The Lives of Others

Watching Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 murder mystery, in a post-COVID world 

“The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it,” wrote the hugely popular film critic Roger Ebert in his 1999 review of the film Peeping Tom. Michael Powell's film caused great outrage upon its release in 1960, and Ebert speculated — nearly 40 years later — that it was because it broke that unspoken contract between the audience and the filmmaker. By making its protagonist a serial killer who liked to film his victims in the throes of death, Peeping Tom forced viewers to contend with the violence of our own scopophilia, the pleasure we derive from looking.

Six years before Peeping Tom, another British director had made a film about the pleasure of looking, featuring a news photographer instead of a film studio focus-puller. But Alfred Hitchcock was too clever to make his audiences too uncomfortable. The kernel of Rear Window (1954) lay in a 1942 Cornell Woolrich short story called 'It Had To Be Murder', where the temporarily laid-up narrator's view of the windows across from his own leads him to suspect a murder. “I could have constructed a timetable of [my neighbours'] comings and goings, their daily habits and activities. Sure, I suppose it was a little bit like prying, could even have been mistaken for the fevered concentration of a Peeping Tom,” concedes Woolrich's narrator, before quickly denying any intentional voyeurism. “That wasn’t my fault, that wasn’t the idea.”

Hitchcock's hero doesn't get let off so easily. Within the film's first few minutes, his no-nonsense nurse Stella berates him as a 'window shopper' who spends his days looking at newly married couples and “bikini bombshells”. Stella has no doubt that spying on other people is a modern-day evil: “We've become a race of Peeping Toms. They used to poke your eyes out for that sort of thing, with a red-hot poker...” . But Hitchcock, along with his superb screenwriter John Michael Hayes', transforms the original story to make his hero a professional viewer of the world — and his film all about looking.

LB Jefferies, better known as Jeff (James Stewart) is a globe-trotting photographer who's fractured his leg on a particularly adventurous shoot. When the film opens, he has been holed up in his New York apartment for five weeks, with nothing better to do than look out of his rear window. While he converts these telling glimpses of his neighbours into stories — and in Hitchcock's unspoken self-referential extension, into cinematic fictions complete with a plot — Jeff himself is never seen. Or at least, he tries his best to ensure that he isn't: wheeling his chair back, keeping his lights off, even hiding at opportune moments. Not really the usual style of a cinematic hero.

There is all sorts of genius in this Hitchcock treatment, starting with the fact that Jeff thinks of himself as being of generally superior intellect to others in his locality. He does have an interest in the outside world, but usually it is reserved for distant places that impinge on his consciousness only in some headline-making way — when his editor calls to propose a trip to Kashmir because the “place is about to go up in flames”, Jeff's excited response is “Didn't I tell you that's the next place to watch?”. His immediate vicinity he thinks of as dull, lulling us into that assumption — and also making us feel a little guilty about the voyeuristic gaze that seeks excitement.

Dullness appears to be a problem both for those outside relationships and those in them. One single female neighbour — Jeff calls her Miss Lonelyheart — often drinks herself to sleep. But her efforts to date are ill-fated, too: we watch one much-awaited young man thrust himself on her as soon as the front door is closed. Another single woman — Stella's 'bikini bombshell', named 'Miss Torso' by our hero — has no shortage of male admirers, but none of them looks worth having. A single male songwriter above Miss Torso seems equally starved for love.

Meanwhile the couples lead lives of sweetly boring domesticity, or else bitter conflict — the sort that can lead to murder. Our hero himself has a girlfriend most men would have killed for, Grace Kelly as a model called Lisa Fremont who appears on the covers of magazines, but he isn't happy either. He thinks she isn't cut out for marriage to someone like him, who spends weeks on the road in rough places. “If she was only ordinary,” Jeff whines to Stella. We're meant to see that Lisa's Park Avenue perfection and high fashionista status is dull as ditchwater to Jeff: once he even asks what her cocktail companion was wearing, only to ruthlessly mock her reply.

Alfred Hitchcock lets Jeff tell many an uncle joke about nagging wives and the sad fate of husbands. But Rear Window can also be seen as undercutting Jeff's rather comfortable narrative: the rough-and-ready adventurer remains tied to his chair till film's end, while the exquisitely-turned-out Lisa does all the mystery-solving legwork, even putting herself at risk. Lisa's physical fearlessness is what finally impresses Jeff — he seems to think he's kindled her sense of adventure. And of course, Jeff's fracture literally bars him from legwork. Even so, his reliance entirely on visual tricks is fascinating: even when the murderer walks into his room, all Jeff can think of as a weapon is a battery-operated flashlight to blind him temporarily. And it's definitely possible to read Rear Window in a way that sees Jeff's immobility as emasculation, and emasculation as marriage — Hitchcock's hero ends the film with both legs in a cast and firmly embedded in traditional coupledom.

