Rear Window With a Different View

A kernel of an idea…

In my late twenties I lived in a 6-story walk-up 1-bedroom apartment. What made it unique wasn’t the lack of an elevator, though it was murder doing laundry and hauling up a full week’s worth of groceries, let me tell you! No, what made it a place I’ll never forget is the set-up.

Three buildings; A, B, and C. Each of them together created a sort of square, like my little diagram below shows:

I actually went to Google Maps and got this screenshot of what the front of the building looks like. I didn’t remember that it was actually more round on the facade. Anyway, what I loved about living there, besides the fact that it was straight out of a Hitchcock movie, was the sounds. At any given moment I could open my window and hear the many different sounds coming from peoples apartments. Kitchen pans, children playing, adults talking, most of them in Spanish. Then there was the opera singers. They really were the highlight of the time I spent there. On the weekends they would play a record and then sing along to it. I wish I had recorded it because they were amazing. I never met them and I couldn’t tell you which apartment was theirs. I just know that it was a man and woman and their voices filled the air. I assume they were rehearsing and singing operatic music was their job and I basically got to hear some great songs for free from my apartment window.

Why am I sharing all this from my past? Well, bringing it all back to the movie Rear Window, (have you seen that movie by the way? If you haven’t, I suggest you watch it because it’s really good) I’ve been thinking a lot about this movie. More importantly about the point-of-view the movie gives us.

A brief background, the movie is based on Cornell Woolrich’s 1942 short story “It Had to Be Murder.” The premise being, when a famed action photographer hurts his leg while on the job is forced to stay at home to recuperate, he witnesses what can only be seen as murder by a neighbor in the apartment building opposite him. Along the way he convinces his devilishly attractive femme fatale girlfriend and physical therapist that the man he’s been spying on has indeed murdered his wife. Of course, he spends most of his day spying on all of his neighbors but the murderer is what’s important to the story.

And for some reason it got me wondering what the story would be like if we were to view it from the point of view of the murderer? Lars Thorwald would be quite an interesting character to dissect. For instance, where should that story begin? There are a lot of assumptions that must be made by us, the viewer, as well as Jefferies (the main character) when coming up with a reason for why Lars felt the need to commit murder on his own wife. Sure, we see one scene where the wife is clearly berating her husband. Something she probably did often enough to him and he likely was sick of it. We also suppose he has a mistress who colludes with him to get the wife out of the way.

But to tell the story from the point of view of Lars, I wonder if going back to right before his wife ended up bed-ridden. What was the reason for it? In the movie Jefferies makes a passive statement about how she all of a sudden got sick and spent most of her days in bed complaining to her husband all the time. Is it possible that Lars was poisoning his wife but realized this method was simply taking too damn long?

Then there’s being in the room when it happens. And by “it” I do mean the murder and eventual dismembering of the body. I still chuckle at the infamous lines near the end of the movie, after we find out that Lars is confessing to everything and the nurse is tending to Jefferies after he just fell out his own window (breaking his other leg by the way), an officer shouts down that the body parts are scattered all over like she supposed. And the head? In a hat box in the apartment. The smug detective and friend to Jefferies who refused to believe his crazy story that the neighbor killed his wife, asks the nurse if she’d like to see it. The hat box. And she says, “No thanks, I don’t want any part of it.” Get it? Yeah, well, I guess you need to have seen the movie…

All this leads me to my May curio fiction story. It’s still a bit rough around the edges but, picture this, a recently retired blue collar worker now spends most days as nurse-maid to his sickly wife who nags him incessantly. While out grocery shopping he bumps into a really pretty woman (maybe younger?) who sympathizes with him over coffee and pretty soon they fall in love. But he can’t run off with her, he’s got his wife to think about! Or does he? The idea to commit murder comes up (I wonder who initially mentions it?) and though their plan seems foolproof they don’t realize a nosey neighbor across the way may have just witnessed the whole thing. Now, I realize it’s nearly on the nose to the original which is why I want to do a few more major tweaks to the story. For instance, what if the whole idea to kill his wife is just a ruse being played on the woman he meets to con her out of money and they do this sort of thing, he and his wife, all the time? It’s a bit weebly-wobbly but you get where I’m going with this.

The main idea is the entire story must be seen through the eyes of the murderer and because I want to include it in my curio fiction collection of short stories, it needs to incorporate a typewriter in some way as well.

What story have you read/watched recently that you think could be interesting if told from a different characters POV?