The Rear Window
When Alfred Hitchcock optioned “It Had to be Murder” he had to change the title. It simply wasn’t resonant enough and, besides, it left no reason for ambiguity. So when the film version of this classic tale which has inspired countless variations upon it by other writers was released into theaters, it was under the title Rear Window. And the rear window is mentioned right there in the first paragraph. It is frame through which the temporarily immobile narrator looks upon the world outside the apartment he is relatively confined to. That the window faces toward the back is significant: it is behind us where our eyes are not normally focused that suspicious activity usually goes on unnoticed.
Cops
The typical Woolrich story is about a guy left to his own devices—the friend he must depend upon due to his own incapacity for some reason—who must work his way out of the web of deceit in which he has gotten himself trapped. He can rarely rely upon the cops for help either because they are actively pursuing him or hindering his efforts by not believing his story. Cops thus come to symbolize the various problematic aspects of a system of justice upon which the average guy cannot depend.
Heads or Tails
The first-person narrator of “New York Blues” gets philosophical at one, as Woolrich characters are wont to do. And arrives at a conclusion which is perhaps the defining philosophical statement of the author’s entire body of work. The symbol at the center of his contemplation is one almost equally applicable to any other crime-related story he ever composed:
“There’s an innocuous explanation for everything. Everything is a coin that has two sides to it, and one side is innocuous but the other can be ominous.”
Unregulated Authoritarianism
“Dead on Her Feet” offers one of the most uniquely gruesome symbolic representations of the abuse of law enforcement authority by a cop with a wickedly corrupt soul in the annals of crime thriller fiction. The mystery revolves around the peculiarly Depression-era fad of the marathon dance competition. The cop at the center of the investigation already knows that a suspect in the case is not the guilty party yet for no reason other than his own sadistic enjoyment at exercising his unchallenged authority forces the man to keep dancing with a dead woman until he is driven to the point of madness. The marathon dance becomes in that moment a symbol of the corruption of power.
Skepticism
Skepticism is so pervasive in the fiction of Woolrich that it rises to the level of symbolism. But the symbolism is manifested in different ways. The cops don’t believe anybody and so their skepticism comes to symbolize the paranoia of those in authority. Journalistic media tends to jump on the side of a story that distrusts any suspected criminal claiming innocence and so the skepticism of the reporters becomes symbolic of the power of persuasion. Typically, in those stories where one man is fighting his way out of the web of suspicion, the number of people he can truly trust comes down to just one person which insinuates a symbolic attitude that most people can’t open the gates of their own skepticism to more than a few people. Trust is an element in short supply in the dark world of Cornell Woolrich and it may paradoxically be a cause rather than an effect of what happens there.
