Rear Window is often considered a film that thematizes cinematic spectatorship. In other words, it is considered to be a movie about watching movies. L. B. Jefferies, a photo journalist for a magazine that resembles Life, sits transfixed for hours looking into other people's windows, just as cinema spectators gaze intently at the film screen. Indeed, the windows across the courtyard resemble miniature movie screens. Because of an accident on the job, Jefferies, or Jeff as he is often called, is confined to a wheelchair much like cinematic spectators sit confined in their theater seats. A good deal of his watching occurs at night or from the shadows, just as film spectators view a film in a darkened theater. Most importantly, because Jeff seems to see his own desires and anxieties projected onto the rear windows/movie screens, the film reveals what psychoanalytic film critics have argued since the 1960s, namely that cinematic spectatorship is akin to the dream state, the state in which, according to Sigmund Freud, we symbolically fulfill our unconscious wishes. Sitting immobile in the theater, isolated from the rest of the audience by virtue of the darkness, the film spectator is seemingly left alone to peer secretly at the illusion of a private world displayed on the screen. In turn, this world on the screen functions like a projected image of the spectator's own subjective fantasies.