Rear Window: A Race of Peeping Toms?

Still from Rear Window with actors James Stewart and Grace Kelly,

The 1954 Alfred Hitchcock thriller ‘Rear Window’ concerns itself with voyeurism; with the paralysing effect that our curiosity into the lives of others can have on our own relationships. As such it offers a perceptive analysis of a very modern condition.

‘I can smell trouble right here in this apartment. First you smash your leg. Then you get to looking out the window, see things you shouldn’t see. Trouble.’

The film opens with a view of a Greenwich Village apartment building on a hot summer’s morning. A cat runs up the garden stairs. A couple sleeps on the balcony to keep cool. A businessman puts on his tie to go to work. We see a man listening to the radio while shaving, and a young woman exercising while making herself a coffee. There are pigeons perched on the roof.

This scene fascinates professional photographer Jeff Jefferies (James Stewart), who lives opposite and is confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg. 

‘Six weeks sitting in a two-room apartment with nothing to do but look out the window at the neighbours.’ 

The more Jeff watches, the more he is captivated. As day turns to night, he begins to build narratives around each household.

Two amorous newlyweds are handed the keys to their new accommodation and draw the blinds. A glamorous dancer fends off the persistent attentions of gentleman callers. A troubled pianist searches relentlessly for a new hit. There’s a middle-aged couple who lower their small dog to the garden in a basket; a travelling salesman with a bedridden wife; and a sculptor next door who thinks he over-waters his plants. There’s a lonely spinster who prepares dinner for an imaginary sweetheart and greets him with an imaginary kiss.

‘You'd think the rain would've cooled things down. All it did was make the heat wet.’

Jeff is so caught up in the theatre playing out in the building opposite that he cannot pay proper attention to his girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly), a refined society woman who works in fashion. He confides in Stella (Thelma Ritter), the nurse attending to his convalescence, that he doesn’t see much future in their relationship

‘She's too perfect, she's too talented, she's too beautiful, she's too sophisticated, she's too everything but what I want.’

Jeff believes that Lisa’s glamorous lifestyle is incompatible with his own gruelling career as a travelling photojournalist. Stella suggests he’s over-thinking things.

‘When two people love each other, they come together - WHAM - like two taxis on Broadway.’

Still from Rear Window: The Apartment Block

Jeff’s resistance to Lisa’s charms is hard to believe. She’s smart, funny, considerate - and a vision in an embroidered white tulle circle skirt and off-the-shoulder black top; with a chiffon shawl and a pearl choker necklace; with red lipstick, blue eyes and elegantly coiffed blonde hair. (Kelly’s wardrobe was designed by Edith Head.)

‘Well, if there's one thing I know, it's how to wear the proper clothes.’

One night, after a spat with Lisa, Jeff is left alone in his apartment. He hears the sound of breaking glass and a woman’s scream:

‘Don’t!’

Reaching for his binoculars, he sets them aside for his telephoto lens. He observes the salesman in the building opposite making repeated trips back and forth carrying a suitcase. Drifting in and out of sleep, he wakes to see the same man cleaning a large knife and handsaw. 

By the time Lisa visits Jeff the next morning, he is convinced that the salesman has murdered his wife. 

Jeff: Why would a man leave his apartment three times on a rainy night with a suitcase and come back three times?

Lisa: He likes the way his wife welcomes him home?

Film Poster: Rear Window

The couple then spy the suspect tying a rope around a large trunk and overseeing removal men. Now Lisa too is persuaded of the man’s guilt, and they set about proving it.

‘Tell me exactly what you saw and what you think it means.’

‘Rear Window’ was an extraordinarily inventive production. It was shot at Paramount Studios in an enormous indoor set that replicated a real Greenwich Village courtyard. Hitchcock directed the entire movie from Jeff's apartment, communicating with the actors in the building opposite via radio microphones and earpieces. The film only employed sounds arising from the normal life of the characters and the street: the noise of kids playing and a man whistling; of car horns and a passing barrel organ; of partygoers singing ‘Mona Lisa’ and the pianist practising his new composition.

