no tears, no passion, no emotion.
Human sensibility is dead" also ring true for the
people in the town Pleasantville in the movie Pleasantville( 1998)?

14. Do you agree with Stuart Samuels that
instead of being a "metaphor for communism...
podism spoke to a society becoming more
massified, more technological, more standardized"?