Suspense Thriller Rear Window - Assignment Example

The word genre is a word that means a class, category, or classification of a literary or artistic work in terms of certain similarities in its form, substance, style, subject matter, or technique. Crime, suspense, and the thrill of discovery are the distinctive elements of this film genre.

The principal themes in Rear Window are voyeurism and the care for another person, in this case, the person living in the apartment building opposite the rear window of James Stewart's place who got murdered. People should ideally not bother themselves with the affairs of their neighbors and should mind only their own business but a broken leg left the principal actor played by James Stewart with nothing to do but sit the whole day in his apartment.

There are three different analytical points (perspectives) to view this film and these are voyeurism, patriarchy, and feminist theory. Voyeurism is depicted by actor James Stewart as he spends all day watching his neighbors, in effect spying on them. A patriarchal approach is also a viable perspective because most of the human relationships shown in the film are about male and female relationships with the male always aiming for dominance. Feminism is also used because the women in the film were either mistreated or treated without respect at all or were generally put in a not flattering light for the movie audience. In the movie, the girlfriend of Stewart named Lisa is shown as a sexual object for the fantasy of male viewers; Lisa is obsessed with style and fashion to the point of narcissism (McCabe 25).

The film maintained its ability to create fear and panic because the auteur Hitchcock understood very well the human psychology of the fear of getting murdered, the attractions of voyeurism, and the overall portrayal of most human relationships in everyday events. Its film director allowed the audience, in a sense, to know in advance what would happen next. A lack of special effects used in modern films allowed Rear Window to showcase the talents of a real auteur who can manage to bring a story to the audience without the use of special effects.

Sigmund Freud is mentioned frequently in Rear Window because of the meaning of his psycho-analytic observations about the joys of voyeurism in which the pleasure of the secretive look is eventually transformed into a controlling gaze (Belton 60).