I recently re-watched Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Jimmy Stewart plays L.B. Jeffries, a photographer laid up with a broken leg, who turns the sharp eye of his focus to the lives of the neighbors through his courtyard window. It's a classic study of the power of sight: a sort of metaphysical meditation on the ability of the artist to shape the world as he observes it. I've always shunned convention and named Rear Window my favorite Hitchcock film, even if it meant swimming upstream through my own ambivalent cinephilia and enduring the incredulity of my fellow travelers. ("But...Vertigo!" insist the self-styled experts who, you have to wonder, have maybe never even seen Notorious).

Wherever the Criterion crowd may rank it, Rear Window has taken on new meaning for me ever since I moved into a small, suburban complex where all four of my own six-by-three-foot windows face the entrance. People can and do quite often look in. It is a peculiarity that I have come to tolerate, out of respect for the unique sort of loneliness that the suburbs perpetuate. I realize that the restrictions of the last two years have sent all of us grasping for something to observe beyond the rectangle of our smart phones. As the social limitations of the pandemic endure, we languish in a state of convalescence: a nation of broken-legged photographers struggling to find some sight worth capturing in the banal scenescape of our own backyards.

It seems significant that I can't see into anyone else's apartment from my vantage point on the first floor. I am not an L.B. Jeffries, endowed with the godlike power of sight. Like so many of the characters in Rear Window, I am reduced to an object of other people's gazes. It doesn't seem a coincidence, either, that like so many other characters in the film, I am a woman. This affronts me as a person who considers herself an artist, or at the very least an intellectual—I should be brandishing that weapon of sight, backing people into corners with my own keen perspicacity. Instead I feel robbed of basic agency, pinned to the walls of my apartment like an unlucky bug on a card, or the animated doll in a horror film dollhouse, waiting for some calamity to render me visible.

It was never my intention to write a hackneyed reflection on the male gaze. Twelve years on from an education steeped heavily in the platitudes of third-wave feminism, I am hard-pressed to accept that I am the victim of some clandestine conspiracy of gendered gazes. And yet nonetheless I have to wonder about the ways in which my gender and my situation are co-involved.

I was brought back to Rear Window as a sort of heuristic for defining a situation that eludes me. I live inside these frames that offer a mostly silent vantage on my life, should I choose to raise the curtain by tilting or lifting the blinds. And yet how can I look in through my own windows, become an object to myself? Hitchcock offers some precious perspective on the self-as-object to the outside observer.

That perspective is bleak. The three major possibilities are embodied in the film by the women Jeffries bothers observing at length, commenting on, and ultimately calling into the narrative by naming: Miss Lonely Hearts, Miss Torso, and of course the Murdered Wife. These characters become representations of the ways in which a woman is permitted to exist through a lens that is wielded through the gaze of a dispassionate observer: as a lonely neurotic, as a provocative whore, or as a murdered wife whose death is nothing but a pretext for the protagonist to exercise some sort of agency over a world that he has hitherto confined himself to observing.

Miss Torso is the most recognizable archetype. In the opening sequence, she poses in a pink bandeau and short-shorts, dancing around the studio with a chicken thigh in her mouth. The lens of the camera pans up her legs as she lies prostrate on the bed reading, as though self-conscious of the gaze she is inviting through the courtyard window. Later, the scene in her apartment turns sinister, as Jeffries watches her struggle to deflect the wolfish advances of the various men who force themselves on her. The playful name that Jeffries gives her—Miss Torso—recalls the ways in which her body is pieced apart by the observer, and echoes the grisly murder on which the plot centers.

Miss Lonely Hearts is a lesser-known archetype. She is aging, lonely, and entertaining chimeric delusions of imaginary partnership. Jeffries watches with incredulity as she pantomimes a dinner with an invisible date, and then as the flesh-and-blood date she hosts devolves into a sexual assault. Finally, he watches as she prepares pills, vodka, and a suicide note to end her misery. We the audience pity but do not intervene. Ultimately, she is the victim of her own neuroses, of whatever errors led her to find herself unwed and alone at such a late stage in the game.

Then of course, there is the Murdered Wife, the fulcrum of the film, and the place where so much of our prurient voyeurism remains fixated. Dead wives dominate the cultural imagination, which is the issue I take with most true crime; the object of our fixation is not a character with dimensionality so much as it is a pretext for Jeffries to use his omniscience towards virtuous ends. The only affirmative proof of her existence is the scream that echoes through the courtyard, before her body is dismembered and littered throughout lower Manhattan.

Ultimately, Rear Window is a film about murder—about uxoricide to be precise—and that fact leaches into the stories of the women in the courtyard who lead adjacent but non-convergent lives. Death and dismemberment, both suggested and literal, are the specters that haunt the camera's probe into their homes. The film dramatizes the limited range of possibilities available to women in a world structured by a gaze that is inexorably male. I am silent until I scream. I am deprived of interest until I am dead. In death, I am dimensionless, the pretext for heroism and for a very masculine brand of post-haste justice.

From the enclave of my first-floor apartment, I can anticipate the most likely objection to this reading: have the past seventy years not shifted our options, not moved us beyond these outdated archetypes? Perhaps, to an extent. But what interests me about Rear Window is the way in which the film cuts to the heart of our social isolation, which has only over the course of the intervening decades compounded.

The fact is that many of us are unfamiliar with the people who surround us. Relationships with one's neighbors are mutually parasocial until that fourth wall is lowered by some action spilling out of the neat frame of the window into real life. In the meantime, the unknown moves us to project possibilities on the people we regularly encounter, and these possibilities are necessarily informed by archetypes. Proximity may breed familiarity, or it may estrange us further to the complexity of the human condition, to the shades of grey between the aging hag and the provocative whore, between the lovely young socialite breezing into her boyfriend’s apartment in a French dress with a French dinner, and the castrating wife berating her husband until he is moved to homicidal rage. It is in this grey area where most of us reside, synthesizing traits from different sources, each of us an entirely unique amalgam of qualities that defies one straightforward interpretation.

Rear Window is a product of 1950s Hollywood, which dictates its rosy ethos. Miss Lonely Hearts is eleventh-hour rescued by a melody wafting from the apartment of the composer upstairs. Miss Torso marries the nebbish G.I. who shares her love of chicken thighs. And of course, the murdered wife is brought to justice in time to resolve Jeffries' hang ups about marrying his lovely girlfriend.

In light of its ending, I suppose one might counter that Rear Window is a film about partnership, marriage, and the protagonist's arc from the reluctant object of female affection to an acquiescent enough husband. But my takeaway is far darker. The film is about the power to control the people you observe, and the ways in which that power is ineluctably gendered. As I have asked in a previous essay, what possibilities do we have to live fulfilled lives when we are reduced to the object of observation? It is an act that diminishes each of us—voiceless, dimensionless—to a category that we have had no hand in creating, so much so that we become inauthentic to ourselves, unable to bridge the gap between the way we are seen and the limitless ways we know ourselves to be capable of becoming.