Heights

—Overview
—Photos
—About this Film
—Spiritual Connections

There is a sense in which watching film is an exercise in voyeurism. We are looking at a world that we are not a part of. Good film can draw us into that world and make us feel a part of it, or at least help us to understand our connection to that world. There is nothing wrong with this kind of voyeurism in film. Indeed, it is one of the three V’s that make up film. (Jon Boorstin refers to the “voyeur’s eye,� the “vicarious eye,� and the “visceral eye.�)

Heights is a film built around voyeurism. The opening scene is watching a class rehearse a scene from Macbeth. So we are in the position of watching a class watch a play. We are being voyeurs in the second degree. Diana is a renowned actor getting ready to play Lady Macbeth on Broadway. We see her rehearse. We see her audition an actor for an Off-Broadway play she will direct. Always, she is busy being something other than who she really is – even at her own birthday party.

Her daughter Isabel is a photographer – a voyeuristic profession. Again, we watch her taking pictures and we become second degree voyeurs yet again. She keeps trying to find something interesting to photograph, but has no sense of interest in her own life.

There is even a scene in the film in which Alec, an aspiring actor, is working as a waiter at a sexual voyeur party. We see him seeing others watching others. We are voyeurs of the third degree.

As voyeurs, we see the secrets that the characters hide from everyone else. We want to see their passion, but instead we only see the ways they lock that passion away. Diana knows how to bring passion to the stage, but has no way of showing her anger over her husband’s affair or her fear for Isabel’s potentially disastrous marriage. Isabel has a chance to do important work, but meekly sets it aside because of her upcoming wedding. Her fiancé Jonathan, when asked if what he has with Isabel is real, answers, “It’s close enough.�

We spend the film watching the lives of various people interact, but we are always at a distance, peeping in a window (actually more like watching someone peeping), so to speak, without really encountering who these people are. All we see is the misery and pain that fill their lives. But we are kept at such a distance that we aren’t really able to connect with their lives, perhaps because they have such trouble connecting with their own lives.

That distance between audience and film becomes a problem. Instead of being able to find some way to participate in the story, we end up being nothing more than bystanders watching the bleeding souls of these unhappy people. And they are unhappy. The best that can be said is that by the end of the story they know the unhappiness that has always been there.

There is a bit of hope offered for a few of the characters, but it is such a faint light, that the viewer knows that it will not burn long, and eventually what bit of happiness might have come is doomed because these people just don’t know how to be happy.

So for all our watching, we come away frustrated. The nature of voyeurism is that we want to see something that we want for ourselves. In this film we only see miserable people become more miserable as their facades fall away. The window we are looking into gives us a glimpse into a Sartrean Hell.

—Overview
—Photos
—About this Film
—Spiritual Connections