Disturbing Rear Window

I didn't see it at the theater because I was one of the seven people in the country who chose to go see Grindhouse that weekend instead. The movie has a few effective suspense scenes, but for the most part it wasn't very good. It's premise is obviously derived from Rear Window (1954) – a housebound individual starts peeping on his neighbors and suspects that one of them is a murderer – but it felt like the filmmakers simply had no understanding of what made Hitchcock's version so effective and wonderful. Every change they made to the Rear Window template was a step in the wrong direction, betraying the central conceits of the story. So, I thought I'd jot down a few musings I've had about where Disturbia went wrong in its translation of Hitch...

First off, the central premise of the filming of Rear Window was that (with the exception of the final shot) the camera never leaves the room. In other words, the audience is stuck in the apartment for the whole film along with the James Stewart character, who has broken his leg. Much of the suspense comes from the claustrophobia of being in the room, and from the frustration of being unable to simply cross the courtyard to get a closer look in the neighbors' apartments. By tying his camera to the room, Hitchcock expertly monkeys with the conventions of Hollywood filmmaking: only James Stewart and his pals are granted close-ups; the rest of the neighbors are only seen in long shot. Big reveals in movies usually happen in close-ups. We also get to know more about the characters who appear in close-up. By denying the close-up for Stewart's neighbors – at best they are seen with a long lens from across the courtyard – Hitchcock interferes with the audience's familiar expectation of moving from wide to close shots to get a better look at things. Disturbia opens up the space a little more: Shia LeBoeuf's character is under house arrest and can move around most of his house and garden. That's all fine and good, as it gave us more places to explore and stopped the movie from just being a complete Rear Window clone. It made the mistake, however, of frequently letting the camera go outside the boundary of the house. In other words, the camera was given more freedom to roam than the character, and the audience never feels locked down like the character is. As a result, the film gave into the audience's desire to see more than the character can, and diluted the suspense by doing so.

This leads me to a second, related, complaint: like a lot of movies these days, Disturbia did not understand the concept of a restricted point-of-view. The whole premise of Rear Window works because we, the audience, are locked into the same point-of-view as the James Stewart character. We only learn things when he learns things. If we were to get ahead of him in the story, the film would be dead and would have nowhere to go. Disturbia blows this by allowing us get ahead of the Shia LeBoeuf character and see things that he does not see. Every time it does this, it drains the movie of suspense. The biggest impact this has is on our knowledge of the killer. In Rear Window, we are deprived of seeing the suspected killer in close-up until the very end of the film when he enters Stewart's apartment. In Disturbia, we are given lots of opportunity to see and get to know the killer, and we learn more about him than the main character knows – such as in the scene where he scares Sarah Roemer in her car or in the scene where the camera cuts to blood splatting on the neighbor's window (something none of the protagonists see). There is really no ambiguity about whether the neighbor is a killer or not because we know too much. Had the film stuck rigorously to LeBoeuf's point-of-view, and had it shown less of the neighbor, this would have been avoided.

The last point I'll discuss is the issue of voyeurism. Rear Window is all about the desire to look, and Hitchcock consciously implicates the film audience in James Stewart's voyeurism. Hitch is basically saying that all cinema audiences are peepers who get off on spying on other people's lives. By locking the camera to the room, by denying the audience close-ups, and by restricting our point-of-view to that of Stewart, Hitchcock is deliberately toying with our desire to look. And at the end of the movie, he is careful to punish Stewart's voyeurism by having him break his other leg. In this era of mobile devices and ubiquitous surveillance, Disturbia had the potential to explore similar issues about what it means to look in today's world. Of course, it doesn't seem to aim for that at all, and it ultimately ends up becoming something of a pro-surveillance movie: LeBoeuf is rewarded, not punished, for surveilling his neighbors; moreover, he even gets to use his surveillance prowess to get his revenge on the pesky kids across the street. I feel like I've seen a lot of movies in the past few years that offer up pro-surveillance narratives – Deja Vu (2006) and Next (2007) spring to mind – and this might be the most disturbing thing about Disturbia. Oh well, at least the neighbor wasn't Muslim...