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What can you see from your Rear Window?
by Stacy Westbrook

The story is this: L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries, played by James Stewart, is a professional photographer who has been sidelined by a broken leg. During his convalescence, he has little else to do than watch the bustle of his neighbors through the courtyard-facing window of his apartment. Bouts of neighbor-watching are broken up by visits from the sage and bossy Stella, Jeff’s insurance company-assigned nurse, and Lisa Carol Fremont, Manhattan dilettante and beau to Jeff, played by Grace Kelly.

In Jeff’s apartment building, it seems that nearly everyone leaves their shades open. I guess people had less to hide in the ‘50s… or did they? While peeping through his window one night, Jeff spies a neighbor behaving suspiciously. Based on this and other observations, Jeff concocts a story in which the neighbor has killed his wife and disposed of her body. Lisa and Stella are drawn in to this tale despite their better judgement, fueling Jeff’s determination to prove that the neighbor is a murderer. But, I won’t ruin the ending for those who haven’t seen the movie already.

While the characters discuss "rear window ethics", I find myself less interested in the ethics of "peeping" at one’s neighbors and more interested in our insatiable need to make up stories about the world we observe. Jeff studies his neighbors with sociological attention, even making up names for them. In the end, he creates whole narratives about these people, even though he has had no real interaction with them aside from what he observes from his window.

I’ve been working from home for the last nine months. In that time, what I have learned from watching my neighbors is this: they are deadly boring. I live in a neighborhood of retirees, so this is to be expected. The biggest deal around here was an abandoned van several months ago. Even so, I find myself inexplicably drawn to my kitchen window, watching the neighbor boys play basketball, watching the short school bus speed down the street every morning at 7:45am, watching my neighbor mow his small lawn with a massive riding lawnmower. As riveting as these activities are, my neighbors were more interesting when I lived in an apartment.

It was a courtyard-style apartment complex consisting of two buildings with four apartments each. Mostly, people kept the shades drawn and kept to themselves. It’s amazing how little a person can know about the people they share a wall with. The only neighbor I really ever talked to was James, the guy in the apartment across from me. My cat, Icarus, liked to hang out in James’ apartment with his cat, Spot. Over a period of four years, I got to know James a little bit better, though never very well. In the summer, we’d chat in the courtyard and he would tell me stories of his travels to Thailand, his motorcycle trips through Mexico, or his work for Intel. James used to bring cookies to my partner and me ("It’s baking season!" he’d say). He built the gardening boxes in the back of the apartment building so we could all grow vegetables in the summer. He was always very nice. Almost too nice, we were certain.

The facts, as we knew them: James drove a maroon Dodge Ram Van, and also had a BMW motorcycle. He was a member of the NRA. He lived alone, and had a floral-patterned cover on his futon. He made his living as a contract engineer, and said that he designed the refueling door on the Stealth Bomber. He liked to go fishing, and had built his own fishing boat. He collected Samuri swords. He baked.

Clearly, he was either a nice gay man, a strange single straight man, or a psychopath. Well, he could have been a gay psychopath, too. Either way, we decided that he must be hiding something, and that he was probably kidnapping women and taking them off in to the woods in his Ram Van. This didn’t stop us from eating his tasty little chocolate chip cookies, of course. Between his stories and the even more bizarre ones we were making up about his life, every encounter with James was interesting. Once, a neighbor borrowed his van to use in a movie as a coroner’s official vehicle. The gold "CORONER" stickers on the sides and rear of the van only served to convince us more strongly that James was really an axe murderer.

Sadly, James moved away before we could discover whether or not he was a murderer, and we missed his cookies and funny stories. In his place came Layla, and she was really strange. Creepy strange. She was the kind of lady that kids think is a wicked witch. She probably was a wicked witch. We didn’t make up stories about Layla, because it was likely that those stories would be the truth.

With James, making him out to be a murderer was like putting a square peg in a round hole; we’d try and try to find the right story to explain his quirks, but it never stuck. The fun was in making up increasingly more absurd stories. And that’s really the heart of this compulsive need to figure out what James was "really" up to: as humans, we tell stories. It’s what we do. That’s what "Rear Window" is all about; a lonely man who makes up stories to pass the time. These days, most people are content to watch television and let someone else make up the stories for them. Sometimes that is enough. I watch plenty of television, but I can’t help but wonder what the lives of my neighbors are like, so I concoct stories to amuse myself, and to make sense of the things they do.

Observing my own behavior regarding the stories I make up about my neighbors, it suddenly makes sense to me that the first novels written were really travelogues. The authors would travel, observe other people and cultures, attempt to make sense of the things they observed in terms of their own experiences, and write down what they interpreted to be the facts. There is something about remaining a distant observer to the action that grants the author a certain artistic license with the truth. I am a traveler in my own neighborhood, rarely interacting with my neighbors, but often watching what they are up to. Their actions are easier to romanticize that way. Seeing my middle-aged married neighbor drive off at ten o’clock at night in his restored ’72 El Camino smacks of potential adultery when I don’t know that he’s really just heading off to the store for some ice cream.

Deprived of my more interesting apartment courtyard, I am left making up stories about the people on my street. So far, I haven’t come up with anything as juicy as murder, but that doesn’t stop me from watching, and wondering.