Lisa: Where does a man get inspiration to write a song like that?

Jeff: He gets it from the landlady once a month.

A core theme of ‘Rear Window’ is voyeurism. Jeff’s obsession with observing other people’s private dramas seems to prevent him from living his own. And since we the viewers share Jeff’s perspective of the apartment block opposite, we are complicit.

‘That’s a secret private world you’re looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn’t possibly explain in public.’

The worldly-wise Stella points out that sometimes our curiosity can be cancerous.

Stella: We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes sir. How's that for a bit of homespun philosophy?

Jeff: Reader's Digest, April 1939. 

Stella: Well, I only quote from the best.

Rear Window: ‘Stella and Jeff’: Thelma Ritter and James Stewart

This thought still resonates today. The more we are absorbed in the trivia of celebrity and social media, the more we are subsumed in apathetic torpor. We become incapable of addressing our own real life issues. 

Happily Jeff and Lisa’s quest to catch the killer also repairs their fractured relationship. They are united in the fear and excitement of the chase; in shared action. They are a team. And perhaps there’s a lesson here for us all. 

At the end of the movie we see that the pianist has finally cracked his song and a romance with the spinster is blossoming. The dancer has been reunited with her devoted partner, a soldier who has been away on active service; and the newlyweds have begun to bicker.

The still convalescing Jeff sleeps contentedly, blissfully unaware of all this. Lisa reclines on a nearby chaise longue in red button-down shirt, blue jeans and loafers. She sets aside her book – ‘Beyond the High Himalayas’ - and picks up her copy of Harper’s Bazaar – the Beauty Issue.

‘Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you.
You're so like the lady with the mystic smile.
Is it only because you're lonely they have blamed you
For that Mona Lisa strangeness in your smile?
Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa?
Or is this your way to hide a broken heart?
Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep,
They just lie there and they die there.
Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?
Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art?’

Nat King Cole, ‘Mona Lisa’ (R Evans, J Livingston)

No. 438

The 39 Steps: Does Your Brand Have a MacGuffin?

'Have you ever heard of the 39 Steps?
'No. What's that, a pub?’

‘The 39 Steps’ is a classic 1935 British thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on a novel by John Buchan.

Robert Donat stars as Richard Hannay, a Canadian visitor to London who becomes a murder suspect, goes on the run and endeavours to prevent a spy ring from stealing British military secrets. It’s gripping stuff.

A gun goes off in a music hall and an alluring secret agent seeks sanctuary in Hannay’s flat on Portland Place.

‘There’s a dangerous conspiracy against this island and we’re the only ones who can stop it.’

But the mysterious woman dies with a knife in her back, clutching a map of the Highlands. Hannay escapes disguised as a milkman, hides away on the Flying Scotsman and kisses a fellow passenger to evade arrest. He jumps off at the Forth Bridge, stays the night with a crofter and is chased across the moors by a police gyrocopter. 

'I've been guilty of leading you down the garden path. Or should it be up? I never can remember.'
'It seems to be the wrong garden, all right.’

Next Hannay is shot by an aristocratic villain with a finger missing – but the bullet is stopped by a hymnbook. He is interviewed by an unreliable sheriff and seized by police who may not be police. And he spends the night at a country inn handcuffed to a beautiful blonde who doesn’t quite trust him. 

'There are 20 million women in this island and I've got to be chained to you.'

‘The 39 Steps’ takes us on a breathless chase across the Highlands, along roads blocked by flocks of sheep, through a patrician country house party and a crowded political meeting. We are desperate for our hero to escape his pursuers and foil the villains’ scheme. But, in truth, we are not that concerned about exactly what that scheme is.

This is a classic early use by Hitchcock of a plot technique he called a MacGuffin: a device that drives the narrative and motivates the characters, but is itself unimportant.

