CORNELL WOOLRICH: REAR WINDOW

Voyeurism and the Confined Observer

Due to his injury, Jeff spends most of his time looking out the window, scrutinizing the lives of his neighbors. He has the “fevered concentration of a Peeping Tom. That wasn’t my fault. … what should I do, sit there with my eyes tightly shuttered?”

The story by Cornell Woolrich explores the idea of observing others’ lives from a distance and the potential for misinterpretation and obsession that can arise from such behavior. 

The Daily Habits of the Rear Window Dwellers

“I didn’t know their names. I’d never heard their voices. I didn’t even know them by sight, strictly speaking, for their faces were too small to fill in with identifiable features at that distance. Yet I could have constructed a timetable of their comings and goings, their daily habits and activities.”

“The lights started to come on around the quadrangle. … The chain of little habits that were their lives unreeled themselves. They were all bound in them tighter than the tightest straitjacket any jailer ever devised, though they all thought themselves free. The jitterbugs made their nightly dash for the great open spaces, forgot their lights, he came careening back, thumbed them out, and their place was dark until the early morning hours. The woman put her child to bed, leaned mournfully over its cot, then sat down with heavy despair to redden her mouth.”

When Mrs. Thorvald doesn’t come out to greet her husband, the “first link, of the so-strong chain of habits, of custom, that binds us all, had snapped wide open.”

Cornell Woolrich Builds Empathy … and Breaks It

“I felt sorry for the couple in the flat below. I used to wonder how they stood it with that bedlam going on above their heads. To make it worse the wife was in chronic poor health, too; I could tell that even at a distance by the listless way she moved about over there, and remained in her bathrobe without dressing. Sometimes I’d see her sitting by the window, holding her head. I used to wonder why he didn’t have a doctor in to look her over, but maybe they couldn’t afford it. He seemed to be out of work.”

He was holding a cigarette in his hand. I couldn’t see it, but I could tell it was that by the quick, nervous little jerks with which he kept putting his hand to his mouth, and the haze I saw rising around his head. Worried about her, I guess. I didn’t blame him for that. Any husband would have been. She must have only just dropped off to sleep, after night-long suffering. And then in another hour or so, at the most, that sawing of wood and clattering of buckets was going to start in over them again. Well, it wasn’t any of my business, I said to myself, but he really ought to get her out of there. If I had an ill wife on my hands …

The Armchair Detective Gathers Evidence

Cornell Woolrich has created an armchair detective who is unable to physically investigate. Jeff starts piecing together clues from his observations.

I wondered vaguely why he had given that peculiar, comprehensive, semicircular stare at all the rear windows around him. There wasn’t anyone at any of them, at such an hour. It wasn’t important, of course. It was just a little oddity, it failed to blend in with his being worried or disturbed about his wife. When you’re worried or disturbed, that’s an internal preoccupation, you stare vacantly at nothing at all. When you stare around you in a great sweeping arc at windows, that betrays external preoccupation, outward interest. One doesn’t quite jibe with the other. To call such a discrepancy trifling is to add to its importance. Only someone like me, stewing in a vacuum of total idleness, would have noticed it at all.

“I hadn’t seen the woman all day. I hadn’t seen any sign of life within those windows until now. … He didn’t remove his hat. As though there was no one there to remove it for any more. Instead, he pushed it farther to the back of his head by pronging a hand to the roots of his hair. That gesture didn’t denote removal of perspiration, I knew. To do that a person makes a sidewise sweep—this was up over his forehead. It indicated some sort of harassment or uncertainty. Besides, if he’d been suffering from excess warmth, the first thing he would have done would be to take off his hat altogether.”

“He’s worried about her, I said to myself, as any man would be. It’s the most natural thing in the world. Funny, though, he should leave her in the dark like that, without going near her. If he’s worried, then why didn’t he at least look in on her on returning? Here was another of those trivial discrepancies, between inward motivation and outward indication. … His head went up with renewed alertness, and I could see it start to give that slow circular sweep of interrogation around the panorama of rearward windows again. … [I saw] the microscopic but continuous shift of direction his head made in the process. I remained carefully immobile until the distant glance had passed me safely by. Motion attracts.”

Suspicions arise, and Cornell Woolrich raises the stakes. Jeff becomes increasingly convinced that a seemingly normal couple is involved in a murder, when he sees the husband acting suspiciously after his wife disappears.

