Jimmy Stewart’s Window was the Original Twitter
I’ve made an effort to reduce my social media consumption during quarantine. It’s something I should be doing anyway because, as we all know, social media is rotting our brains. It’s full of people yelling at each other with bad faith arguments and then others replying with overused gifs or saying “yass kween.” But COVID-19 has made Twitter an even greater source of unnecessary anger. Most of the people I follow fall under either Sports or Movie Twitter, but with no sports or movies going on the only thing for Twitter people to do is be mad at the president or Liberate My Gated Community morons. Times are tough enough, now. I don’t need to be spending my time getting worked up over dumb strangers. I’d rather spend my days walking the dog or playing very dated video games.
Rear Window put into perspective that our need for unhealthy distractions has always existed, though. Jimmy Stewart plays wheelchair-bound L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries, a photographer that’s been stuck inside his apartment for weeks because he broke his leg on the job. Absent Netflix or Twitter Jeff has been spying on his neighbors, creating narratives for their lives in his head. There’s the attractive dancer he’s named “Torso,” the newlyweds that spend the whole movie banging, the struggling songwriter*, the lonely woman on the first floor, and Lars Thorwald, who Jeff is convinced murdered his wife and chopped her up into pieces so as to dispose of the body more easily.
*The Leo in me was overly pleased to notice the Hitchcock cameo in the songwriter’s apartment.
Jeff becomes obsessed with these people’s lives. If he sleeps at all, he chooses to fall asleep in his wheelchair so that he won’t miss a new development in the ongoing soap opera his neighbors provide. He succumbs to the temptation to spy using binoculars, and when that doesn’t suffice he uses a long camera lens (?…I don’t know cameras) to get a closer look. Jeff cannot stop looking out his window, even when visited by his girlfriend Lisa, played by Grace Kelly. To underscore Jeff’s preoccupation, Lisa is basically the coolest girlfriend that ever existed, an archetype for the Gone Girl cool girl. She has her own career, never repeats outfits, brings dinner, and is infatuated with Jeff, putting up with his bullshit even when he treats her like crap. Oh, and she looks like Grace Kelly. Jeff ignores several sexual advances because he prefers to remain parked in front of his window.
While watching the movie I couldn’t help but think of Twitter. Is Jeff staring out his window all that different from me scrolling through Twitter on a Friday night, constantly refreshing to see more people shitting on Trump? On many occasions I’ve spent the majority of my time during a major sporting event staring at my phone because I want to see how other people are experiencing the game, which in turn hinders my enjoyment of it because I’m not really paying attention. Or while watching a movie I realize I had missed the last minutes because I was looking something up on the internet, something dumb like whether kangaroos can eat bananas. In a very sitcom-y stereotype of the modern Typical Husband, I’ll often scroll through the dank Twitter memes and miss whatever it was my wife was just telling me.
Why do we willingly miss out on the Grace Kellys in our lives? The things we actually enjoy, like spouses, friends, pets, food. I mentioned above that I don’t even like Twitter. It makes me angry whenever I open the app…and yet I’ve already logged on today and I guarantee I will later today. Hitchcock tapped into something in humanity’s collective lizard brain with Rear Window. No matter how many good things we have in front of us, we’ll always have a wandering eye.
By the way, to complete the connection between Rear Window and Twitter, there’s also a heckin good doggo that lives in Jeff’s apartment complex.
13/10 for digging up flowers.
A couple weeks ago I mentioned I was reading It. I mercifully finished over the weekend. I doubt Stephen King took many editing suggestions for this novel. It’s 1150 pages, there’s seven main characters, and spans literally millions of years.
If you saw the movies but haven’t read the book did…did you know all the boys fuck the one girl that’s in the Losers Club? Yeah, so, there’s a group of seven friends that are fighting the Scary Clown, one girl and six boys and they call themselves the Losers Club. They’re all about 11 years old. After they defeat Scary Clown down in his sewer kingdom, they’re lost and need to find a way out. The girl, Beverly, suggests all the boys have sex with her and that their connection will help them find their way out of the sewer labyrinth. They do, and it does. The sex scene lasts for like five pages and is very unpleasant and uncomfortable to read.
To recap for those familiar with the movie, the cute kid from Stranger Things bones his friend when he’s 11 years old. My first question is how would that even work? I don’t remember being 11, but did I know what sex was back then? I was probably more concerned with fruit snacks and A Bug’s Life.
My second question is, should the FBI seize King’s computer? I get that he’s a fiction writer and what his characters do isn’t an endorsement of their behavior. I don’t think King thinks the Scary Clown that offers to suck a boy’s dick is a good guy. But it is, at the very least, very weird that he a) thought about a child orgy and b) decided that was something that needed to be included in his book about a Scary Clown. As someone that just finished the book, take my word for it when I tell you it’s unnecessary. When the Losers fight Scary Clown again as adults, they don’t need to fuck each other this time to find their way out of the sewer lair…they just figure it out. Andy Muschietti should have been nominated for Best Director for leaving the kid sex out of the first movie.
