It is perhaps the mark of a great film that it can be appreciated and understood on many levels as a genuine work of art. Rear Window is rich in powerful symbols, metaphors, self-conscious and cultural allusions, and shrewd commentary. I don't think anyone can truly grasp all the complexities of a film like this after one viewing, and I'm sure I still haven't after the screening and a comprehensive analysis by Elizabeth Cowie. Rear Window's simple plot was made far more powerful in Hitchcock's skilled hands, and is transformed into a complicated sexual allegory, questioning assumptions about marriage and guilt. Detective Doyle, caught looking at Miss Torso out the window, hastily looks away when Jeff bluntly asks, "How's your wife?" Yet, despite Jeff's own obligations to the (equally beautiful) Lisa, he himself openly examines the dancer's cleavage. Such hypocrisy on the part of both characters helps to suggest the film's underlying message: as Jeff prefers the passive position of viewing Thornwald from a distance, so do we as humans instinctively desire that which is forbidden. Of course, there are many other things that can be pointed out and admired in this film, notably Jeff's incapacitated similarity to Mrs. Thornwald, the many pseudo-Freudian connotations (notably, "Thorwald wielding a large knife....given Jeff's immobility... can be read metaphorically as a 'castration'... symbolized as well by the image of his smashed camera at the beginning of the film." [Cowie, 484-5]), and the many different layers of meaning suggested in the complex soundtrack.