10 Movies That Judge You For Watching

6. Rear Window

It's no secret that Alfred Hitchcock's masterful thriller Rear Window is wholly concerned with voyeurism, what with wheelchair-bound photographer protagonist L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) killing time by spying on his neighbours and, eventually, witnessing a murder.

But what Hitchcock's film does so cleverly is make the audience complicit in Jeffries' snooping, ultimately holding them to as much account as it does Jeffries himself.

Roger Ebert's brilliant 1983 review of the film perhaps puts it best - "We are all asked to join Stewart in his voyeurism, and we cheerfully agree. We lust after Miss Torso in one of the windows, and we sympathize with Miss Lonelyhearts in another. We're aloof and superior to their plights, of course—until the chilling gaze of the killer locks eyes with ours across the courtyard."

He adds, "The experience is not so much like watching a movie, as like...well, like spying on your neighbors. Hitchcock traps us right from the first. As his hero, Jimmy Stewart, idly picks up a camera with a telephoto lens and begins to scan the open windows on the other side of the courtyard, we look too. And because Hitchcock makes us accomplices in Stewart's voyeurism, we're along for the ride. When an enraged man comes bursting through the door to kill Stewart, we can't detach ourselves, because we looked too, and so we share the guilt and in a way we deserve what's coming to him."

Rear Window may not have any outwardly meta tricks up its sleeve, but the fact that Jeffries is a photographer is surely no coincidence. It is a film as much about humanity's instinctive desire to leer as it is a straight-forward thriller about curiosity run amok.

Basically, Hitchcock is calling you out for being a pervert, but that's OK, because he was clearly one too.