A Film Canon

Disturbia may have been directed by D.J. Caruso, but it's producer Ivan Reitman who really leaves his signature upon this inflection of Rear Window through 80s suburban horror. A year after his father dies in a car accident, Kale Brecht's (Shia LaBeouf) increasingly erratic behavior lands him a three-month house arrest, during which he gradually comes to suspect his neighbour, Robert Turner (David Morse), of being a serial killer. Virtually the entire film takes place in this house, which generalizes the 80s bedroom into the basis for full-scale residential architecture in a similar way to Big - although whereas Big glimpses a more radical, postmodern architectural aesthetic, Disturbia's transformation is more dimensional than categorical, an 80s bedroom that has simply swollen to take on the dimensions of an entire house. That's appropriate, since the film's vision is nostalgic, rather than futuristic - or, perhaps more accurately, partakes of 00s nostalgia for the 80s sense of breathless futurity (and, for all its homeliness the house's flamboyant, panoptic sweep would feel just as home in the sci-fi world of Brian de Palma's neo-Hitchcock cycle). From that perspective, Julie Brecht's (Carrie-Ann Moss) punitive confiscation of her son's various interfaces and communicative devices, and Kale's proportionate fascination with the world outside his window - "this is reality without the TV, a world right outside my window" - isn't a reactionary or cautionary argument for reality over technological mediation, but rather an exquisite prescience for the extent to which the architectural thresholds of 80s suburban horror were all so many nascent prospects of exactly these interfaces. It's not an argument for physicality over virtuality, but a complex fascination with the moment at which physicality quivered at the threshold of virtuality, and cinema quivered at the threshold of post-cinematic entertainment technologies - the thrill of a voyeuristic propinquity that's barely contained by binoculars. When Wes Craven or John Carpenter's protagonists gaze through windows, the film suggests, they're glimpsing, progressively and ever more distantly, every interface that's progressively denied Kale - and the film is lovingly, achingly nostalgic for windows, the glassiness of swimming pools - just as L.B. Jeffries is glimpsing them even more distantly. That said, the thresholds of Kale's property are by no means limited to its windows - not only does the house arrest force him to explore every possible limit to his property, but those limits are grafted onto the limits of his own body, the ankle bracelet that he's forced to wear. As a result, Kale is forced to register suburban thresholds on his body at the very moment at which those thresholds become digital, rather than analog, turning his relentless movement from mailbox to attic, his attempt to determine exactly when his garden bed ends and his neighbour's begins, into a kind of cyborg act - the logical conclusion of his predicament is that he can only exist while plugged in to the house, perhaps explaining why we're made privy to virtually every power outlet. If he's a cyborg, though, he's a likable cyborg - Lawnmower Man reimagined as a vehicle for technophilia, rather than technophobia - and LaBeouf turns in the most endearing performance of his career so far, exuding a clumsy, contagious goofiness that gives the whole film an 80s naivete, or good faith; the stalker as a sweetie. In the end, it's not really an adaptation, or even an update, so much as the awareness that the way we watch suburban horror has changed, and a concomitant longing to be one with the original audience, as if Kale's bedroom-house were ultimately a surrogate multiplex, a concatenation of screen-windows that might just allow us to glimpse Freddy before the fire.