Seeing is Believing: Detective and Romance in Rear Window

Abstract

One of the many pleasures of watching Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) is that the viewer is required to continually readjust his or her sense of the relationship between what gendered characters say, what those characters see and how they react to what they've just seen. In this discussion I will consider this correlation between saying, seeing and reacting, focusing specifically on the way in which the relationship between Jeff (James Stewart) and Lisa (Grace Kelly) develops - through a conflict between a detective narrative and a romance narrative - as a kind of battle of the sexes which reaches, if not resolution, at least a certain stability.