ABSTRACT
James Stewart portrays a photographer who, incapacitated by a broken leg, becomes increasingly involved in the affairs of his neighbors across the apartment courtyard; Genevieve Bujold portrays a doctor who becomes suspicious about the mysterious deaths and medical goings-on at the hospital where she works. Whatever else one might say about these films (Rear Window [1954] and Coma [1978]), their appeal, both popular and scholarly, is due in large part to their preoccupation with spectatorship. For in these films, the act of watching is both pleasureful and dangerous, and if the characters of the male photographer and the female doctor are sources of identification, the identification is marked by a foregrounding of the cinema itself in its capacity to see, to hear, and to know (see Mulvey 1975; Wood 1982; Modleski 1988; Cowie 1979, 1980). To begin with, then, spectatorship refers not just to the acts of watching and listening, and not just to identification with human figures projected on the screen, but rather to the various values with which film viewing is invested. Hence, the pleasures and dangers affiliated with watching and listening, in Rear Window and Coma, are channeled into powerful cultural and narrative myths of man and woman, social class, private and public life.
