And I feel the sky falling down around me
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asakiyume, who had asked me about the differences watching Rear Window (1954) first as a child and then as an adult:
It never occurred to me as a child that James Stewart's Jeff could be wrong. He was the protagonist; if he said something was going on, something was going on. Rewatching as an adult, I can recognize that a major part of the fun and the tension of the film comes from the danger and ambiguity of whether Jeff really has detected a murderer across the courtyard of his two-room apartment in Greenwich Village or whether his boredom and imagination and a collision of personal and professional frustrations are working up an exciting story which is getting out of hand as more and more of the people in his life take it seriously and either way someone is going to get hurt because you can't have your girlfriend and your physical therapist start investigating a murder, real or invented, without repercussions. As a child, it was entirely about the terror and the unfairness of being disbelieved, especially about something as important and horrible as a murder that happened where everyone could see, but no one—except one photojournalist, whose business was people-watching; the cinematic reflexivity of observing the lives of your neighbors like sitcoms through a telephoto lens also passed child-me by—was looking. Consequently my memory of the film is much higher-strung than the actual experience of rewatching it, where much of the point is how cheerfully and banally the life of the apartment courtyard is ticking along on this very hot summer in New York until all of a sudden a woman screams over her murdered dog like the myth of Kitty Genovese and all of Jeff's suspicions snap into dreadful plausibility where before they could be pushed off into the unknowable countries of the lives of the strangers next door. Hilariously in context of recent film interests, I had no distinct memories of the character played by Wendell Corey at all, even though he figures importantly in this plot: he's either the voice of reason or the voice of wrongheaded rationalizing, because he's the character—and he's a detective lieutenant of the NYPD, so his opinion means more than moral support—who holds out the longest on believing Jeff. As an adult, I can see what he contributes to the different layers of the story, the ways in which he shadows and foils for Jeff. As a child, I imagine he just looked to me like dumb authority not listening, all the more maddeningly because he's so friendly about it. I can see more about the lives of the neighbors, too, which to a child were more of the background color and from an adult perspective deliberately emphasize that Jeff's is just one of however many million stories in the naked city, just the one that we happen to be watching while all around him other people's stories go on far more completely than he can understand from his glimpses through their windows and vice versa. I had forgotten a lot of details, obviously, and not necessarily caught a lot of the humor or the sexual daring of Grace Kelly's Lisa, who strikes me now as an atypical, rather wonderful heroine for Hitchcock. I had remembered the disbelief. This time around, while I still wasn't able to share it, I could at least see where it had been fairly introduced.
asakiyume, who had asked me about the differences watching Rear Window (1954) first as a child and then as an adult:It never occurred to me as a child that James Stewart's Jeff could be wrong. He was the protagonist; if he said something was going on, something was going on. Rewatching as an adult, I can recognize that a major part of the fun and the tension of the film comes from the danger and ambiguity of whether Jeff really has detected a murderer across the courtyard of his two-room apartment in Greenwich Village or whether his boredom and imagination and a collision of personal and professional frustrations are working up an exciting story which is getting out of hand as more and more of the people in his life take it seriously and either way someone is going to get hurt because you can't have your girlfriend and your physical therapist start investigating a murder, real or invented, without repercussions. As a child, it was entirely about the terror and the unfairness of being disbelieved, especially about something as important and horrible as a murder that happened where everyone could see, but no one—except one photojournalist, whose business was people-watching; the cinematic reflexivity of observing the lives of your neighbors like sitcoms through a telephoto lens also passed child-me by—was looking. Consequently my memory of the film is much higher-strung than the actual experience of rewatching it, where much of the point is how cheerfully and banally the life of the apartment courtyard is ticking along on this very hot summer in New York until all of a sudden a woman screams over her murdered dog like the myth of Kitty Genovese and all of Jeff's suspicions snap into dreadful plausibility where before they could be pushed off into the unknowable countries of the lives of the strangers next door. Hilariously in context of recent film interests, I had no distinct memories of the character played by Wendell Corey at all, even though he figures importantly in this plot: he's either the voice of reason or the voice of wrongheaded rationalizing, because he's the character—and he's a detective lieutenant of the NYPD, so his opinion means more than moral support—who holds out the longest on believing Jeff. As an adult, I can see what he contributes to the different layers of the story, the ways in which he shadows and foils for Jeff. As a child, I imagine he just looked to me like dumb authority not listening, all the more maddeningly because he's so friendly about it. I can see more about the lives of the neighbors, too, which to a child were more of the background color and from an adult perspective deliberately emphasize that Jeff's is just one of however many million stories in the naked city, just the one that we happen to be watching while all around him other people's stories go on far more completely than he can understand from his glimpses through their windows and vice versa. I had forgotten a lot of details, obviously, and not necessarily caught a lot of the humor or the sexual daring of Grace Kelly's Lisa, who strikes me now as an atypical, rather wonderful heroine for Hitchcock. I had remembered the disbelief. This time around, while I still wasn't able to share it, I could at least see where it had been fairly introduced.
