P A R T    T H R E E
A Tour of the East River

+ Part One: Blacker Blacks and Whiter Whites
+ Part Two: Lies About the Good Old Days, During the War

Thorwald's crime looms over the movie too, of course, even in the scenes seemingly unrelated to him: scenes constructing a wrangle of urban life that unwinds cyclically in the various homesteads that Jeff can see. Exquisitely crafted, with an ambient soundtrack that drifts smoothly in and out of the diegesis, these scenes are rightly praised as a pinnacle of Hitchcock's artistry. And yet they also do simpler, but still necessary, work: fulfilling the genre prerequisite that a mystery should have dead-ends and distractions to make it tougher for the audience to figure out the crime.

Rear Window's mysterious crime is this: Lars Thorwald administers a sharp, blunt shock to his wife, killing or immobilizing her. If she is not dead already, he snuffs her out while she is unconscious. He then drags her corpse to the bathroom and laboriously dismembers it with a saw. He buries at least one of the corpse's hacked-off limbs in a courtyard flower garden, but when a dog sniffs at the ground over it, he gets scared and exhumes it. Some other parts of Anna's body find their way into the East River.

None of this is shown, of course, which — given the audience's alignment with Lisa and Jeff — is tantamount to saying that neither of them has seen a crime take place. That their theories are deduced entirely from circumstantial evidence proves to be a problem for them when they try to convince Doyle that a murder has really taken place. The murder's invisibility is coarsely attributable to another unrestorable aspect of the culture surrounding Rear Window's composition and release: a pre-MPAA prohibition on showing bodies being dismembered or violently penetrated. Six years later, in Psycho, Hitchcock would explicitly stage the butchery that, in Rear Window, occurs wholly offscreen. Still, the specific event that takes Marion Crane's life — the blade going in — occurs only in the audience's mind.

Had Lisa and Jeff been able to supply Doyle with an eyewitness account of Lars's murder, this would have been enough to merit Doyle's search warrant and Rear Window would have ended much sooner than it does. Since what Jeff and Lisa see is more or less what the audience sees, though, for them to witness the event would mean that we would witness it along with them. And in 1954, as in 1960, it was simply too frightful to show the infliction of wounds that cause death. The movie revolves around Jeff and Lisa's struggle to convince Doyle of an unseen murder, so it is largely about the prohibition against the frank simulation of violence, just as Psycho's shower scene is largely about not seeing the knife go in.

Because the murder in Rear Window is conveyed solely through Jeff and Lisa's speculative testimony and through the outwardly innocuous actions Lars takes to cover up his crimes, the movie is free to be much more brutal than Psycho in the sort of murder that it narrates. In the latter film, Marion Crane's (Janet Leigh) lifeless body remains intact; the less fortunate Anna is not only murdered but torn apart.

Earlier on, Stella supposes that Lars has disposed of Anna piecemeal, "scattered" her all over New York City. That seems to be just what he has done, sometime in the process of dispersing her personal effects in crates that Jeff and Lisa believe to contain parts of her body. When Lars confesses (as most Hitchcock villains — with their deeply submerged sense of right and wrong — eventually do), he promises to take Doyle on a "tour of the East River," where one presumes that Anna will be put back together, as least as well as a forensics team can manage. There follows a bit of falling action in which Jeff, having now had both legs broken, looks forward to another seven weeks of purgatory, and Lisa, thrilled in her new life as an amateur crime reporter, still finds that her love for the fashion magazine Bazaar can't be denied. The movie ends by showing Lisa curled up with her shiny copy of Bazaar, while the songwriter croons her name on the suddenly no-longer-ambient soundtrack.

Once the blinds that were raised in the beginning are lowered again, the movie's tidy closure seems absolute. But when the lights go up, you could conceivably be imagining another scene the movie doesn't show, in which Lars — still not knowing what anyone wants from him, a little insane and sick with a rage so seething that the movie never goes near it — guides Doyle to the remaining portions of his dead wife. Around this time Doyle would set about to solve the mystery of what has made Lars the way he is, since the more important puzzle — how to go about reassembling Anna from a pile of floppy or decomposing limbs — isn't ever going to get solved.

If you'd watched the movie in 1954, then, as you stepped back out into the sunlight, you may have thought briefly about the news you'd heard, mostly on the radio, about the bodies coming back in pieces from the war in Korea. That conflict had only ended the year before. The radio didn't mention the state of those bodies, and the emergent technology of television certainly didn't show them, the way it would later, in Vietnam. That wouldn't matter, though, if you were one of America's ten million-plus World War II and Korean War veterans, because you'd probably have a pretty vivid picture of just what the radio was talking about. You'd seen GIs bracketed by mortars or incinerated by German 88s, conscripts ripped apart by American firebombs or offshore Naval shells, Japanese civilians in the wake of the atomic bomb. You'd seen these things even if, now, you never discussed them.