'The MacGuffin is the thing that the spies are after, but the audience don't care.’
Alfred Hitchcock

We learn that the 39 Steps refer to a foreign spy organisation that has been scheming to smuggle the design for a silent aircraft engine out of the country. Although we the audience appreciate that silent aircraft engines are hugely important to the key protagonists in the movie - that they are prompting them to risk their lives – silent aircraft engines don’t really matter too much to us, or to our enjoyment of the drama.

Hitchcock was fond of MacGuffins. ‘Foreign Correspondent’, for example, was propelled by a clause in a secret peace treaty; ‘Notorious’ by radioactive uranium; ‘North by Northwest’ by confidential microfilm. 

Indeed you’ll find MacGuffins in many movies, particularly thrillers. There’s the small statuette in 'The Maltese Falcon,’ the stolen transit letters in ‘Casablanca,' the briefcase in ‘Pulp Fiction,' the rug in 'The Big Lebowski.'

I found myself wondering about Brand MacGuffins: particular characteristics that drive a brand narrative, that sustain its core benefits – but that are not of themselves that important to consumers.

Back in the day Cadbury Dairy Milk contained ‘a glass and a half of full-cream milk’; Dove soap was ‘one quarter cleansing cream’; and Boost was ‘slightly rippled with a flat under-side.’ KFC had an ‘Original Recipe of 11 herbs and spices’; Coors was ‘brewed with pure Rocky Mountain spring water’; and Flora margarine had ‘polywassernames’…

Wanting to draw attention to the breadth of his brand’s range, in 1896 Henry J Heinz introduced the slogan ‘57 pickle Varieties.’ In fact he was selling more than 57 varieties, but he just thought the numbers 5 and 7 were lucky.

The 39 Steps (1935) Alfred Hitchcock (second right) directing the handcuffed Madeleine Carroll and Robert Donat on the first day of filming

Brand MacGuffins – Reasons to Believe or Substantiators as we called them back then - were vitally important to the businesses that claimed them. They established difference, explained superiority and justified premium. They were often shrouded in secrecy and guarded with alacrity. As consumers we were glad they existed, but didn’t really care too much about their specifics.

Of course, nowadays Brand MacGuffins are rather thin on the ground. Product differentiators are easy to copy and difficult to extend across sectors. And if you research them, people just shrug their shoulders. Modern brands prefer emotional differentiators and Big Ideas – they’re more pliable, comprehensible, universal. 

It’s a shame. Brand MacGuffins conferred texture, character and credibility. They enabled more engaging, distinctive brand dialogue. They were fun.

Perhaps now, after all this time, it may be pertinent to ask: could your brand benefit from a MacGuffin?

At the end of ‘The 39 Steps’ Hannay realises that the plotters have not actually stolen any secret papers. Rather they intend to smuggle the details of the silent aircraft engine out of the country using the extraordinary recollective powers of a theatre performer. 

We make our way to the London Palladium. Mr Memory, who has been an unwitting accomplice in the scheme, is shot on stage as he reveals the plans. He seems relieved finally to be liberated from his secrets.

‘The first feature of the new engine is its greatly increased ratio of compression represented by R minus over to the power of gamma where R represents the ratio of compression and gamma... Seen in end elevation, the axis of the two lines of cylinders...Angle of degrees… Dimensions of cylinders as follows...This device renders the engine completely silent.’ 
‘Am I right, sir?’
‘Quite right, old chap.’
‘Thank you, sir. Thank you. I'm glad it's off my mind. Glad.’

'I got an X-ray camera hidden in your house
To see what I could see.
That man you was kissing last night
Definitely wasn't me.
And I spy for the FBI.’

Jamo Thomas ‘I Spy (for the FBI)’ (R Wylie / H Kelley)

No. 324

Habit Is the Thinker’s Friend

Edna May Wonacott as Ann Newton in 'Shadow of a Doubt'

‘We eat and sleep and that’s about all. We don’t even have any real conversations. We just talk.’

