By David Baggett

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One of Rear Window’s main themes is spectatorship. It’s a movie heavily about our relationship with art. Among the neighbors that Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart) watches so closely is a dancer, a sculptor, and a musician. More specifically the movie is about cinema, movies, as Jefferies looks out his window across the courtyard into the lives of his various and sundry neighbors. The movie begins with his window blinds going up—the way the curtain used to rise on a movie screen; and his girlfriend later refers to the show being over for now to divert his attention from the stories unfolding before him. She even sports her titillating negligee as a “preview of coming attractions.”

Cooped up in his apartment because of an injury, Jefferies falls into the voyeuristic trap of watching the lives of others rather than living his own. As a professional photographer, indulging in voyeurism became his occupational hazard, and the occasion of being home-bound and confined to a chair only intensified the temptation.

But yielding to the temptation carries risks. In light of the cinema analogy, we see that the trap into which Jefferies falls is one to which we are all susceptible. For every book the average college student reads, he sees something on the order of fifty movies. Movie-makers are the new myth-makers, powerful shapers of the prevailing plausibility structures and thought patterns of our culture, wielding an influence far greater than many realize, and perhaps far more than they ought.

Movies can be a wonderful source of entertainment and reprieve from the world. Hitchcock himself loved movies. They can serve eminently worthwhile ends—they can be inspirational, they can be challenging, thought-provoking, even profound. They can also, however, be vacuous, insipid, and mindless.

***

There is a conspicuous parity between the fluctuating pictures on a movie screen and the flickering images on the wall of Plato’s famous cave. Plato asks us to imagine men chained their whole lives inside a cave, able only to watch shadows on its wall. The shadows are but a dim reflection of the outside world—the real world, as it were—and, as a result, such men unwittingly lack knowledge. Their perspectives are shaped by mere appearances, not reality. For Plato, the cave represents the world in which we live, a world of mere appearances. Only through reason can we be put in touch with the real world and actual knowledge rather than opinions based on appearances. His skepticism about playwrights (the movie-makers of his day) came from their implicit crafting of representations of representations, doubly removed from the real thing.

Plato’s point is well taken. We need to be careful to distinguish appearances from reality, and opinions from knowledge, and we should be cautioned against a preoccupation with movies and television. When someone suggests that the best news available is from Jon Stewart, there’s a problem. When we confuse wants with needs, when we confuse pundits for statesmen, or when we settle for personality over character and celebrity over substance, we fall into the same recurring trap of being enticed by dazzling veneers disguising vacuity.

Rear Window has as one of its main insights this particular danger of spectatorship: failure to engage life directly, content with passive viewership without commitment, which results in a life of inauthenticity. One of the recurring motifs we find in the corpus of Hitchcock’s work is the importance of personal engagement and commitment. Holding others at arm’s length, refusing to commit, and staying at a safe distance is the recipe for inauthenticity.

***

In one sense the character of Jefferies, committed to finding out whether the neighbor across the way killed his wife, is a seeker of knowledge. But what led to his suspicions wasn’t a quest for justice or the natural human desire to solve a mystery or a laudable goal to protect another person, but simply rabid, morbid curiosity, indulgence in voyeurism. Though watching lives from a safe distance can lead to some propositional knowledge, it can also lead to faulty inferences (as it does in Jefferies’ case, as he’s wrong about nearly everything and everyone), and it can also lead to a failure to achieve knowledge in the arguably far deeper sense than the merely propositional.

Perhaps we underestimate the way instant communication and access to the world’s events nowadays condition us to get caught up in the novel and exciting news, catching the waves and getting swept up in the latest break, however banal and ultimately inconsequential. Or we swing the pendulum the other way: we read and hear of tragedies as if they were meant for our entertainment, almost as if they’re fictional tales weaved for our amusement, when real lives are at stake and genuine pain experienced. Real people become two-dimensional caricatures, almost fictionalized into something less than human, easily laughed at, mocked, gawked at, trivialized.

Remember for a moment the biblical characterization of knowledge. Adam knew Eve. We’re called to know God. This isn’t merely propositional knowledge. It’s deep personal acquaintance, intimate knowledge of another. It’s more than knowing about others; it’s knowing them. Substituting propositional knowledge for deep personal knowledge and intimate spiritual and emotional acquaintance lends itself to superficiality and lack or loss of real engagement.

When Jefferies sees his neighbor—Miss Lonelyhearts—nearly driven to suicide by her loneliness, he fears for her life and considers action. But what had stopped him from intervening sooner to provide help in a more practical way—inviting her to dinner, introducing her to a friend? Rear Window, perhaps most of all, is about what it means to be a neighbor.

To move beyond spectatorship to real involvement, from a gawker to a real neighbor, requires that we heed the advice of the wise William James, the American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist. In his magnum opus Principles of Psychology, James writes about those people who obsessively read novels with such sympathy for the fictional characters they encounter there, but whose emotions, thus aroused, have no bearing on how they treat people in the real world around them. He worries about the person who experiences excellence in a play or concert performance, and leaves that experience at a level of the purely passively aesthetic, not goaded to go and do something excellent himself. James elaborates on this danger:

“The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coach-man is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probably a relaxing effect upon the character. One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass without prompting to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept up. The remedy would be, never to suffer one’s self to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it afterward in some active way. Let the expression be the least thing in the world—speaking genially to one’s aunt, or giving up one’s seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroic offers—but let it not fail to take place.”

Reading a book, watching a movie, seeing a concert—all can be great and inspiring activities. Sometimes of course the sheer fun and delight are enough, and nothing further is required. If indulgence alone becomes the habitual pattern, however, and the inspiration and insight such events imbue don’t manifest in concrete actions of one sort or another, there’s not only a missed opportunity, but a real danger that looms—the risk of inauthenticity and disengagement, of self-consumption rather than neighborly love, of superficiality rather than depth—and such is no wise course.

***

Having grown up outside Detroit, I attended seminary in the idyllic town of Wilmore, Kentucky, spending three delightful years there. Occasionally I would watch the local news, charmed by the gravity given to local drama—with occasional exceptions, stories tended to be anecdotal and heart-warming. One Christmas I went home to visit my family and sat down to watch a local Detroit newscast. Although it was the same thing I had watched hundreds of times growing up, on this occasion the unrelenting stories of tragedy and heartbreak gripped my imagination. I had grown far more desensitized to human tragedy than I ever realized. Suddenly, listening to one heart-wrenching story after the next burdened my soul, nearly making me physically ill. I’d grown accustomed for so long to ingesting vast quantities of human tragedies without bothering to digest much of any of it.

Our call is to reflect the light of God’s kingdom into the darkest corners of the earth, not to gawk blithely at our disparate and desperate neighbors. Like Jefferies, we must not allow distractions to blind us to the dramatic Story unfolding before us of which we’re a part. God has called us to step out of the house and show love to our neighbors, even when it makes us uncomfortable or vulnerable. This is God’s kingdom manifesting itself in this world–the ultimate preview of coming attractions.

David Baggett is a professor of philosophy at Liberty University. He’s edited or co-edited a half dozen books in philosophy and popular culture, a debate between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew, the book C. S. Lewis as Philosopher, and co-wrote (with Jerry Walls) Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, which won the 2012 Christianity Today best book in apologetics/evangelism. 

Illustration courtesy of Seth T. Hahne. Check out Seth’s graphic novel and comic review site, Good Ok Bad.