Rear Window is a ridiculously apposite watch for a post-COVID world, where travel for travel's sake seems to have gone, well, out the window. For one, Lisa's attitude turns the perfect side-eye upon Jeff's grandstanding travel stories. Other aspects of the film ring even truer in an era in which rising authoritarianism and the ubiquity of social media, combined with pandemic-enforced isolation, is pushing us more and more into the once socially dubious roles of the lurker, the invisible spectator in the dark. On our screens and off them, stalking and surveillance have greater currency than ever before. Stella's “homespun wisdom” — from a 1939 Reader's Digest — seems almost poetic in its appropriateness: “What people ought to do is get outside their own houses and look in for a change.”

Published in Firstpost, 25 Oct 2020

"You Maid Me Better"

Forgot to put this up earlier: my Shelf Life column for April. (Shelf Life is a monthly column I write for the website 'The Voice of Fashion', on clothes seen through the prism of literature.)

Doris Lessing, who debuted with the great novel The Grass is Singing

As the national COVID-19 lockdown enters its third week, privileged Indians are being forced to acknowledge how many of our comforts are enabled by the labour of those we euphemistically call 'help'. Servants are the invisible glue that keeps the Indian family together, taking up the physical and emotional burdens of domesticity that most middle class men dump so blithely on their wives. But if dependence is one aspect of our unacknowledged relationships with servants, the other is intimacy.

In 1765, British judge Sir William Blackstone listed the master-servant relationship as the first of three “great relations of private life” (the other two were between husband and wife, and parent and child). He saw something many are still loath to admit. The greater the ubiquity of domestic staff, the more the social distance between employers and servants is policed. In her wonderfully readable Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth Century Britain, Lucy Lethbridge remarks on the separation of social spaces enforced by the British aristocracy, “whose most intimate secrets, paradoxically, had long been shared with the valet or the ladies' maid who undressed and bathed them”.

Clothes have been central to this relationship. For centuries, the personal servant took care of the employer's clothes, laid out their outfits – and often actually dressed them. The servant's role in the master's or mistress's toilette has been at the centre of many literary depictions. One such relationship is between PG Wodehouse's bumbling young aristocrat Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, his valet. Jeeves rules Bertie's wardrobe with an iron hand, perpetually giving away clothes that he thinks inappropriate for a true scion of the upper classes, scotching Bertie's attempts at fashion. Under Jeeves' stiff upper lip lie unutterable depths of emotion: Bertie's one-time decision to grow a moustache creates a rift between him and Jeeves that feels almost lover-like.

That “almost” ripens to fullness in Sarah Waters' marvellous thriller Fingersmith (2002), in which a petty thief sets herself up as ladies' maid to an heiress. The orphaned Sue Trinder is a perfect Dickensian character. Her version of Fagin is called Gentleman, a trickster swell who teaches her the ins and outs of clothes she has never had occasion to wear. Beginning with the delicious double entendres of Gentleman's first lesson (“Are you ready for it now, miss? Do you like it drawn tight?...Oh! Forgive me if I pinch.”), Waters imbues the Victorian lady's wardrobe with frisson. The layers of garments are secret links between mistress and maid: the chemise, camisole, corset, the stays that hold the body close, while the nine-hoop crinoline floats, unwitting, above it all. Sure enough, Sue's pleasure in the keeping of Maud's gowns and silken petticoats blooms slowly into a sensual attachment to the keeping of Maud herself—a secret love that will not be suppressed.

Sue's relationship with Maud's clothes reminded me of the chilling scene in Daphne Du Maurier's iconic 1938 novel Rebecca, when the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers insists on making the book's unnamed young heroine caress the late Rebecca's nightgown, laid out on her bed as if she might walk in any minute. “'Feel it, hold it,' [Mrs. Danvers] said, 'how soft and light it is, isn't it? I haven't washed it since she wore it for the last time... I did everything for her, you know... We tried maid after maid but not one of them suited. “You maid me better than anyone, Danny,” she used to say. “I won't have anyone but you.’”

The fictional Rebecca's inability to find a single maid that “suited” was probably Mrs. Danvers' wishful imagination, but it may have also reflected an upper class predicament that grew more widespread, as the First World War and then the Second altered the social aspirations of the working class in Europe. In the colonies, of course, there was an inexhaustible supply of cheap labour only too grateful to find work in the white man's household. The friction in the early years of empire resulted from attempts to train domestic staff across the vast gulf not just of class, but of cultural knowledge–and racial suspicion. Emma Roberts was likely fairly representative of the colonial memsahib in India when she complained in 1835 that native ayahs did not take the “slightest pains to make themselves acquainted with the mysteries of the European toilette; they dress their ladies all awry, and martyrdom is endured whenever they take a pin in hand: they have no notion of lacing, buttoning, or hook-and-eyeing...”That clueless privileged voice, complaining of the 'uncultured' servant, can still be heard all around us.

But a class of colonial servants was gradually trained, and as Lethbridge points out, the domestic life of the British in India grew to levels of display unmatched in world history. In the more remote outposts, in Africa for instance, English-style formalities could be impossibly tough to keep up. Among the great depictions of such fraught intimacy between black servant and white mistress is in Doris Lessing's stunning debut novel The Grass is Singing (1950). Towards the end, a white visitor is shocked to find the native servant Moses buttoning up his mistress Mary's dress. He attempts to joke about it, telling Mary about an empress of Russia who “thought so little of her slaves, as human beings, that she used to undress in front of them”. Lessing is astute as always, commenting: “It was from this point of view that he chose to see the affair; the other was too difficult for him.”

