I saw possibility.

Looking through those windows was as if we were seeing the many, quite believable endings to Jeff and Lisa’s relationship. We can’t tell the future, but Hitchcock gave us a glimpse at these different paths Jeff and Lisa, together or apart, would take and where it could or could not lead them.

In Miss Torso, I saw it as a reflection on not just Lisa, but Jeffries as well. It was almost a silent comment on what it was like to flit emotionlessly between people, without any attachment or relationship to hold onto. And then, in the end, how her boyfriend (fiancée?) comes back and we see just how lonely she might have really been, how nothing is as golden as it looks.

Miss Lonelyhearts, well it’s in her name. She’s lonely, but on a caliber that doesn’t begin to be summable in a single word. It’s an emotion so beyond her own ability to handle, that she considers suicide. Where Miss Torso might also be lonely, though less obviously, she stills has someone coming back to her. Miss Lonelyhearts has no one. It feels like a reflection on the emotional weight of what it means to be completely alone in this world.

In the same vein, the Composer is lonely too. Is he not? He may be surrounded by clamoring fans, and fellow artists, but who does he really have? Who does he have to come home to? He comes home drunk to no one. Writes his music alone. He’s alone. I think it’s an astute comparison on what it is like to be alone both mentally (in the case of the Composer) and physically (as with Miss Lonelyhearts).

Then the Newlyweds and the Thorwalds who aren’t quite so different. Not really. There is just 20-30 years separating them from where the Newlyweds began and the Thorwalds ended. You can see it in the exasperated, slightly annoyed Mr. Newlywed. And then above all of them, the couple that sleeps on their balcony and whose only joy, from the looks of it, is a pesky dog.

I think that all these people, the different lives being led and seen through ‘rear windows,’ are to Jeffries what is likely to come about if he continues with Lisa. He is like a dog on a leash, he feels as though his freedom is slowly being stripped away.