THE PSYCHICAL MAP OF THE FILM
Peter Wollen sees in general the series of places in a film as its structural elements: "Building up the story of a film ... also means drawing a psychical map. In watching a film we form in our minds diagrams of the relationship between the different places on which the film is constructed, and of those routes the characters use in or between these places."14
The routes used by the characters in Rear Window are almost completely in the unknown back stage, neither can the audience form the kind of psychical map Wollen spoke of. The exit from Jeff"s flat to the street is somewhere to the left behind the audience. The murderer creeping up the stairs to Jeff"s flat brings the unfamiliar rear of the building into the audience"s imagination and it is just the unfamiliar rear that maximises the threat: at this stage the threat is not just the rather pathetic Mr Thorwald, but the labyrinthine unfamiliarity of the building itself. The true identities of the tenants, their invisible intimate life and subconsciousness, appear to be concealed in this back stage. The threat is not contained in what is shown, but in what is not shown. The terror is not in the scene projected on the screen, but in the minds of the audience.
The wheelchair-bound photographer has to leave his front door unlatched so his girlfriend, nurse and detective buddy can enter; the three steps leading to the door prevent the wheelchair patient from opening it. The knowledge that the door is unlocked increases the threat of the footsteps creeping up the stairs. An extra dimension of terror is provided by the narrow strip of light under the door with its ominous guillotine-like shape. When the passage lights suddenly go out as the footsteps reach the door, it"s like the blade falling; the startling of the audience when the lights go out further increases the intensity of terror.
Hitchcock says about his special cinematic field, fear: "My special field (which I have split) into two categories - terror and suspense ... terror is induced by surprise, suspense by forewarning."15 He went on to define the difference between the two: "Suspense is more enjoyable than terror, actually, because it is a continuing experience and attains a peak crescendo fashion; while terror, to be truly effective, must come all at once, like a bolt of lightening, and is more difficult, therefore, to savour."16

THE GEOMETRY OF VOYEURISM
The film tells the story of a murder and its exposure, but its central philosophical theme is actually the voyeurist gaze. The complicated relationship between the watcher and the watched in Rear Window brings to mind Velazquez"s painting Las Meninas. The location and role of the watcher have been the subject of philosophical contemplation in both.
"We"re all voyeurs to some extent, if only when we see an intimate film. And James Stewart is exactly in the position of a spectator looking at a movie,"17 François Truffaut notes when interviewing Hitchcock about his intentions in Rear Window. Jeff"s voyeurism is not, however, a sexual perversion in its normal meaning, but more the professional curiosity of a photographer.
Although the concept of private life would appear to be quite self evident, the 2800-page A History of Private Life18 shows that it has both an interesting history and a multiplicity of dimensions. In a drawing in his collection The Art of Living19 published in 1945, the well-known cartoonist Saul Steinberg shows a set-up similar to that in the film of a dissected apartment block exposing the private lives of its tenants. But even Steinberg had his predecessor; as far back as 1847 Le Magazine pittoresque"s cartoonist depicted in his Tableaux de Paris drawing different life styles and social classes within the framework of a single building.
The voyeuristic stage and private performances of Rear Window are also connected to the private peep shows, the "tableaux vivant", of Parisian brothels in the last century. "That"s a secret, private world you"re looking at out there. People do a lot of things in private that they couldn"t possibly explain in public," says Detective Doyle (Wendell Corey) to Jeff.
By way of introduction to the voyeurist content of the film, the bamboo shades rise slowly underneath the credits, like a view opening through drowsily raised eyelids; this is also a reference to the gradual awakening of the unsuspecting sleeping photographer to the reality of murder. The shades are likewise a metaphor for the stage curtain; as they rise they reveal the courtyard, the scene of the unfolding drama. This introduction to the theme of voyeurism is also present in the hovering helicopter ogling at the scantily dressed girls.
Throughout the film, the camera - the voyeuristic eye - is bound to the wheelchair in the photographer"s room, apart from the climax when the murderer pushes his exposer out of the window - it then moves outside along with the photographer. The camera also pops outside during the scene of the strangled dog, but the spectator hardly realises that it has momentarily strayed into the courtyard.
In analysing Descartes" writings dealing with reading, the philosopher David Michael Levin uses the term "bodiless reader".20 The protagonist in Rear Window and the spectator are likewise bodiless observers. Jeff"s immobility eliminates the physicality of experience and transforms it into something purely visual; the eye subjects the other senses. Scratching his itchy leg under the plaster with a back scratcher epitomises the loss of Jeff"s sense of movement and touch. His complete reliance on his sense of vision represents the spectator, alone and bound to his chair in the darkness of the cinema. It is just the spectator"s immobility that lulls him into a regressive, dreamlike state.21

