Dual Vision: Searching for the 4th Amendment in Rear Window

(This post is adapted from a longer law journal article that I wrote in 2000. The article appeared in the Legal Studies Forum under the title Lonely Hearts and Murderers: The Fourth Amendment Through Hitchcock’s Lens. In both cases, I argue that Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) shrewdly illuminates the values that underlie the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.)

Halfway through Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the protagonist, L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart), implores a detective (Wendell Corey) to search the apartment of a neighbor whose wife has disappeared. Jefferies (aka “Jeff”) suspects the neighbor, Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), of murder. The detective resists, appealing to the need for sufficient evidence to support a search warrant. But Jeff counters that the detective’s hesitancy is misguided. “[I]f you find something, you’ve got a murderer, and they won’t care anything about a couple of house rules,” Jeff insists.

Few films have captured our ambivalence about constitutional “house rules” as effectively as Rear Window. In fact, Hitchcock’s 1954 masterpiece is suffused with the competing values that inform the Fourth Amendment’s bar on unreasonable searches. Which is more important to us – effective law enforcement, or individual privacy rights? This question hangs over the film’s narrative, which hinges on the murder theory that Jeff develops as a result of his pervasive visual surveillance of his neighbors.

A variation on that very question had come before the United States Supreme Court only six months before Rear Window’s release. In February 1954, the Court ruled in Irvine v. California (347 U.S. 128) that the Fourth Amendment did not prohibit the use of evidence illegally obtained by California police without a search warrant. The police in that case had secretly made a key to a suspect’s house and installed a concealed microphone in the suspect’s bedroom, which enabled them to hear incriminating statements at a nearby garage that had been set up as a “listening post.”

Writing the controlling opinion for a divided Court, Justice Robert Jackson observed in Irvine that “[e]ach of these repeated entries of [the suspect’s] home without a search warrant or other process was a trespass, and probably a burglary, for which any unofficial person should be, and probably would be, severely punished.” Jackson also warned that “[s]cience has perfected amplifying and recording devices to become frightening instruments of surveillance and invasion of privacy, whether by the policeman, the blackmailer, or the busy-body.” His opinion reflects a grave discomfort with the idea of the police eavesdropping, for weeks on end, on the bedroom activities of Mr. Irvine (who was suspected of illegal bookmaking) and his wife. But even while decrying the police conduct as “flagrant” and “shocking,” the Court ruled that exclusion of the evidence gathered from the bug was not constitutionally required. It was not until 1961 that the Court ruled, in Mapp v. Ohio (367 U.S. 643), that evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment was not admissible in a state criminal proceeding.

In Rear Window, of course, the surveillant is a not a policeman, but a wheelchair-bound “busy-body” (Jeff). And the instruments of his surveillance are not hidden microphones, but rather binoculars and a large telephoto lens, which enable him to monitor the personal business of the neighbors across the courtyard. Even so, Hitchcock explores the same competing impulses that came to the fore in Irvine and that would preoccupy the Court for decades to come. As Jeff debates the ethics of his behavior with his nurse (Thelma Ritter), his girlfriend (Grace Kelly), and Detective Doyle, Rear Window brings into focus the tension between our desire to root out crime, on the one hand, and the privacy costs of unchecked surveillance, on the other.

Hitchcock shows us Jeff spying on a wide range of people, including a scantily-clad woman who dances around her apartment (whom Jeff dubs “Miss Torso”); a newlywed couple whose passion quickly gives way to disaffection; a middle-aged woman searching for love (whom Jeff calls “Miss Lonelyhearts”); and a jewelry salesman, Thorwald. Like a detective on a stakeout, Jeff monitors these neighbors’ windows and, as a result, observes Thorwald quarreling with his wife. Then, on a rainy night, he hears a scream and the sound of breaking glass. Stationing his wheelchair by the window, Jeff sees Thorwald come and go from his apartment repeatedly after midnight, carrying a suitcase. And the next morning, he witnesses Thorwald wrapping a saw and knife in newspaper.

After realizing that Thorwald’s wife has disappeared, Jeff escalates his voyeurism with his binoculars and a camera (which Stella cleverly calls a “portable keyhole”). Jeff’s use of these instruments of technology evokes the warnings of liberal judges of the era, who feared that “new methods of photography” used by police could “overcome distances” and lay bare “intimate personal matters” (Goldman v. U.S., 316 U.S. 129, 139 (1942) (Justice Murphy, dissenting)). Hitchcock underscores this affront to privacy by cutting between Jeff’s surveillance of Thorwald and his observations of the travails of Miss Lonelyhearts, who, in one powerful sequence, must ward off the unwanted physical advances of a suitor.  As Miss Lonelyhearts breaks down in tears, Jeff is moved, for the first time, to question his own behavior. “I wonder if it’s ethical to watch a man with binoculars and a long focus lens,” he says to Lisa. “Do you . . . do you suppose it’s ethical even if you prove he didn’t commit a crime?”

