Her Entry
Watching "Rear Window" (1954)
Rear Window. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954. 115 mins.
Why do we do what we do? Can we change, and if we did, what would that change feel like?
As mentioned in my previous post (Hard Novels, Jan 6, 2026), I’ve been pondering why Simenon’s tale of a man in a room — looking across the internal courtyard of his tenement building into a window opposite, at the spectacle unfolding, and what it said about his own floundering existence — had affected me so much. Started living in my head. Rent-free, as they say.
Then I remembered an episode from my own life.
After my first marriage ended, I lived for a few years in Berlin, took an apartment in Charlottenburg (no scruffy Kreuzberg for me) and ended up perched on the third floor, looking across that same courtyard arrangement, a row of windows opposite, as I worked at my kitchen table. Making the collages for my book American Campgrounds, as it happens.
It was a fairly mundane view, no nymphets on parade or crime scenes unfolding before my eyes. The courtyard activity was barely that, the odd person collecting their bicycle, or venturing from one building to the next. A mailman making deliveries if you were lucky. Charlottenburg has a long-held reputation for being fairly dull, hipsters scorned it, maintaining that it was the only region in the old West Berlin that hadn’t possessed a nightclub. That sounded good to me. But I digress …
Most of my fellow tenants couldn’t even be seen, hidden away behind net curtains. But one ground floor window caught my eye, and began to preoccupy me.
Maybe the net curtain was a little flimsier, or old and worn out, but I could see something, I wasn’t sure what, occurring in that room. I could see a figure sat in what I took to be a rocking chair, moving back and forth, back and forth, sometimes faster, but seemingly always in motion. A dark shadow of repetitive movement.
Maybe someone engaged in an obscure aerobic activity in a home gym, or a particularly vigorous elderly person enjoying some volkslieder or schlager. I didn’t know, and for a moment I even flashed on Norman’s mother in Psycho. It was no big deal, but I was curious, and continued to be so. After living with that daily view for a few months, I found out what I was truly seeing.