Anthropologist Raka Ray's fieldwork in Kolkata poses a similar question: how do people reconcile having male servants with a highly sex-segregated society like India's? Male servants walk in and out of bedrooms, are present at intimate moments when other men wouldn't be and handle women's clothes. One elderly lady says to Ray, “A servant isn't really a man; a servant is a servant.”

Among the subtlest fictional portrayals of this space of unsettling intimacy is Manto's short story 'Blouse'. When Shakeela Bibi flings off her vest for the teenaged Momin to take to the shop, he finds himself rubbing it between his fingers. “[I]t was soft as a kitten”, “the smell of her body still resided in it”, and “all this was very pleasing to him,” writes Manto. Shakeela's newly stitched purple satin blouse triggers a dreamscape whose eroticism is not even part of Momin's conscious mind. The deputy saab's wife and daughters remain oblivious, like saabs and memsaabs too often are: “Who could play that much attention to the lives of servants? They covered all of life's journeys on foot, from infancy to old age, and those around them never knew anything of it.”

As our unacknowledged intimates, servants have too long been treated as shock absorbers for our inner lives, our troubles. It is high time we recognise that they have their own.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 13 April 2020.

Home viewing in times of quarantine

My Mirror column:

Everything I watch these days seems to be speaking to the current moment. One theme that jumps out at me, film upon film, is our relationship to the idea of home

It’s the third week of lockdown in India, and quarantine is having an odd effect on my film viewing. I don't know if it’s me, or the universe conspiring in some strange serendipity, but almost everything I watch these days seems to be speaking to the current moment. One theme that jumps out at me, film upon film, is our relationship to the idea of home. Home is a place where you feel safe – until you don’t. The other day, on a popular streaming platform, I stumbled upon Darren Aronofsky’s much-discussed (and frequently dissed) Mother! (stylised as mother!), a film I had missed when it came out in 2017. In the talky aftermath of the film’s release, Aronofsky went to some lengths to ‘explain’ his spooky, eventually grisly film as a Biblical allegory for the rape and torment of ‘Mother Earth’ by ‘God’, while other characters stand in for Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel.

I have to confess that the Judaeo-Christian analyses baffled me, because I found Mother! entirely intelligible (all right, not entirely!) as a film about domesticity and its dangers. Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence play a couple living in a large and glorious old house. He spends all his time as writers often do, failing to write, while she cooks and cleans and continues the laborious process of restoring the unfinished house. Lawrence is an unbelievable combination of picture-perfect and extremely hands-on: her flowing hair piled into an artfully messy bun as she mixes new shades of wall paint, or conjures up meals that her husband pronounces “perfect” while making polite noises about how she didn’t have to make so many things. The dynamic between them is strained; her obsession with a private paradise is clearly not sparking his creativity. The more she tries to create the perfect space in which the two of them can live happily ever after, the more avidly he tries to invite the outside world in.

The first to arrive is a man who claims to be a great fan of the man’s previous book. Then his wife, his squabbling sons, and then more and more strangers arrive, until the house is overrun. As the ‘guests’ go from admiring and raucous to irresponsible and downright dangerous, the film walks a brilliant tightrope between possible ways in which we might see this. Is the woman overly anxious, closed off and selfish and the man generous, open, free-flowing? Or is he the selfish one, and she the victim? A pandemic that has us all panicking at the idea of strangers in our homes seemed to me to throw Mother! into a whole new light.

Then the night before last, on another streaming platform, I watched a Japanese film called Domains, directed by Natsuka Kusano. The 2019 film is a marvellous formal experiment that likely isn’t for everyone. A mild-mannered policeman reads out the confession of a woman called Aki who has drowned her old friend’s little daughter. From there, we move on to a series of scenes in which three actors – playing the woman, her friend and her friend’s husband – repeatedly rehearse the lines for what might be the film. Except, of course, this is the film.

For some two and a half hours, we almost never leave the bare room in which the actors sit. When we do, what we see is a near-empty city: roads almost free of traffic, a strangely quiet metro.

A more uncanny resonance with our time comes from the characters’ preoccupation with creating a space in which they feel safe. “Nodoka seemed stifled to maintain the comfort of the house. Naoto, on the other hand, treasured his home so much that he seemed to be keeping everyone out except his family,” remembers Aki. The ‘domain' created by the couple and their daughter is, for Aki, a rival to the one she shared with Nodoka in childhood, a magical “kingdom of chairs and sheets” that only the two of them could enter.

The husband, Naoto, on the other hand, feels visibly threatened by Aki’s being so at home with his wife. When he tells Aki to stop coming over because his daughter has caught a fever in her excitement, Aki responds angrily: “So you think I'm some kind of virus, don’t you?”

Naoto regulates everything, from his wife’s smoking to the humidity and temperature of the house. “I do want to feel safe. I need to protect my family,” he says peevishly. And yet, safe is exactly what they are not in the end. Control can backfire, just as much as openness.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Apr 2020