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Analysis Of The Movie Rear Window

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Rear Window directed by Alfred Hitchcock is revered as one of the greatest movies in American Cinema; every shot and plot point in the story considered a work of art from the creative mind of the ambitious director. Due to this, it has been referenced many times in pop culture, TV shows, amongst other forms of media. One of these TV shows is the long-running titan of cartoons, The Simpsons. The episode “Bart of Darkness” is a parody of the whole movie, using the camera angles and plot points from the movie for comedic and mocking purposes, yet in its own peculiar way pays homage to the source material and Hitchcock with respect.
The similarity between the episode and the movie isn’t very apparent at the beginning, but the show does drop in some subtle hints at the beginning to tell what it will be referencing later. The episode takes place during the peak of summer like Rear Window, and shows everybody suffering under it. Lisa and Bart beg their parents to purchase a pool to beat the heat after going for a swim in Otto’s mobile pool. But the most important piece of evidence comes at a scene which can be written off as unimportant to the casual viewer. When the mobile pool stops abruptly in front of the Simpson’s house, water flows through the “rear window” into Otto’s truck, to which he says, “I gotta replace that window”, (Groening, Bart of Darkness). It is a very subtle but clear case of foreshadowing to what the episode is going to parody later that the observant viewer can see and appreciate.
The parody starts to become more obvious after Bart breaks his leg in a pool accident. He essentially becomes the L.B. Jeffries of the story afterwards; bored, isolated, and with nothing better to do than to watch the world turn. He starts to watch other people go on with their mundane lives with a telescope out of boredom until he comes across the neighbor Ned Flanders acting very suspiciously, who becomes like Thornwald in Rear Window. The episode follows a similar storyline to that of the movie, with the wife gone for a long period of time and seeing both bury something in the ground, which could be either be a body or a piece of crucial evidence. Bart and Jeff become so paranoid that they send their

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