Of all the films Alfred Hitchcock directed, he claimed his favourite was 1943’s ‘Shadow of a Doubt.’ This lesser known classic is set in Santa Rosa, California. The serene suburban normality of the Newton family is interrupted by the arrival of sinister Uncle Charlie from the big city.

Joseph Newton: ‘Don’t put the hat on the bed.’
Uncle Charlie: ‘Superstitious, Joe?’
Joseph Newton: ‘No, but I don’t believe in inviting trouble.’

Hitchcock seems to enjoy both celebrating and undermining small town American life. He likes exploring the banality of evil and the strangeness of the familiar. At one stage the precocious youngster of the house, Ann Newton, announces:

‘I’m trying to keep my mind free of things that don’t matter because I have so much on my mind.’

I have some sympathy with Ann Newton. Modern life is full of incidental choices and decisions. We are assaulted on all sides by the insignificant, the inconsequential, the irrelevant. What to wear, what to eat, what to say, where to go, who to meet, who to follow? It’s sometimes hard to find time for the meaningful and important.

In his 1970 book ‘Future Shock’ the American writer Alvin Toffler observed that the contemporary world throws up an excess of equivalent options. It creates ‘overchoice.’ And this choice overload can be confusing, dissatisfying, mentally draining. Perhaps it lay at the root of Santa Rosa's suburban anxiety.

My own response to overchoice is to eliminate decision making from large sections of my life. I decide not to make decisions. I choose not to choose.

So I always wear pale blue shirts with the top button done up. I never wear party shirts. I carry a flat cap in case it rains and a cotton bag in case I need to shop. On a plane I take a window seat. At the theatre I take an aisle seat. On the tube I try for the one next to the glass divide. I walk on the down escalator and I stand on the up. I sleep when a vehicle is moving (so long as I’m not at the wheel). I eat cheddar on Tuc biscuit (with an apple) for weekday lunch. I share starters, but not main course or dessert. I eat fish and chips on Friday (it’s my religion). I take an afternoon nap at the weekend. I make notes on the back of my dry cleaning ticket. I avoid things that are described as ‘fun’ or ‘funky.’ If I must order a cocktail, I ask for a Negroni. And I know I can’t go wrong with a Cotes du Rhone.

As I’ve grown older I have accrued quite a number of incidental habits. They perhaps derive from some active choice I made in the distant past. But for the most part they serve to excuse me from any current engagement with decision making.

Habit demands nothing of one’s attention. Habit frees up the mind for other things. Habit finds space for mad ideas. Habit is the thinker’s friend.

I have found that in business too we are constrained from thinking great thoughts by the dreariness of everyday dilemmas. Routine and repetition may in fact provide protection from the maelstrom of decision-making that confronts us in the office.

I’d suggest you consider the following.

Always wear a suit, grey or navy. Never wear a costume. Write with a fine blue Bic. Use plastic wallets, not bull dog or paper clips. Walk every floor, every day. Limit yourself to one exclamation mark per email. Don’t play golf or work the weekend. Never kiss your Clients. Have a latte in the morning and a Nescafe in the afternoon (with a Tunnock Caramel Wafer). Eat the same lunch from the same vendor. Always nod in meetings and write stuff down. Place your watch on the desk to monitor time diplomatically. Solve it in the room. Don’t high five, literally or metaphorically. Don’t ‘touch base’ or ‘reach out.’ Make your first comment positive and your last comment memorable. And the older you get, the earlier you should leave the party.

It seems clear to me that force of habit preserves us from the trivial and superficial. It makes time and space for proper contemplation. So why not liberate yourself from the tedium of choice by creating your own customs and conventions; by inventing the habits of a lifetime?

No. 138

Hitchcock, Rebecca and the Interfering Boss

The Second Mrs De Winter: ‘I want you to get rid of all these things.’
Mrs Danvers: ‘But these are Mrs de Winter’s things.’
The Second Mrs De Winter: ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!’

