Watching Rear Window, Now
Honestly, could I not title all my posts ending in — comma, Now? But I’ve been thinking about Rear Window again, as one does when one’s house is full of Rear Window inspired paintings. We watched it last night for the umpteenth time, and it seemed all new and fresh again. It was before the pandemic began that Rob painted a series of paintings which he titled, Big Screen TV. He painted them using the grid method which reminds one of the digitization of screens, etc. So he’d painted these works, and they were in a show, and then a bit later, the pandemic. And at the beginning (three years ago already?), it felt a lot like Rear Window! I was sent home from work for three months and we spent a lot of time out walking, looking into windows, looking out of our own windows. (The further away we get from that time the more surreal that feels, right?)
Rob had already been painting his flower paintings by then, but he started to really delve into that subject in a larger way, leaving the screen stills behind. We started experimenting with social media in different ways, goofing around, taking photos for fun and generally amusing ourselves, because why not? The header photo is me posing with a painting from a screen still of Grace Kelly from near the opening of RW. (I look literally 10 years younger there than I do now but that’s another story). A few others from that series, here.
Looking back, I can make a huge list of things I have learned that I probably wouldn’t have come to in the same way if things hadn’t gone the way they did. (There are indeed silver linings).
I know that by now there is likely very little that I could say about RW that someone else hasn’t already said, but this time through, watching, I loved noting the use of lenses, when which lens was used — the single lens of the camera vs the binoculars. And I loved also noticing the light and darkness, going into, coming out of, how we can peer into the dark from the dark, and move into the shadows to hide ourselves, while looking out of these shadowed spaces to see how others are behaving in the light. Someone has made a video about just this. I loved the way the purse was a bit of a plot point. (If you’ve read Rumi and the Red Handbag you’ll understand my fascination with purses).
I think what drew me back to thinking again about and wanting to re-watch RW is for what it teaches us about knowing. How things and information can move in and out of the light, how the way we know things is more fluid than we’d like, and how we’re continually trying to make sense out of what we see, and then act on that to the best of our ability (knowing that we don’t know everything). Some are more hampered, as Jeff was in his chair, and others may be daring, as Lisa was. The element of danger is unpredictable! I remember first watching Rear Window and thinking that the ending would be quite different from what it was. That there would be a different or another twist. And this is the way the last few years have been in some ways.
We make decent guesses from where we’re sitting. We’re trying our best to act from an ethical vantage point. We are each in a way, trying to solve our case, which is to say, our lives. We observe others, but in the end, how far can we see into their lives? How can we bring our empathy to their losses? (ie the woman with the dog….!). We bring our knowledge and our intuition and observations to a situation, but much is beyond our control — who shows up to help, and when. We are all of us restricted in various ways by our own situations. Are we lonely? Are we supported? Are we bored? And meanwhile, the circumstances of where we live and how we make our living affects so much. Awful things may have happened that we have only peripheral knowledge of, or that we’ve only witnessed from a distance, but these things still affect us.
Have you seen Rear Window? And have you seen it lately? Let me know what you think or what strikes you about it these days.
And meanwhile, I posted a video of where we stayed in Rome, November 2022, which also had me thinking very much of this movie. Taken from the kitchen of the apartment we rented for the month which I night (and day) dream about all the time.
