Seven Red

We just watched the Shia LeBeouf vehicle, Disturbia, so I want to say a few words about that. Usually, I wouldn’t comment on just another teen thriller, but, of course, Disturbia is based on Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window, and I have my own ideas for how Rear Window should be remade. That should be coming to theaters some time in 2014, when I get my shit together. My version will win an Oscar. But when I first saw a commercial for Disturbia, I was pissed, although I knew implicitly that they would fuck it up. They did. But not as badly as I expected. LeBeouf (Kale) can’t hold a candle to Jimmy Stewart as freelance photographer L.B. Jeffries, but it doesn’t appear that anyone was really asking him to. And poor Sarah Roemer (Ashley) is asked to fill the giant role of Grace Kelly. She makes up in nasty hotness what she lacks in Kelly’s star quality, although one is forced to wonder from time to time why a 26 year old model is living with her parents in Disturbia (she was “forcibly relocated” from “the City,” apparently) . But before I get into my main point on the remake, a few views from our own rear window (or, rather, porch) here in Chi-town:

Facing northwest, Sevenred’s rear view

Sevenred’s rear view facing due west

I think I could really get some good snooping done given this configuration, supposing I had some accident that immobilized me for some duration. That’s the first feint in Disturbia. The film moves you to a horrendous car accident in which the protagonist’s father – an utterly likable fellow who we don’t know long enough to care about – is, well, killed. Kale comes out of the car limping, so there’s your big immobilization move, right? Wrongo. This is, after all, a teen movie, so our hero has to be a male fantasy. He’s “non-comformist,” tough, cool, funny, smart, etc. Think Will Hunting (the ultimate male fantasy figure) without the Southie grit. The car accident only provides emotional justification for Kale’s criminality. He cold-cocks his Spanish teacher, earning him….tada!…house arrest. So, where Jeffries’s immobility is produced by an actual car crash (and Hitchcock is subtle here, showing the viewer only the still photo of a flipping race car, from which the viewer must deduce that photographer Jeffries took that prize winning shot, and that nobody taking such a shot would be uninjured, therefore…), Kale’s immobility is not physical but juridical. Where Stewart’s immobility is signaled by his visibly encasted leg, Kale’s immobility is tied up in his court-ordered ankle bracelet. Thus begins the first in the series of “updates” for Rear Window.

It’s an interesting move, to be sure. One of the smartest devices of the film is the makeshift “fence” that Kale constructs to reveal his electronic borders. He cannot see where his ankle bracelet will “go red,” thus summoning the police, so he builds a fence of garden tools and rope, walking his electronic borders to discover the device’s coverage area. The film is fascinated with the notion of electronic information, the infosphere. There’s a scene in which the kids coordinate their surveillance of the Bad Guy through cell phones, which would surely make Howard Rheingold pump up his chest with glee. The various surveillance activities are accomplished with cell phones, video recorders, computers, etc. There’s prominent product placement for iPods and iTunes. Kids these days! So connected. There’s also something to be said for the removal of rear window from the city into a suburban milieu. In Hitchcock, voyeurism was something like the flip-side of community – the community that the globe-trotting Jeffries has been neglecting before being forced to connect through his accident; in Disturbia, it is an intensification of boredom, and little more, with only the merest suggestion that online games and cable television constructed a false community for Kale.

But these updates fall flat, since the film retains the essential premise of Hitchcock’s version: immobility is the primary problem of society. Hitchcock’s film is about speed – or, rather, about mobility and immobility. Jeffries problem is that he’s stuck. He’s used to mobility and speed, but he’s trapped in a particular kind of immobility – the physical immobility of his broken leg puts him in the apartment in the first place. It’s no accident that Jeffries injury was caused by a race car, in other words. We’re meant to juxtapose its speed with the slowness to which it has consigned Jeffries. It’s also no accident that Jeffries is a photographer, one who “freezes” time, one who brings motion to a standstill in the still picture. Hitchcock made motion pictures, not still ones. The figure of Jeffries is the figure of immobility itself. And, essentially, Hitchcock is heralding the close of a society of immobility. The problem many of us have now is not immobility, but too much mobility. The problem is not slowness, but speed. In this sense, Disturbia gets its update completely wrong; it’s still stuck on immobility. And it can update the gadgets of surveillance all it wants. That still misses the point.

So, how would I remake Rear Window given this set of problems? I would still want the voyeuristic aspect, but I’d want to speed it up. The Jeffries character would be played by a woman, maybe Audrey Tatou of Amelie and A Very Long Engagement fame (and, of course and unfortunately, The Davinci Code). She would not be a still photographer, but some kind of videographer, experienced in the quick cut, the form of vision built on the half-second image spliced together with other half-second images, the aesthetic of the film trailer (was it Jameson who said you only have to watch the trailers today?). And rather than place her in an apartment, utterly immobile, I would place her on a moving elevated train. So, she doesn’t witness what she takes to be a murder in her own back courtyard, out of her rear window, but rather sees it in an apartment window visible from an elevated subway car. This presents her with a particular problem. In order to investigate the supposed crime, she would have to ride the train past the window, again and again and again, getting only five to ten second views of her suspect each time, supposing that he happens to be home when the train rolls past. Her problem is not immobility, but too much mobility.

At the very least, this scenario provides us with a good cinematic scream moment. In Rear Window, the suspense is elevated when Bad Guy Thorwald (played by later super lawyer Raymond Burr) notices that Jeffries has been spying on him. You see him peer out his window back at Jeffries, and the effect is menacing. How much more chilling would the effect be in the remake? Time and time and time again, our heroine rolls past the window on the train, getting little glimpses of her suspect’s life. She’s moving too fast. This is the best she can do. Sometimes he’s there. Sometimes he’s not. The audience is lulled by the repetition. And then the fifteenth, twentieth, or fortieth time she rolls by, she gets ready for her five second glimpse, and the man is standing at his window, staring out, into the train, directly at her. Needless to say, there’s no good reason for the killer to have noticed such surveillance; his sudden awareness of it would be a species of magical realism (Disturbia at least gestures in this direction, since the Bad Guy purportedly understands that he’s under surveillance by the kids, but we never really get an explanation about how that is).

That said, Disturbia’s exploration of immobility can be interesting in its transformation of the broken leg into the ankle bracelet. Deleuze famously notes the emergence of control societies, with the attendant breakdown of the old disciplinary institutions. So, where the prison and the hospital used to play particular roles, we now see more supple forms, like home health care and house arrest. And the curious scene in which Kale stakes out his limits of movement within electronic space, in the regime of electronic control, can do some work. Where Stewart’s immobility is manifest, and resides in his broken body, Kale’s immobility is outside of him, a fact that the film inelegantly reinforces by showing us that his ankle bracelet constantly itches, like a cast, but also like an external irritant. Moreover, his limits of movements have to be discovered. Kale doesn’t know where his little box made of ticky-tacky ends: only an exploration (by legwork, as it were, or anklework) will establish its contours. If the writers of Disturbia retain the notion of immobility from Hitchcock (to the detriment of the remake), they at least attempt to rethink what constitutes immobility today.

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