Gazes in Rear Window

In Mulvey's analysis of gazes in film, she says that in classic Hollywood women are the objects of gazes rather than simply the subjects, and that the viewer engages in scopophilia when viewing women on film. She looks for ways that the pleasure of scopophilia in viewing film can be destroyed. Rear Window presents a possibility of achieving this that is similar to Roland Barthes' suggestion on how to destroy myth. Barthes says that the only way to destroy a myth is to mythify it, that is, to use it as the signifier for a higher level myth. In the transformation of Lisa from the object of the gaze in Rear Window to one of the gazers, something similar is accomplished.

When Lisa first arrives in Rear Window, she is basically the center of attention. Jeffries has his neighbors to look at, but at this point their actions are generally mundane and uninteresting. Both the viewer and the camera would prefer to focus on Lisa rather than anything else. This is then a scopophilic gaze where Lisa is the object. In relation to myth, the camera, Jeffries and the viewer are one side and Lisa is the other, forming a gaze.

Eventually, Jeffries convinces Lisa that something fishy is going on with his neighbor, and they decied to investigate it together. At this point Lisa changes from being the object of the gaze, to, along with Jefferies and the viewer, being the gazer of something more important. Like a higher level myth, all the participants of the first gaze become simply the viewers in a higher gaze, in which the mysterious and bizarre actions of Thorwald are the new images to be viewed. In this way, Lisa has escaped from being the object of the gaze, just as one myth can lose its history by becoming the signifier in a higher myth. This suggests that a spectacle or something out of the ordinary can destroy the scopophilic gaze of the viewer by offering a gaze of a higher level.