Filmmaking and film watching, two activities united in their seedy perversity. Even Ritter's moral focus is fully corrupted by the end as nothing can escape the sordid realities of watching. And the attempts of finding a distance between watching and its lower pleasures just expand cinema's vigilante streak, how easy it can be captured for notions of surveillance, how easy it is for filmmaking with a higher calling really simple becoming the terrain of cops. It is interesting how there's so many Rear Window inspired films but so few of them actually try to adapt the multiple story structure focusing instead in the easy more appealing murder plot as a lot of what the movie does is depedent in the interplay between plots and some of the more chilling bits just involve watching/giving meaning to far more mundane neighbors actions. Of course filming desire is always a dirty business, everything is an extension of different imaginations imposed by Stewart, Kelly and Ritter and some of Hitchcock's best points come when he plays with their different reactions to their neighbors plights, but no of it is ever hide of anxiety and some form of perversity, there's a stain to any gaze, too many hung ups that can never wash.