Still, Jeff and Lisa cast aside any reservations about the ethics of spying as their belief in Thorwald’s guilt intensifies. Their demands for police action, however, are repeatedly rebuffed by Detective Doyle – first with reference to the legal requirement of a search warrant and later with an admonition about Jeff’s invasion of his neighbors’ personal affairs. “That’s a secret, private world you’re looking into out there,” Doyle tells Jeff. “People do a lot of things in private they couldn’t possibly explain in public.” It is a tribute to the sophistication and complexity of John Michael Hayes’ screenplay that the detective emerges as a voice of restraint. Ironically, Doyle becomes the film’s spokesman for an essential Fourth Amendment principle: namely, that the limitations on police searches invoked by criminals also protect innocent citizens from unwanted intrusions.

Jeff, on the other hand, expresses a populist version of crime control values. Either a search will turn evidence of a murder, in which case justice will have been done, or it will not, in which Thorwald is “clear.” Accusing Doyle of excessive caution, Jeff warns that “by tomorrow morning there may not be any evidence left over in that apartment.” He then poses the same question that law students would hear in constitutional criminal procedure classes for decades to come:  “Well, what do you need before you can search . . .  bloody footsteps leading up to the door?” Rarely has a film so seamlessly embedded essential legal concepts in snappy dialogue.

One of Rear Window’s rewards is that as the characters make their respective cases, each of them offers seemingly persuasive points. Their debates call to mind peak episodes of The West Wing, which often gave fair hearings to conflicting perspectives.

At the same time, Rear Window points to an internal conflict in Jeff’s position. When Jeff insists that “of course they can do the same thing to me, watch me, like a bug under glass, if they want to,” the choice of language belies his cavalier attitude. Like all of us,  he instinctively realizes that “they” have the ability to monitor our every move, threatening to strip us of our privacy and, with it, our humanity. In fact, despite his bluster, Jeff’s own conduct suggests that he cannot abide the prospect of being watched. At one point, when he sees Thorwald look out the window, Jeff frantically wheels himself back into the darkness to avoid being seen. Similarly, when Jeff later catches Doyle looking at Lisa’s lingerie, which is lying on a couch, he is quick to warn the detective (“Careful, Tom”) -- even though Doyle’s glance is less intrusive than Jeff’s secret surveillance of his neighbors.

[Readers who have not seen Rear Window and wish to avoid spoilers are excused for the next three paragraphs.]

Fittingly, Hitchcock delivers his most striking message about privacy with his camera, in the film’s most suspenseful scene. Frustrated by Doyle’s inaction, Lisa enters Thorwald’s apartment through an unlocked window and begins to search for what she and Jeff consider conclusive evidence of the murder: Mrs. Thorwald’s wedding ring. But then Thorwald unexpectedly arrives at home. He discovers Lisa and begins shaking her. After an excruciating delay, Jeff phones for help, and the police arrive on the scene to interrupt the assault. Ironically, they arrest Lisa for breaking-and-entering. As she is about to be escorted out, Lisa signals to Jeff her discovery of the wedding ring by pointing, behind her back, to the ring on her finger. The camera tracks from Lisa’s hands to Thorwald, who has noticed the signal. Thorwald then looks across the courtyard to Jeff’s window and directly into the camera. He has detected the source of his trouble.

The effect of the shot is that Thorwald is staring at us – a moment of cinematic inversion. Having sat safely in the dark and watched Thorwald for 90 minutes, we are now being watched. The shot conveys the inevitable consequence of uncontrolled surveillance: sooner or later, the spies themselves will be spied upon. If we sanction invasions of our neighbors’ privacy, we put our own privacy in jeopardy. It is hard to imagine a legal argument, however eloquent or artfully constructed, making that point as viscerally as Hitchcock does here. (For an even more potent depiction of the risks of unauthorized intrusions into a person’s home, see the scene in Psycho (1960) in which private detective Arbogast enters the Bates’ house without permission).

Rear Window’s climax sees Thorwald enter Jeff’s apartment and force him over his window ledge, which Jeff clings to by his fingertips. The police arrive in the nick of time to restrain Thorwald, but are unable to prevent Jeff’s fall into the courtyard. Lying on the ground, his other leg broken,  Jeff takes a parting shot at Doyle: “You got enough for a search warrant now?”

Jeff’s crack taps into a popular intuition that adherence to procedural norms should give way when the end game is apprehending a murderer. But the film hardly endorses his call for unconstrained police discretion. By showing both the costs and fruits of surveillance, Rear Window reminds us of the delicate balance that courts must strike in fashioning rules to govern police searches. Its essential warning found a scholarly reformulation in a Minnesota Law Review article published 20 years after the film was made, when professor Anthony Amsterdam observed: “[U]nless the Fourth Amendment controls tom-peeping and subjects it to a requirement of antecedent cause to believe that what is inside any particular window is indeed criminal, police may look through windows and observe a thousand innocent acts for every guilty act they spy out.”

The citation for my full brief on Rear Window is 24 Legal Studies Forum 99 (2000). The article’s mock cover below was designed by Caroline Johnson (who also designed the cover for Nothing to Fear).