The Object of the Male Gaze in Rear Window

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window centers around a voyeuristic male character (Jimmy Stewart’s L.B. Jeffries) who is more interested in turning his gaze on men than on women. The voyeurism is not sexual however; Hitchcock takes pains to actually asexualize Jeffries. His background as a photography indicates that he might very well have a purely professional interest in spectacle. He sees his neighbors as subjects, not as objects of desire. He does enjoy watching the dancer who practices in her underwear, but no more than the composer or any of his other subjects. In fact, when Jeffries’ girlfriend Lisa visits him, he seems mostly disinterested in her presence, even when she is trying to arouse some sexual desire in him. At one point, the two are kissing near Jeffries’ window and Lisa can clearly tell that his attention is focused not on her, but on the people outside of his window. Until the end of the film, Jeffries has little to no sexual interest in Lisa or really anyone.
That being said, he does seem to prefer men to women when it comes to his subjects. He watches a newlywed couple, but after an initial shot of the wife, it is really only the man who comes into his frame of view. The woman is only heard off screen. Jeffries also spies on Miss Lonelyhearts (as he calls her), but is more concerned with the lack of a man in her life than with her. His attention is only really drawn to her when she finally succeeds in getting a male companion to take her on a date. Only when the man comes back to her apartment does Jeffries give her more than a cursory glance or mention. He also mostly skims over the dancer, though when he does look at her, she is mostly in the company of at least one man. And the subject with whom he eventually becomes obsessed is a man, Lars Thorwald. Thorwald is conspicuous precisely because there is NOT a woman in his life. He has killed his wife and this lack of a woman is what brings him to Jeffries’ attention.
This goes against Laura Mulvey’s claim in her article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” where she states that “the presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film” (203). Rear Window is entirely concerned with spectacle – the film revolves around the act of looking out a window – and yet women seem to quite dispensable to the primary spectator. Mulvey also claims that a woman’s “visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (203). Again this does not hold true for Rear Window. Women on screen do not freeze Jeffries’ gaze more than men do. As for the women he sees out the window, their effect on the development of the plot is no different than the effect of the men. In fact, in the case of Lisa, she actually drives the action when she leaves Jeffries’ room, digs for evidence in the garden, and enters Thorwald’s apartment to gather evidence.