Now, I don’t usually do rewatch writeups on here, just because there’s stuff I rewatch a couple times a year (Rocky Horror, Reanimator, Repo!, etc.) but the last time I saw Rear Window I was 11 or 12, and since a good chunk of time around those ages is just kind of Gone due to am untreated head injury I sustained two days before the start of 6th grade, it’s basically like I watched it for the first time.
This was another ‘took my grandma to a vintage movie showing’ watch. We missed Decembers because I so very cruelly made her follow her doctor’s orders and didn’t let her go out in the cold when she had pneumonia. But she’s mostly better now, and we’d had this planned for months. This is her favorite Hitchcock, probably because it the nosy person’s wildest dream. She would love to live in a world where you solve a murder and prove everybody wrong by spying on your neighbors. All she gets from spying on her neighbors is the ability to feel superior about someone ordering too much stuff online.
I remembered the broad strokes of the movie: the wheelchair, the spying, the dog dying, a man ignoring a truly beautiful woman because he was too busy spying on the neighbors. But what I either forgot, or didn’t catch as a kid, was how funny this movie is. It’s tense, yes, of course it is, but the tension is constantly buoyed by the tight humor in the dialogue.
What also struck me was how easy it would be to remake this with all lesbians. Were it a stage play I’d be planning out a version of that right now. This is inspired by both the subplot about the male lead being convinced he can’t marry his girlfriend because he is Just Too Tough And Manly and she is just too Girly And Feminine would take on a fascinating lens when given to a woman who flouts gender norms who is in love with a woman who does not understand that the kinds of queer they are plays very different to an outside observer, therefore subtly reinforcing the themes of voyeurism, and also that I kept mishearing the cop character’s name as Dawn despite knowing it’s Tom. Stella would stay the same, just change the husband references to a wife. Is there a real reason to do this? No. But it is rotating inside my brain and so now it is recorded here.
I guess I don’t have that much to say about this one. That’s the problem with an old movie that’s a good as everybody says it is: everything you could possibly say about it has already been said. And so I have perhaps said one of the last possible unique things about Rear Window: what if lesbians. Think about it. What if lesbians?
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 