‘There’s No Losing It”: Disability and Voyeurism in Rear Window and Vertigo

Abstract

Alfred Hitchcock’s diptych of films, Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958), share many things in addition to the use of James Stewart as the male lead. In both films Stewart spends time with a woman whose characterization is a complication of both the maternal and the roman- tic. Both films contain themes of voyeurism and isolation within society and introduce the concept of voyeurism in the opening credit sequence. Particularly striking is that James Stewart’s character begins each film in a state of disability. The form of disability in each film, physical or mental, is closely related to the form of voyeurism practised. Thus, a compari- son of the relationship between physical disability and what I will term “public voyeurism” in Rear Window, and between mental disability and what I refer to as “personal voyeurism” in Vertigo, provides a lens through which we can compare the two films’ resolutions as a result of this dis- tinction between public and private. Specifically, Hitchcock seems to use the public voyeurism in Rear Window to emancipate voyeurism by nor- malizing it; whereas the isolation in Vertigo and the subsequent murders condemn voyeurism.