The 1940 film Rebecca is a haunting tale of doomed love, corrosive guilt and the ever-present past. It was Alfred Hitchcock’s first movie in Hollywood and his only work to win a Best Picture Oscar.

Hitchcock had been hired for the job by the producer David O Selznick. From the outset it was an uneasy relationship. There were disagreements about casting, performances and scheduling. Selznick liked to review different cuts of the same set-up after the shoot. But Hitchcock’s practice was to work out his shots in advance and cut in the camera.

Selznick took to prescribing executional ideas. He suggested that it would make a dramatic and resonant climax to the film if the smoke from the burning country house, Manderley, mysteriously formed a huge letter R for Rebecca in the sky. Hitchcock naturally felt this rather crude, and, while Selznick was preoccupied with producing Gone with the Wind, he shot a sequence of Rebecca’s burning negligee case, monogrammed with the letter R. Undoubtedly a more elegant solution.

Mrs Danvers: ‘Why don’t you go? Why don’t you leave Manderley? He doesn’t need you…He’s got his memories. He doesn’t love you. He wants to be alone again with her. You’ve nothing to stay for. You’ve nothing to live for really, have you?’

We have all worked with the Interfering Boss. What starts with broad direction and encouragement, evolves into helpful suggestions and ideas, and culminates in executional orders and instruction. As the pressure mounts and the relationship deteriorates, hands-off empowerment transitions into hands-on leadership.

This transition is often accompanied by protestations of special circumstances. The Interfering Boss asserts that he or she has a particular understanding of what the Client wants or the problem needs. This issue is, they say, relationship compromising, account threatening. This one’s too important to take a risk on. And then comes the promise of more creative freedom in ‘Year 2’ of the campaign. Year 2, of course, is a mythical place that few have visited.

I confess I have myself on occasion been that Interfering Boss. In the absence of a strong creative voice, I would sometimes step in with my own strong creative opinions. Leadership abhors a vacuum. I knew even at the time that this wasn’t healthy. Perhaps I was insufficiently trusting of the creative directors. Perhaps I was over-confident in my own abilities. Perhaps I was under pressure.

Thankfully, for the most part, my creative suggestions were rebuffed: the well-meaning ‘thought-starters’; the half-baked script ideas; the painful puns (‘ISA-tonic’ or ‘YouK’ anyone?); the helpful loan of my Parapluies de Cherbourg DVD (I’m sure I was onto something there); the frequent requests for a Luther Vandross soundtrack…. Looking back, my personal creative legacy may in fact be limited to the legendary laundry endline: ‘Smell the Clean.‘

So how should you deal with the Interfering Boss?

Well, you could try to ignore them, in the hope and expectation that they’ll always have their own Gone with the Wind to occupy their time. You could nod enthusiastically and then wilfully misunderstand what you’ve been asked to do. You could perhaps take on the Interfering Boss, and make a career-limiting speech about roles and responsibilities. In the long term, I’m not sure any of these approaches is sustainable.

‘We can never go back to Manderley again. That much is certain.’

I’d suggest that the smart option is to think properly about what the Interfering Boss is trying to get at with his or her awkward illustrations and sketchy scripts. If you can isolate what at root they’re looking for, the problem they’re trying to resolve, you can probably come up with a better, more satisfying solution. This is, after all, how Hitchcock dealt with Selznick’s ‘smokey R’ proposal.

Sir John Hegarty would always say, to Clients and account people alike: ‘Describe the problem, don’t prescribe the solution.’ In other words, tell me we have a branding issue; don’t demand that I put the brand in the first 5 seconds. Wise counsel. I’m sure we always progress further, faster, when well-briefed creatives are allowed to do the creating.

Of course, the ultimate way of dealing with the Interfering Boss is to do exactly what they ask you to do – to the letter. They’ll inevitably be confronted with their own creative shortcomings; with the linear logic of their inelegant ideas; with the merely moderate and quietly conventional. That’ll really wind them up. 

No. 121