In Rear Window, L. B. “Jeff” Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart), a photojournalist bedridden in a cast in his small Greenwich-Village apartment for six weeks after an automobile accident, has “nothing to do but look out the window at the neighbors.” In the middle of a rainy night, he hears a woman scream and then sees her husband, Mr. Thorwald (Raymond Burr), leave and return three times. In the following days, Jeff obsessively watches the suspected murderer calmly wrap a knife and saw in newspaper, ship off a large trunk, and fiddle with his wife’s wedding ring. Reluctant at first, his fashionista girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) eventually joins him in his amateur sleuthing.

In Only Murders in the Building, three residents of the Arconia, a lavish apartment building in the Upper West Side, accidentally become friends when they discover their shared love for a true-crime podcast called “All’s Not OK in Oklahoma”: Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin), a washed-up star of a 90s cop show, Oliver Putnam (Martin Short), a smarmy has-been Broadway director on the brink of bankruptcy, and Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez), a mysterious young woman with bright-red Beats headphones. After learning about the apparent suicide of one of the residents in the building, Tim Kono (Julian Cihi), they suspect murder and launch their own true-crime podcast, called “Only Murders in the Building,” as they investigate.

Democratic Individualism

For the characters in Rear Window, one of the most puzzling aspects of the crime is why Mr. Thorwald would parade it “in front of an open window.” Similarly, in the first moments of Only Murders in the Building, Charles narrates that there’s no reason to worry about crime in New York City because “there’s eyes on you all over the place here.”

Population density, however, is not a sufficient basis for community.

In Rear Window’s title credits, the camera looks out the rear window of Jeff’s apartment on a sweltering summer morning, and as the shades scroll up to reveal the apartments across the backyard, we see the intimate details of the lives of his neighbors: a man shaving while listening to the radio, a man and woman sleeping on their fire escape to escape the heat, a beautiful young woman putting on her bra and dancing while she brews coffee, and a husband and wife quarreling in their bedroom.

Similarly, in the animated title credits of Only Murders in the Building, the camera zooms in on the entrance of the Arconia before it abruptly pans up the building itself, showing through the front-facing windows the main characters, alone in their respective apartments: Charles trying to cook an omelet, Oliver on his phone while drinking a glass of wine in an ostentatious purple coat, and Mabel sketching on her iPad.

As Alexis de Tocqueville observed of citizens of democratic regimes, the characters are “indifferent and like strangers to each other.” Democratic peoples, Tocqueville writes, are predisposed to the disease of individualism, a sentiment that inclines “each citizen to isolate himself” from his neighbors, to “withdraw to the side with his family and his friends,” and “finally to enclose himself entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

Tocqueville writes that this disposition to individualism is eventually fatal to both virtue and liberty. Praising public indifference, individualism encourages selfishness and shrinks the soul of the citizen. Indeed, some in democracies call the citizen that “willingly abandons the society to itself” a good neighbor. Placing citizens “side by side, without a common bond to hold them,” it makes them vulnerable to tyranny—or in these stories, to killers who attempt to take advantage of their neighbors’ isolation from and indifference to each other.

Hitchcock most overtly alerts his audience to these dangers when the fire-escape couple realize their dog has been murdered and its body left in the backyard between apartment buildings (notably, the most “public” space in the film). From the fire escape, the wife screams in agony into the night: “You don’t know the meaning of the word neighbors. Neighbors like each other, speak to each other, care if anybody lives or dies. But none of you do.” As she turns to go inside, the neighbors, having been drawn to their windows by the commotion, casually return to their private lives with a shrug. “It’s only a dog,” says a partygoer at a neighboring apartment.

Similarly, rather than eulogize the deceased Tim Kono at his memorial service in the lobby of the building, the residents of the Arconia callously grumble that Tim, an asthmatic, prevented them from using their fireplaces. “I hated that guy,” says Charles. “He ruined Christmas,” exclaims one resident. “He once yelled at me for smoking outside,” adds another. “Can we all just be grateful he’s gone?” asks the board director, moments after admitting that the service was being held only for some “bulls**t insurance purposes.” On the lookout for a suspect, the protagonists finally notice a resident (played by Michael Cyril Creighton) crying, only to learn that his cat, Evelyn, died the night before. A neighbor gasps. “Did you say Evelyn died?” “The sweet blond tabby?” “Oh no! She died?” As a kid, Tim Kono knew “everyone” in the building. At his death, he is, as Charles observes, “less likeable than a dead cat.”

“Looking” in Rear Window

Hitchcock uses the rear window of Jeff’s apartment to represent the big screen on which we watch Jeff watch his neighbors. In his review of the Rear Window, Roger Ebert writes that “[t]he experience is not so much like watching a movie, as like . . . well, spying on your neighbors.”