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Your child v adult viewing is so relatable: I remember first watching Ugetsu Monogatari when I was, I don't know, maybe 10? It said quite different things to me then than it does to me now, as you can imagine. But I appreciate the things it showed 10-year-old me, and what I love (among many things) about what you say here is how much you appreciate the feelings of young you. And I do too! It's terrible, after all, not to be believed.
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I appreciate it!
I remember first watching Ugetsu Monogatari when I was, I don't know, maybe 10? It said quite different things to me then than it does to me now, as you can imagine.
I would love, in turn, to hear about your differences. I saw that film for the first time only a couple of years ago.
And I do too! It's terrible, after all, not to be believed.
I am strenuously not responding with another paragraph about the ways in which the film nudges its audience towards or away from believing Jeff because I don't have time to write about Rear Window! (I have other things I want to write about, too.)
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re: Ugetsu Monogatari, I had no coherent sense of the plot, and I think I tuned in partway through it (it will have been on TV some Saturday or Sunday afternoon). What I saw was the most mysterious, beautiful woman--this is the ghost in the ruined mansion. I had never seen anyone like her before (no kidding: she was made up like a Muromachi-period noblewoman, a concept I wouldn't meet until college). I could tell she was a spirit, and I could tell she was enticing the man--I had seen the 1950s anime of The White Snake Enchantress(I loved that), so I understood this, but probably because of The White Snake, I couldn't wrap my head around her as malevolent. I wanted the guy to stay with her! And then the priest goes and writes sutras all over him to protect him! What?! (But I liked this form of protection--I filed it away as useful magic.)
Then the end of the movie, where the guy makes it home but his home has been destroyed and his wife is a ghost--all that went right over my head. In other words, the human tragedy was lost on me.
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That's wonderful: she was out of your entire world, too.
(But I liked this form of protection--I filed it away as useful magic.)
(I am pretty sure I learned about it from a retelling of Hoichi the Earless.)
Then the end of the movie, where the guy makes it home but his home has been destroyed and his wife is a ghost--all that went right over my head. In other words, the human tragedy was lost on me.
That makes sense to me. As often as I watched Splash as a child, as an adult I discovered I had still forgotten most of the parts that were not directly part of the fairytale or the familiar alienness of Madison. Or I had seen them, but not known what they could mean, either to the film or later to me.
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It's a great detail.
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- Yes, it is good that you have elevated this comment. It is a capsule review and should count.
- When I watched the film (I expect I was between 11 and 15 years old, as those are the years we had a television that got A&E and The Channel That Became TCM) I was on the same side as younger you, because adults not believing that terrifying things had just fucking happened right over there was... a theme. I haven't re-watched as an adult and I should. (We joke that Mac prefers Bergman, Kurosawa, and Hitchcock, but thinks Shyamalan should take a bath.)
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If you want to be mad and extra-informed, Marcia M. Gallo's "No One Helped": Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy (2015) is an excellent explosion of the received version of the story and told me a lot of things I had not known about her neighbors as well as Genovese herself and her girlfriend. Also, what? No.
- Yes, it is good that you have elevated this comment. It is a capsule review and should count.
Thank you. I still want to write about a bunch of science fiction and noir! (I want not to have a crushing headache, while we're at it.)
- When I watched the film (I expect I was between 11 and 15 years old, as those are the years we had a television that got A&E and The Channel That Became TCM) I was on the same side as younger you, because adults not believing that terrifying things had just fucking happened right over there was... a theme.
*hugs*
I haven't re-watched as an adult and I should. (We joke that Mac prefers Bergman, Kurosawa, and Hitchcock, but thinks Shyamalan should take a bath.)
I liked it a lot, revisited. I poked experimentally at the available criticism and immediately hit some Lacan and left the scene.
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...Yeah. There was a lot of facepalming when I revisited the film as an adult.
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It sounds like an incredible lesson in reading/viewing procotols, but I'm so sorry!
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Their “Citizen Wayne” sketch didn’t make much sense to me either, as a child.
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I was just familiar with the "Colonel Bogey March" in the form of the playground song about Comet.
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Jeff and his nurse are only able to get the police over fast enough to save Lisa because they’d already dialled the local station when they noticed Miss Lonelyhearts getting out the sleeping pills; and by the time the cop station answers, the reason they can instead report a man attacking a woman, because the Composer has unknowingly halted Miss Lonelyheart’s suicide attempt with his music and they can afford to switch their focus back to what’s happening upstairs.
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Yes! And it's after the woman whose dog has been murdered calls out the inhabitants of the courtyard for not knowing or caring anything about one another: "You don't know the meaning of the word 'neighbor.'" I don't think I caught that sequence of events at all the first time around.