I just watched Rear Window (1954) on Netflix last night, but I’m sure I’ve seen it before, and on the big screen, perhaps in college in a film series. Here’s the first two paragraphs of Wikipedia’s plot summary:
Professional photojournalist L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies, recuperating from adventurous assignment-related injuries, in a cast from his waist to his foot, is confined to a wheelchair in his Greenwich Village apartment. His mid-floor rear window looks out onto a courtyard with small garden plots, surrounded on four sides by apartments in adjoining buildings. Jeff is regularly visited by Stella, a middle-aged nurse, and his couture-dressed girlfriend, Lisa Fremont, a socialite who works in fashion.
During a heat wave, Jeff watches his neighbors through open windows, including a professional dancer coined “Miss Torso”; a songwriter with writer's block; a spinster who pantomimes dates with pretend suitors, “Miss Lonely-Hearts”; and traveling costume jewelry salesman Lars Thorwald, who is hen-pecked by his bedridden wife. One night, Jeff hears a woman scream followed by the sound of breaking glass. Later that night, Jeff wakes as a thunderstorm breaks; he observes Thorwald making repeated excursions carrying his Halliburton aluminum sample case. After Jeff has fallen asleep, Thorwald leaves his apartment along with a woman obscured by a large black hat.
If you’re thinking the Thorwald murdered his wife, you’re correct. Just how Jeff, along with Stella, Lisa, and Jeff’s police detective pal, Tom Doyle, figured that out and managed to trap Thorwald before he skipped town, that’s the central plot of the movie.
But that’s not what interests me. I’m interested in the secondary plot, which involves the relationship between Jeff and Lisa. When we first see Lisa, played by Grace Kelly, early in the film, she’s pushing Jeff (Jame Stewart) for a deeper, more committed relationship, and he’s resisting, pleading the differences between them. She’s a wealthy socialite, sporting a $1100 dress ($13K in 2025 dollars) and he’s a globe-trotting photographer who barely makes ends meet. At the end of the movie things are quite different. Both of them got caught up in Thorwald’s dramatic and violent capture, with Jeff breaking his other leg, and are now resting contentedly in his apartment. Presumably their relationship is now resolved.
How’d that happen? In his own thoughts about the movie, Henry Oliver notes:
Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart are not Sherlock and Watson—they combine the traditional “merry war” of comic lovers with the competition between sleuths. It is by becoming the daring Sherlock in her own right that this Beatrice wins her Benedick. It is not just private detective against police, or woman trying to pin down man, but a subtle marriage of the two story lines, making neither as clichéd as they otherwise would be.
That is to say, just as the two plots in Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio/Hero and Beatrice/Benedick, each serve as a device to allow the other one to move successfully toward marriage. So in Rear Window the murder plot functions as a device to move Jeff and Lisa from stasis toward marriage.
Getting a couple from attraction to commitment is always problematic; it’s a central concern of comedy. I devoted some attention to the problem in my paper on Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale, but I’m not going to attempt that in this short note. For the purposes of this note we’ll have to chalk it up to what I’ve taken to calling “myth logic.” My point is simply that there is a pattern here, and it can be analyzed and decoded, but not here and now, nor by me.
And that pattern “bleeds” out beyond the Jeff and Lisa story. In the movie’s final moments we see that Miss Lonely Hearts, who had been on the edge of suicide at one point, has met up with the songwriter and the dancer’s boyfriend has returned from military deployment. Those events, and a couple others, are part of the same pattern of myth logic. In the case of the relationship between Jeff and Lisa it’s not that there is any directly causality between the murder and their relationship, but rather that the murder provided them with an opportunity for mutual participation in a common cause, figuring out what had happened. The relationship between the murder and those other two developments is even more indirect. They just happened within the same time-frame.
Where they all come together is in the hearts and minds of the audience (us). That’s where myth logic is operative.
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Addendum, Aug. 1, 2025: I’ve watched the film again. There’s as much dialog about marriage and relationships as there is about the murder. The two topic, of course, do intersect.
After establishing that we’re in Jeff’s room his nurse, Stella, arrives to give him a massage. They talk about his girlfriend, Lisa, and why he doesn’t want to marry her, though she expects it. They’re too different, he says, from different worlds, etc. Stella urges marriage, Jeff resists.
Stella leaves. The newlyweds arrive, and pull down the blinds. Jeff smiles at that. Obviously we’re to assume that they’re having sex.
The next evening, Lisa is in Jeff’s arms, kissing him. We see this in a close-up. He’s paying attention to what’s happening outside in the dark. He wonders what the salesman had in his sample case that he left the apt with it three times. Now he’s cleaning a knife. He’s obviously wondering whether or not he’s killed his wife and is removing her body piece by piece. He’s speculating out loud and now Lisa’s scared, but interested. All this time she’s kissing him. Lisa leaves his arms to smoke a cigarette. They argue and speculate.
The film may be about a murder, but it’s saturated with marriage.
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