Jeff’s “looking” seems to strengthen his two seemingly inconsistent vices: detachment and nosiness. Jeff’s long-distance camera allows him to be distant and up close at the same time. He investigates the steamy details of his neighbors’ private lives and is enraged when his detective friend Coyne (Wendell Corey) refuses to search Mr. Thorwald’s apartment without cause and a warrant. Looking can be a threat to privacy. In addition, looking through rear windows affords the spectator only context-deficient, narrow images of life. As a result, Jeff knows the intimate lives of his neighbors but does not know them. His belittling nicknames for them—“Miss Torso,” the “eat-drink-and-be-merry” shirtless dancer, and “Miss Lonelyhearts,” the spinster who drinks alone and eventually considers suicide—reduce complex human beings to their most obvious characteristic. Detached observation promises to but cannot ultimately satiate our longing for community.

If the rear window out of which Jeff looks represents the big screen, the small windows across the backyard seem to predict the rise of new, more democratic mediums for film. Following Rear Window, Only Murders in the Building makes this more explicit: the alighted windows of the Arconia in the opening credits represent the phone screens on which we, individual viewers, binge the show or aimlessly scroll as it plays on the TV in the background. These new mediums further isolate the citizens of democratic regimes by privatizing the viewer’s experience. Indeed, we in the audience have become more like Jeff since the advent of streaming services. We have become bored and lonely spectators, entertained by rear windows.

“Looking” and Celebrity in Only Murders in the Building

Like Jeff in Rear Window, Oliver, Mabel, and Charles are both prying and emotionally distant. Able-bodied (unlike Jeff), they break into their neighbor’s apartments at will and often do not clearly reveal that they are recording their conversations with the residents of the Arconia. “Is that even legal?” asks Charles. The punchline of some of the show’s darkest comedic moments is the incongruity between the seriousness of Kono’s death and the levity with which Oliver treats it as he uses the sponsorship for the podcast to stave off eviction. Like Jeff in Rear Window, they too nickname their neighbors—“Sexy Bassoonist” (Amy Ryan), “Real Estate Woman” (Zainab Jah), and “Cat Daddy.”

As Tocqueville observed, democratic art is mass produced, and, hence, it is cheap and widely available, imitative and realistic. Rather than build grand palaces of white marble that will stand for millennia as a testament to the greatness of the human spirit, people living in democracies are compelled to make a quick profit and build useful buildings with white-washed bricks. Rather than imagine the transcendence of the soul or things beyond or far from their time, artists in democracies “lend their talent to reproducing exactly the details of the private life that they have constantly before their eyes.”

As Only Murder in the Building shows, the true-crime podcast has further democratized art: anyone can start a podcast. Their podcast is a hastily released, low-budget production (Oliver plans to return the equipment in a few days to get his money back) about a grisly murder that mimics other true-crime podcasts and, like most podcasts, is available for free.

This hyper democratization of art constantly tempts the average person with the possibility of celebrity. (For example, the first two seasons of the genre-defining true-crime podcast, “Serial,” have been downloaded more than 250 million times.) But the result of fame is often loneliness: “they never know the real us,” muses Charles, an actor who still gets recognized on the street. Moreover, the disordered desire for celebrity tends to isolate individuals by encouraging them to share mere curated versions of their lives, hiding or simply lying about the “messy” and hence human parts of their stories.

Attempting to make their podcast “pop,” the protagonists to a large degree live life as if they themselves were being viewed through a rear window. As both narrator of the true-crime podcast and investigator of the crime (thus combining the roles of Jimmy Stewart and L. B. “Jeff” Jeffries), Charles frequently confuses art and reality. “I can’t tell if you’re acting or not,” says Mabel in frustration, after realizing the anecdote Charles told her about his abusive father was actually from an episode of his TV show Brazzos.

On their first date, Jan, the “Sexy Bassoonist,” liberally shares with Charles how her absent father’s preference for her half-sister (who had chosen the flute) led her to the bassoon. When she asks Charles about his childhood, he responds vaguely (“First, um . . . my parents were great. Yeah.”) and then deflects (“Oh, you know what? I love . . . that purse!”). Refusing to share his life, Charles cannot form genuine relationships or be a part of genuine community. “You know, the sharing of stories is kind of transactional,” retorts Jan. “When someone gives you a story, you owe them one of equal or greater value in return.” She recklessly escalates the intimacy of the relationship in the way of an impersonal transaction, but her comment does point to the truth: relationships are built on trust as each individual shares and guards the true and progressively intimate parts of each other’s life, over time.

