Those Who Knew Too Much

The Rear Window of Picture Shows

Photo by Pierre Châtel-Innocenti on Unsplash

Sometimes it pays to sit in the rear of the theatre watching Jacy and Duane making out; at other times, sitting anywhere can be enlightening and a bit dangerous, given who you might be and what you might see, at Midnight or any random afternoon.

For the third picture show in my favorite twenty films of all time, I turn to the master of suspense, a uniquely flawed human being but supreme filmmaker. Very few seemingly “normal” men die in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. The ones who do are even more flawed than the director himself, with the possible exception of the detective ARBOGAST in the classically horror-filled Psycho. More often, of course, it’s a woman who dies, is gruesomely murdered, usually when she least expects it and never because she’s done anything to deserve this fate.

For the record, no one deserves to die as “Marion Crane” does, and murder is always most foul.

Yet it happens, and in Hitchcock films, it happens most to female characters — merry widows, abandoned schoolteachers, London prostitutes, look-a-like secretaries, and blackmailing, pregnant wives.

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, how often or how far, and what dow e expect to see should we look into the rear windows of other, distant souls?