the window

"We've become a race of peeping toms. People ought to get outside and take a look in at themselves.... Look out of the window, see things you shouldn't see..."
-- Stella (Thelma Ritter), the visiting nurse looking after broken-legged photographer/voyeur L. B. Jeffries (James Stewart) in Alfred Hitchock's Rear Window (1954)

The window is one of the most resonant images in film noir. Not only does this fixture essential for casting noir's ensaring shadows, but it also serves as a kind of invisible partition that separates those whom fate has collected in this particular room at this particular moment from those on the other side of the (looking-) glass: the faceless millions who go about their unremarkable lives, oblivious to the dark deeds happening within these walls. The window is a frame (another significant noir motif) that, like the motion picture screen itself, offers a voyeuristic view -- although only a partial, restricted one -- of whatever lies beyond the pane.

In the context of the Dark Room, at least, the window also provides exclusive access into the labyrinthine urban landscape beyond claustrophobic confines of its four walls.  You may venture into the city by going through the window at the bottom of this page.

Noir stories often take the form of mysteries in which the investigation of a crime (or suspected foul play) is transformed into nothing less than an epistemological quest, a search for any kernel of evidence that might help establish the existence of some truth or meaning in a universe that's as deceptive as it is disorienting. That's one reason the private eye so often acts as our guide and surrogate in noir, stumbling blindly as he gropes his way through the dark and convoluted maze of the plot... 

	Concealed in a taxi where she watches through the window, Kathleen (Lucille Ball) shadows a suspect for her private-eye boss Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens) in Henry Hathaway's The Dark Corner (1946).
Young Bobby Driscoll witnesses a murder outside his window in The Window (1949) and finds himself trapped in a nightmare from which he cannot awake. You see, the only adult who believes him is the murderer himself.   Notice how the shadows create bars, a pattern repeated in the pajamas.  He's become The Boy Who Knew Too Much, imprisoned by what he has learned by looking out the window.
	Windows (also staircases, railings, doorways, mirrors, furniture...) are frequently used to compartmentalize the frame, visually isolating people to emphasize their alienation or estrangement from each other -- a particularly modern urban condition.  Here Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame gaze across the chasm (and a forest of criss-crossing bars) separating them in Nicholas Ray's hauntingly titled masterpiece, In A Lonely Place (1950).
Concealed in the darkness of his   apartment while nursing a broken leg, photographer L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) discovers that the windows of his neighbors across the courtyard provide more entertainment than a multi-screen drive-in in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). Hiding his voyeurism behind a facade of  independence and journalistic detachment, Jeffries displays an appallingly cynical lack of empathy for other human beings -- even (or especially) his picture-perfect fiancée Lisa (Grace Kelly). Hitchcock turns this building into an achingly resonant metaphor for the yawning existential void between all people, each condemned to serve a life term in the solitary confinement of his or her own little box/consciousness. When Jeffries thinks he has witnessed a murder, he sends his girl out into the void to investigate...
	I think of Hitchock's Psycho (1960) as a sort of honorary noir, coming only one year after Orson Welles' Touch of Evil theoretically marked the end of the noir cycle. Even though it's technically a horror picture, its  visual and thematic motifs -- doubles, voyeurism, secret lives,   characters who feel trapped by destiny, impetuous or reckless decisions, guilt and repression, the investigation of a murder, the suggestive use of mirrors, windows, blinds, shadows, and the elements of time, chance, fate -- place it firmly in the noir tradition.  Here, Norman Bates (Athony Perkins) peeps through his own private and secret "window" (concealed behind a framed painting) at Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a new guest at the Bates Motel who's preparing to take a shower...
(Note: The b&w 8x10 above illustrates  why widescreen films -- and especially Chinatown -- should never, ever be seen in pan-and-scan video formats, but only in letterboxed versions. Polanski's directorial strategy is based around  framing Gittes on one side of the frame as he watches what's happening in the distance on the other side of the frame. Here, for example, you can't see what he's watching, although you can in the film. To even begin to understand this  movie it's essential that you see the entire frame at all times.)	"You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me you don't," Noah Cross (John Huston) warns private eye J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in Roman Polanski's widescreen neo-noir, Chinatown (1974).  OK, there's no window in this particular shot, but Gittes extends the tradition of detective who never quite sees the whole picture -- usually because he's allowed himself to get too close.  He spends much of the movie watching through glass lenses -- not just windows, but cameras, binoculars, eyeglasses.  In this shot, the perilous Expressionistic angles are provided by the architecture.  Gittes thinks he's hot on the trail of his prey, but his instability is emphasized when he slips and knocks a Spanish roof tile to the ground.  The pictures he takes here make a big splash in the papers, but Gittes misinterprets what he sees.  Turns out he's been set-up, framed.
"It's... a flaw... in the iris," says Evelyn Mulwray when private eye Jake Gittes discovers a dark speck in one of the windows of her soul. Chinatown is all about the flawed vision that haunts Jake, who as a cop in Chinatown can't forget how he tried to keep a woman from being hurt and ended up making sure that she was.  Will the past repeat itself?  Notice the bullet mark in the passenger-side  windshield of Mrs. Mulwray's getaway car, one of several recurring images mirroring that fateful flaw in her iris.
	The window and blinds in the Dark Room, although treated as separate noir elements, were both digitally based on this image of Victor Mature in Kiss of Death (1947).

city

the only way out is through the window...