A movie about reconciliation. In the movie
"Rear Window", Hitchcock maintained his usual suspense style. Suspense brings us anxious and nervous watching experience. In this feeling, we often feel Easily ignore the peaceful temperament that this film reveals. It can also be said that it is too easy for us to focus on the detection of a murder case and ignore its stakeholders, some seemingly irrelevant little people, and their life world, and ignore the narrative context of the movie as a whole. Therefore, we often name the themes of this film after "detective", "adventure", "love", etc., but this undoubtedly means some kind of separation, which means that the whole connotation of the film is castrated. In my opinion, the film begins with a conflict narrative. This conflict is not only a conflict in a murder case, but also the original appearance of almost all the characters in the film. In the end, all conflicts reach a settlement.
Let's first look at the main conflicts. There are two main narrative clues in the film "Back Window": Jeff's voyeuristic and detection process of the murderer, and the process of Jeff and Lisa's love. In the two-line narrative, the two clues must meet at a certain point. The confluence of the two clues in "Rear Window" is completed in the peeping of Jeff (Lisa is a follower). The two narratives The clues intertwine and influence each other throughout the film.
One: The conflict between Jeff's personality and his physical situation. Jeff is a photojournalist, a explorer who wanders around, rainforests, racing tracks, battlefields, these extreme places constitute the world he is used to. This world has the vastness of space, the richness of content, novelty, danger, and the excitement of individual experience resulting from it. In contrast, Jeff has a restless and wandering temperament, and he is very concerned about daily life. The strong sense of curiosity and desire to experience new things outside constitute the connotation of this temperament. Regrettably, he broke his left leg in an accident during a live report of the car and was forced to accept the arrangement of staying in the room to recuperate for one month. This brought him a "tragic" physical situation: "Our actions constitute a world of our image around us. The constant relationship between the individual and the image in the mirror better expresses our relationship with the world. Transparency: The faithfulness of this image, to a certain extent, proves a true mutuality between the world and us." Jeff had to come to another stable and peaceful world after the accident. He The image relationship with oneself was torn off, and it became a void existence. The gap between this tragic situation and his usual living environment undoubtedly brought him a huge psychological impact. His sweating profusely at the beginning of the film and the high temperature figure displayed on the thermometer undoubtedly made an obvious explanation for this. For this reason, he must find corresponding images in the new environment to fill this void to prove the authenticity of his own existence.
When Jeff was in a wheelchair facing the windows open to each other in the building, noticed a businessman going out carrying a box on a rainy night, and continued to pay attention to him with professional instincts. At this time, Jeff’s personality and physical injuries were brought about The conflict of his plight began to fade: a suspicious person broke into his vision (and as the story progresses, we know that this is a murderer). In this way, the reporter Jeff started his new adventure. He was fascinated by his new world of images and enjoyed it. There is no essential difference between the adventure in the rain forest and the peeping in the mansion. He confirmed that the individual continues in another space. Possibility of survival. In this way, the conflict between Jeff's personality and his physical situation is resolved, and the film immediately leads us to another conflict.
Two: The conflict between the snooper and the murderer. This conflict can be divided into two stages, one is the conflict when it is purely peeping. "Vision has a pure theoretical relationship with things by virtue of light. Light, a non-material material, gives them their own freedom while illuminating and brightening things, instead of a feeling like air and fire. To consume things in an unobvious or obvious way” (Hegel) Due to the particularity of light as a medium, the peeper and the peeped object are not a hidden parallel meaning, nor do they have an explicit violent collision. Characteristics. Rather, it is somewhere in between. The voyeur looks at each other in a concealed manner, while at the same time the person being watched (thing) has absolute freedom. The process of peeping is the unmasking of the viewer on the one hand, and the concealment of the viewer (object) on the other. The two inevitably form an invisible conflict.
As the plot progresses, mere peeping can no longer meet the narrative requirements. Jeff and his assistants must use actions to explore the murders that are not visible to the eye. This led to the second stage of explicit conflict: peeping and intervening in the incident. The implicit conflict of power began to transform into a parallel conflict between invisible and visible.
The conflict between the snooper and the murderer gradually became clear, and the struggle between the two sides became more intense, which also promoted the entire narrative process. After the facts of the case were revealed, the conflict was resolved.
Three: Lisa and Jeff's love conflict. This conflict runs through the film and is also affected by the two conflicts above. Lisa loves Jeff, she is a young, beautiful, and almost perfect girl. As a fashion girl in a small town, she never wears the same skirt twice, and she has to deal with different social occasions every day. She also pursues the richness of life, but unlike Jeff, this richness is based on the stability of daily life. It is the richness brought by a certain upper order, and thus must be affected by that order. Constrained by many rules. And the richness that Jeff needs is quite wild, and it requires the greatest degree of dispelling restraints, so this richness is also accompanied by adventure and even danger. On the surface, this contradiction is irreconcilable. When Jeff commented on Lisa's dinner, he said: "The same as before", which just shows that he can't listen to Lisa's suggestion and become a fashion gentleman. And Lisa, although she loves Jeff and "does not care about what you do", she is temporarily unable to make a decision with her lasting and stable lifestyle. Between love and reluctance to live her own life, she lacks a bigger one. Motivation to make a decision.