“He shifted in, away from the door, nearer the window. He thought danger lay near the door, safety away from it. He didn’t know it was the other way around, the deeper into his own rooms he retreated the greater the danger. … He’d torn it open, he was reading it. God, how I watched his expression. My eyes clung to it like leeches. … Guilty! Guilty as all hell, and the police be damned!”

Blurred Lines Between Reality and Perception

As he becomes more convinced of the murder, Jeff faces skepticism from his nurse and doubts about his own sanity, making it difficult to seek help. The internal struggle is real.

Boyne stops by and reads Jeff the riot act about the wild goose chase he’s been on. “Very few men have ever gotten a look from an old friend such as I got from him. At the door he said, stiff as a rifle barrel: “Just let’s forget all about it, shall we? That’s about the kindest thing either one of us can do for the other. You’re not yourself … Let’s let it go at that.”

This story by Cornell Woolrich questions the reliability of observation and the potential for self-deception when trying to piece together a mystery based on limited information.

Helplessness and Isolation

When Jeff finally feels he has enough evidence, he attempts to expose the killer, putting himself in a dangerous situation and facing potential retaliation. We’ve reached the story’s climax, and Cornell Woolrich has made sure that anxiety is high.

Jeff’s physical limitations and inability to directly intervene in the suspected crime reinforce the feeling of helplessness and isolation.

Harbinger of Death

Sam: “Any time you hear [a cricket], that’s a sign of death someplace close around.”

“Seconds went by in packages of sixty. … a breathless stillness. And then a sound came into it … The unmistakable, spaced clicking a cricket makes in the silence of the night. I thought of Sam’s superstition about them, that he claimed had never failed to fulfill itself yet.”

Seeing Is Different from Processing and Understanding

The man “turned his head and looked around behind him. In a certain way, a way that was unmistakable, even from where I was. Not in one certain direction, as one looks at a person. But from side to side, and up and down, and all around, as one looks at—an empty room.

She wasn’t in there.

… For two days a sort of formless uneasiness, a disembodied suspicion, … had been flitting and volplaning around in my mind, like an insect looking for a landing place. More than once, just as it had been ready to settle, … some slight reassuring thing, such as the raising of the shades after they had been down unnaturally long, had been enough to keep it winging aimlessly, prevent it from staying still long enough for me to recognize it. The point of contact had been there all along, waiting to receive it. Now, … within a split second after he tossed over the empty mattresses, it landed—zoom! And the point of contact expanded—or exploded, whatever you care to call it—into a certainty of murder.

[The] rational part of my mind was far behind the instinctive, subconscious part. Delayed action. Now the one had caught up to the other. The thought-message that sparked from the synchronization was: He’s done something to her!”

Cornell Woolrich is definitely on to something here …

Delayed Action Might Kill You

Jeff gets a call. The caller doesn’t speak. Thorwald glances once at Jeff’s bay window. “It was certainly anything but vacant or random, it had a bright spark of fixity in it. It wasn’t one of those precautionary sweeps I’d seen him give, either. It hadn’t started over on the other side and worked its way around to my side, the right. It had hit dead-center at my bay window, for just a split second while it lasted, and then was gone again. And the lights were gone, and he was gone.”

Sometimes your senses take things in without your mind translating them into their proper meaning. My eyes saw that look. My mind refused to smelter it properly. “It was meaningless,” I thought. “An unintentional bull’s-eye, that just happened to hit square over here …”

Delayed action. A wordless ring of the phone. To test a voice? A period of bated darkness following that, in which two could have played at the same game—stalking one another’s window-squares, unseen. A last-moment flicker of the lights, that was bad strategy but unavoidable. A parting glance, radioactive with malignant intention. All these things sank in without fusing. My eyes did their job, it was my mind that didn’t—or at least took its time about it.

“Then suddenly it exploded. … It flashed like waiting gunpowder which a spark has finally reached along a slow train. … It had been waiting there since midafternoon today, and only now … Damn that delayed action.” Jeff realizes where the body is. He calls Boyne, but the line goes dead.

“[D]elayed action. It nearly killed me.”

Indeed. Cornell Woolrich seems to be making a serious argument here about how such delays can be dangerous and even deadly.

