ABSTRACT
In “Alfred Hitchcock’s The Rear Window: Cold War, Spatiality, and the Paranoid Subject,” Beatrice Kohler addresses a different sort of place, one less attached to a given toponym and more situated in the multiple registers of the scopophilic subject, from the voyeuristic individual to an entire geopolitical system of surveillance and control. Kohler investigates the notion of an identifiable “Cold War culture” by discussing Hitchcock’s 1954 classic Rear Window, focusing especially on spatiality and paranoia. The cinematic screen is seen as a site where socio-cultural conflict is negotiated and political reality is transcoded into fictional narratives. Extending beyond the body of criticism that discusses the movie as a prime example of scopophilia and cinematic self-reflexivity, Kohler attempts to combine extradiegetic politics with intradiegetic aesthetics. Emerging from a culture of McCarthyite furor, post-war anxieties regarding the millions of soldiers returning from WWII, and increasing governmental infringement on privacy, Rear Window investigates the politics of suspicion, surveillance, and individual agency by displacing these issues unto multiple imaginary screens that are subject to a paranoid misreading symptomatic of the American 1950s.