Interestingly, this conflict was first alleviated by the first conflict in the film. Jeff’s recuperation gave them more opportunities to contact them. More importantly, during this period of time (perhaps because of boredom, loneliness or other reasons caused by changes in the situation), Jeff suggested that both parties should “don’t think about the future”. "Continue to communicate with each other. This provides time and possibility for the further resolution of the conflict.
Since the second date, Lisa and Jeff have been involved in a murder case. As the conflict between the voyeur and the murderer has intensified step by step, the conflict of love between the two voyeurs has been weakened and further eased. Possible.
Murder is a sudden change in daily life. It is a dangerous existence both internally and externally. Peeping at a murderer and trying to decipher his murder process will undoubtedly lead to a high degree of danger (we have already seen the fate of the puppy in the garden) . Lisa's intervention also means that she has entered a different life state that she is accustomed to, opening up another life form. While it is accompanied by danger, it is also filled with novelty, tension, and excitement-this is exactly the state of life that Jeff needs in his heart. In other words, Lisa's behavior is also an experiment near Jeff.
Lisa did not let us down. Her keenness in analyzing the diamond ring, and her wit and composure after being caught in De's room all showed her ability to cope with this external environment. And this kind of bravery that is not necessary for her life state is also vividly shown by her. When we saw her wearing a skirt and high heels climbing up the ladder to the section of De's room, we were simply amazed. Of course, Jeff is satisfied with her, which can be seen in his warm and shining eyes after Lisa secretly sent an anonymous letter to Dee.
After a near-perfect experiment, in Jeff's house, we saw that Lisa was no longer the fashionable attire of the past, replaced by pants and flat shoes, and the reading in hand has also changed into "Crossing the Himalayas". She obviously decided to change herself to adapt to Jeff's life, and at this time, the conflict was also resolved.
Interestingly, if Jeff initially faced the conflict between the individual and the outside world, then Lisa faced the conflict between the individual itself. Our actions constitute our world of images, but this is not a unified world, but a complex body composed of multiple images, so we also face multiple temptations. If our own interests are not stable enough, it will be easy Get caught in the pull of these temptations. In the face of love, Lisa could not maintain a firm personal stand like Jeff, so she fell into entanglement. However, Jeff's recuperation and murder took her on a wonderful journey. She got her own salvation on the journey. Jeff reconciles himself with the outside world, while Lisa restores her stability through the role of the outside world.
Four: The "conflict" of the little people. According to Nabokov’s method of dividing the form of novels, we can attribute "Rear Window" to a multi-track novel of small turnouts. Although the film is about Jeff, Lisa, De and others around love and murder The narrative of the case actively occupied almost all of the space, but it was also mixed with narratives surrounding the secondary characters Miss Lonely, Ballet Girls and others. The narrative about the latter is fragmentary and not intersecting, but this has not affected the coherence and smoothness of the film in the slightest. The mixed primary and secondary multi-voices have formed a harmonious whole. There are many secondary characters, but they are similar to Jeff and Lisa, and they all face a disorderly life. Take Miss Lonely as an example. Although the film does not have much on her, it prevents her from becoming a prominent image. Miss Lonely’s personality is its contradiction. While eager for a response from the outside world, she maintains a posture of refusal to this response. The conflict between the subject and the object, and the conflict between the different desires of the subject are mixed together, presenting a complex Inexplicable appearance, for this, she once wanted to embark on the road of suicide. "On all basic issues, I mean the issue of driving people to death or the issue of tenfold enhancing the passion of life. There are probably only two ways, one is Paralis and the other is Don Quixote. German. Only the balance between facts and lyricism can move and clarify us at the same time.” (Sutter) Miss Lonely has the dual imbalances of Paralis and Don Quixote, but she is the least able to obey those Sleeping pills that would make her sleep for a winter, and at the end of the film sat in the living room of the pianist. As a result, the conflict in Miss Lonely was also resolved. It can be said that in this film, there are as many conflicts as there are forks. These conflicts either come from the characters themselves, or from the confrontation between the characters and the external environment, or present the complex appearance of the lonely lady, but we see At the end of the film, they all reconciled.
In the vast space of life, each of our individual life is full of desires and pursuits. Due to the different value systems that constitute the individual, our aspirations and desires are also different, but there is no doubt that although we have the supreme Individual independence, but we cannot achieve absolute personal freedom. Personal ascension is always heavy due to some juggling. The juggling comes from the squeeze of other things, fighting each other with multiple interests of oneself, and it may also show the complex appearance of the mixture of the two. "There are some problems that we can't avoid unless we are born free from them" (Kafka) But whether it is through ourselves, or with the help of external objects, or an inexplicable mysterious force. Our actions will finally resolve these constraints and achieve our own salvation, even if it is a relative salvation. The ideal life is based on a certain order, and our life process is also a process of deviating from order and moving closer to order. But no one can weave a life according to the order. What we hear more is the sound of anxiety, loneliness, and pain after deviating from the order... "Rear Window" is just to point out the possibility of returning to balance. And inevitability. Old Hitchcock watched the audience through the camera and gave them the best wishes.
Some people may ask, will Lisa, who replaced her high heels with flat shoes, get the happiness she wants? This is also a blank left by the film, and the discussion it brings to us should end here.
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