A Hitch in Synchronization

“The lights went out over there; I lost him. He was careful not even to strike matches, like he sometimes did in the dark. … My mind no longer distracted by having him to look at, I turned to trying to recapture something else—that troublesome little hitch in synchronization that had occurred this afternoon, when the renting agent and he both moved simultaneously from one window to the next. The closest I could get was this: it was like when you’re looking at someone through a pane of imperfect glass, and a flaw in the glass distorts the symmetry of the reflected image for a second, until it has gone on past that point.”

“I told [Boyne] about the freak synchronization. “The renting agent showed up taller at the kitchen window in proportion to Thorwald, than he had been a moment before when both were at the living room windows together.” They were putting in cement floors and raising them considerably.

A (Well-Placed) Friend in Need

Jeff calls Boyne and tells him to investigate a murder. “Marshaled aloud like that and conveyed to somebody else, a lieutenant of detectives above all, it did sound flimsy, even to me.” But Boyne “accepted it as was. Because I was the source. I even left my window out of it completely. I could do that with him and get away with it because he’d known me years, he didn’t question my reliability.

Putting Sam at Risk

Cornell Woolrich creates an obedient servant in Sam — he’s so obedient that he puts his own life at risk to do Jeff’s bidding.

Jeff sends Sam to get the building address and occupant name.

Jeff doesn’t confide in Sam. Instead, he calls Boyne: “I looked around to make sure the door was safely closed between Sam and me.”

Jeff asks Sam to find his spyglass. “I took a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote six words on it: What have you done with her?” He asks Sam to slide it under his door and dash away.

“For about ten minutes after [Boyne] stormed out my numbed mind was in a sort of straitjacket. Then it started to wriggle its way free. The hell with the police. I can’t prove it to them, maybe, but I can prove it to myself, one way or the other, once and for all. Either I’m wrong or I’m right. He’s got his armor on against them. But his back is naked and unprotected against me.”

Jeff asks Sam “to do something for me that’s a little risky. In fact, damn risky. You might break a leg, or you might get shot, or you might even get pinched. We’ve been together ten years, and I wouldn’t ask you anything like that if I could do it myself. But I can’t, and it’s got to be done.” He tells him to climb the fire escape and enter the fourth-floor flat through the open window.

“I want you to disturb everything just a little bit … to show someone’s been in there.”

Jeff gives Sam his watch. Return within 25 minutes, and “nothing will happen to you. When you see they’re up, don’t wait any longer, get out and get out fast.”

“Climb back down?”

“No.” He wouldn’t remember, in his excitement, if he’d left the windows up or not. … I wanted to keep my own window out of it. “Latch the window down tight, let yourself out the door, and beat it out of the building the front way, for your life!”

“I’m just an easy mark for you,” he said ruefully, but he went.

How might this story by Cornell Woolrich change without the telephone? How might the story change if told today?

“Through a Window” (H. G. Wells) and “It Had to Be Murder” (Cornell Woolrich)

In “Through a Window,” Bailey is convalescing at home with two broken legs. He lies on the couch and watches the outside world through his window. He grows almost addicted to the panorama of activity, telling his friend Wilderspin he never thought he could be so interested in things that don’t concern him.

One day, a Malay bargeman working on the river runs amok with a krees (Indonesian dagger). He’s pursued by three white men. Bailey loses sight of the chase as the hunters and hunted pass out of sight. His housekeeper, Mrs. Green, says she saw the commotion going on outside. Then the Malay man appears at the window, his knife between his teeth, and climbs inside the house. He’s shot by the police through the window, and Bailey smashes a medicine bottle over the man’s head.

The screen through which Bailey watches the chase is also the boundary the Malay breaches when he enters Bailey’s English drawing room: “His expression was an unpleasant grin, by reason of the krees he held between his teeth, and he was bleeding from an ugly wound …. [His hair] stuck out like horns from his head. His body was bare save for the wet trousers.” The Malay is depicted as primitive and devilish.

Bailey tells Wilderspin that the people he observes “come from all points of the compass – from Oxford and Windsor, from Asia and Africa – and gather and pass opposite the window just to entertain me.” They’re from all four corners of the British empire.

Perhaps both H. G. Wells and Cornell Woolrich are saying that people can’t be wholly detached, passive observers, viewing the world outside our windows as cinematic entertainment. Such detachment treats the world outside as somehow unreal rather than the genuine day-to-day reality of other people’s lives.