THE MORALITY OF VOYEURISM
"The New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the work house ... You know, in the old days, they used to put your eyes out with a red-hot poker," warns Stella. "If you could only see yourself [with those binoculars] ... it"s diseased," Lisa scolds and comments that we are turning into "a race of peepers". "What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change," says Stella warning Jeff of the dangers of peeping. At the end of the film the murderer literally fulfills the nurse"s idea by pushing Jeff out of the window - to see the inside of his flat from the outside for the first time.
Jeff ponders whether it is ethically acceptable to spy on people through his long-focus lens. "I"m not much on rear-window ethics," replies Lisa to his semi-rhetorical question. At first both Lisa and Stella disapprove of Jeff"s snooping ("window shopper," accuses Stella), but later become keen peepers themselves. The murderer only realises he is being watched when, following Lisa"s worried hand movements, he notices the position of his observer. At this dramatic moment Jeff changes from being the surveillant to being the surveilled, and all of a sudden his former victim gains the upper hand. In trying to delay the approach of the murderer, Jeff blinds him with flashbulbs. In the eyes of the murderer, his field of vision is toned red - showing his temporary blindness and increasing rage. In this scene the contrast between darkness and light assumes an obvious symbolic meaning.
On two occasions Jeff"s suspicions about the crime appear to be unfounded. The main characters in the film, as well as the audience, are temporarily disappointed that no murder had been committed after all. This feeling of disappointment induces a sense of guilt which gets the audience even more closely involved in the course of the story. Whether in fact a murder has been committed is of importance also from the point of view of the moral acceptance of peeping. "I wonder if it"s ethical [to watch a man], even if you prove that he didn"t commit a crime?" muses Jeff.
In his book Downcast Eyes, the philosopher Martin Jay brings out Freud"s views on the relationship between the desire to know, sexuality and voyeurism: "Freud came to believe that the very desire to know (Wisstrieb), rather than being innocent, was itself ultimately derived from an infantile desire to see, which had sexual origins. Sexuality, mastery and vision were thus intricately intertwined in ways that could produce problematic as well as "healthy" effects. Infantile scopophilia (Schaulust) could result in adult voyeurism or other perverse disorders much as exhibitionism and scopophobia (the fear of being seen).".21

SURVEILLANCE AND THE SURVEILLED: THE PANOPTICON
But Rear Window also philosophises about the distance between the surveillant and surveilled. In the film, the latter are always distanced by the courtyard or some technical gadget. Distance gives to the experience a sense of helplessness and loneliness, as well as a subconscious feeling of guilt associated with watching. The spectator also sees himself as a Peeping Tom. The voyeuristic effect is created just in the one-sidedness of surveilling and because the object is unaware of being observed. The fact that the objects of Jeff's = the spectator's interest never look back, creates a voyeuristic experience and turns the spectator into a Peeping Tom whose feeling of guilt also makes him feel he is being scrutinised.
There is an important psychological difference between the events in Jeff's room and those in the apartments opposite: the former are by nature theatre, whereas the latter distant episodes are cinema. Walter Benjamin discussed the psychological difference between these two art forms in one of his best known works: "The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. ... The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole."22 The audience experience the events in Jeff's room as a continuum, but those in the apartments opposite as unrelated fragments.
Another element in the film is the duality of the voyeuristic gaze; simultaneous spectacle and surveillance. "Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance ... We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine,"23 concluded Foucault. In his book Discipline and Punish,24 Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as the main theoretical means for explaining how man became the object of surveillance in the institutional control, scientific research and behavioral experiments of modern society. Bentham's Panopticon had its predecessor in Louis Le Vau's menagerie at Versailles. At the centre of the building was an octagonal pavilion containing the king's salon, on every side of which large windows looked out onto seven cages containing different species of animals - the eighth side was reserved for the entrance. Similarly, in the film's menagerie there are seven flats being scrutinised and an alley from the street to the courtyard! But Foucault perhaps dismissed the possibility of simultaneous spectacle and surveillance, which is just what Hitchcock's film is all about. Vincenzo Scamozzi's design for the stage of Andrea Palladio's Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza (1584), a vista of seven different streets, is likewise reminiscent of the panopticon as well as the set in Rear Window where seven different flats can be observed from Jeff's room.
The film set lifts peeping to the third potential; 1) the movie camera watches 2) the photographer watching through his telephoto camera, and 3) the audience in turn watches the events through the illusion projected on the screen. Rear Window is a heightened central perspective film, which brings to mind the perspective drawing device used by the Renaissance artist in one engraving by Dürer. The point of projection of the central perspective, Jeff, is simultaneously a member of the cinema audience and the first person narrator of the story. In using a perspective device an artist normally requires an assistant, just like Lisa, Stella and Doyle function as Jeff's legs in his investigations.