Suspicion Gaze

To bring up a later film we are going to watch, Rear Window also deals with the gaze, The illusory quality of the romance is also

Lina with her glasses serve as a critical visual frame that symbolizes her attempts of “female gazing” back at the male figure. During Johnnie and Lina’s first encounter, Lina had her glasses on, and we can say that Johnie did not fall in love with her until she showed up in the horse range without the glasses, where Johnnie said she looked so differently with / without glasses. Later in the film, she put on the glasses 3 times (reading about Beaky’s death; reading Johnnie’s letter about returning the money; and also reading the letter from the insurance company), each time her gaze was framed, focused and empowered by the glasses. Without the glasses, she was unable to see anything, so that she was merely an objectified spectacle under the gaze, and wearing the glasses allowed her to actively gaze back. Through actively gazing back, Lina was trying to challenge the patriarchy, or the big other, the symbolic order. But Lina was not the only one gazing (in vain). Interestingly, the audience experiences the theme of visibility and vision resulting in suspicion on a meta level as we gazing into the silver screen. Hitchcock manipulated the audience and, of course, Lina in the way that he presented all of the obvious visual clues right in front of the audience and Lina throughout the film. Knowing that the audience was equally invested as Lina was, Hitchcock expected the audience to also have the similar doubt shared with Lina’s. For example, in the train scene, it even started with Johnnie not being able to pay for a first class ticket, and also Lina reading in the papers about the social scenarios Johnnie is surrounded by. As if these are not obvious “red flags” enough for Lina, the audience soon enough saw the Lina falls in love too quickly, ignoring Johnie’s first intrusion, and the audience probably forgot it too, until much later, deep into the suspicion. Throughout the film, these visual cues were made clear: when the anagram of clear indictment was played out, the word “murder” was spelled out with each letter and read out by Beaky (as if Hitchcock was not sure if the audience will get the message). When the milk was lit up by the lightbulb, the camera, imitating the audience’s gaze followed and focused on the milk glass as Johnnie has walked through the long shadow casted on him. The so-called invisible poison mentioned by the writer posed a sharp contrast with glowing milk that the audience absolutely fix their gaze on. Then what was the point of this trace-less invisible poison, if both the audience and Lina knew exactly what could be in there. Every visual clue was not only just presented, but emphasized dramatically for Lina and the audience to interpret. The ending’s explanation or confrontation seemed so weak that the happy ending left an abrupt hanger of the plot. (For example, if Johnie wanted to suicide after sending Lina home, there was really no point in insisting on a poison that would leave no trace.) The dramatic visual details that the audience followed throughout the film are put directly on the opposite side of Johnnie’s words (note that by this point the audience should know that Johnnie was never a reliable narrator). Hitchcock really posed the questions of gazing and (mis)interpreting to the audience, where asked: is it true that everything you see is true? If so, why don’t you trust it? If not, what is the point of even trying to look?