Tutoring Self-Interest

Perhaps even more than Rear Window, Only Murders in the Building presents a dark picture of disconnectedness in modern American life. And yet, the characters in these stories find common life together and come to see the importance of shared public life—in spite of, or maybe because of, their democratic art.

Mary Nichols and Denise Schaeffer observe that Jeff and Lisa’s relationship is at an impasse, since Lisa “belongs to that rarefied atmosphere of Park Avenue” and he to a life of adventure—until they begin the common enterprise of looking, and “their differences become less divisive than complementary.” Though from different generations and backgrounds, Charles, Oliver, and Mabel form their unlikely friendship through investigating the murder and producing their podcast.

However, as they continue to look together, these characters begin to look with empathy as they imagine themselves in their neighbors’ shoes. Detective Doyle’s scolding—“that’s a secret, private world you’re looking into out there”—prompts Lisa to question their “rear window ethics” and Jeff to imagine how he would feel if his neighbors looked at him as he looks at them, “like a bug under glass.” “Whatever happened to that old saying, ‘Love thy neighbor’?” reflects Lisa.

As Charles, Oliver, and Mabel try to find a reason for their audience to care about Tim Kono’s death, Mabel (who knew Tim when they were kids) eventually says, “He was alone. Isn’t that enough to make us care? You of all people should know how f*cking sad that is.” “You’re right,” says Charles. “Tim Kono was a person. He was a neighbor.” Charles begins to care about Tim when he notices their similarity. The stories present an “empathetic looking” as the alternative to not looking, on one hand, and detached looking, on the other.

Tocqueville explained that Americans had mitigated individualism by an education in political liberty cultivated in their local communities, and especially through “the doctrine of self-interest well understood.” “Clear and sure” rather than “lofty,” this enlightened self-love can habituate democratic citizens to sacrifice “a portion of their time and their wealth” for the common good by reminding them that their particular interest merges with the general interest. When they see that the community is composed of individuals like them, they believe they indirectly serve themselves “by serving [their] fellows.”

In Only Murders in the Building, Oliver and Mabel discover that Jan poisoned Tim Kono for breaking up with her, and as she poisons Charles in his apartment, she reveals her plan to gas the entire building through the air duct connecting the newly opened fireplaces. “I mean, in a way, it makes us all connected in the building,” she jokes as she leaves. Oliver and Mabel find Charles writhing on the floor and mumbling barely intelligible gibberish, but rather than run for their lives, the protagonists rush to the boiler room to stop her. What started as enlightened self-love has led them to risk their lives for their neighbors. When Jan pulls her gun on them, Charles stands up for his new friends (at least in his drug-addled head): “before this, I was a hollow shell walking around. And they made me alive.” To everyone else, he is speaking slurred, garbled nonsense, but it distracts Jan long enough for Oliver and Mabel to knock the gun out of her hand.

If Tocqueville is right, that moralists should principally turn their minds to the doctrine of self-interest well understood, then Rear Window and Only Murders in the Building serve an indispensable function by reminding us of our isolation, pointing to the dangers of detached observation, and tutoring our self-interest, which may “imperceptibly” draw democratic citizens “closer to virtue by habits.”

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In a letter sent to the Biden Administration the next day, the National School Boards Association likened parents’ protests about COVID-19 policies and critical race theory to “domestic terrorism.” In response, the Attorney General directed the FBI to work with local law enforcement to address this “criminal conduct.”  In a similar vein, the Connecticut Senate Democrats recently tweeted a cartoon depicting concerned parents going to a school board meeting as famous villains from horror movies.

Two authors in the Washington Post accused these parents of asserting a radical and novel form of parental rights that deviates from “common law and case law in the United States.”

What rights do parents have in directing their children’s education?

Parental Rights at the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United States first upheld this right of parents in a series of landmark cases in the mid-1920s. In Meyer v. Nebraska (1925) the Court struck down a state law prohibiting instruction in German to students before the ninth grade; in the lesser-known decision of Farrington v. Tokushige (1927), the Court overturned a similar law in Hawaii that forbade instruction in Japanese. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), the Court struck down an Oregon law that effectively outlawed private schools.

The primary motivation behind these laws was the nativist impulse to assimilate the children of immigrants, to “standardize” children, into white, Protestant, American culture. In Oregon, for example, the Ku Klux Klan was among the most powerful and vocal supporters of the law forbidding private (read: Catholic) education. In a pamphlet widely distributed in Oregon, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan wrote of Catholic parents and their school-aged children: “somehow, these mongrel hordes must be Americanized; failing that, deportation is the only remedy.” “Democratic education,” he wrote, is the “one unfailing defense against every kind of alienism in America.”

In overturning these laws, the Supreme Court established what William Galston has described as “a rebuttable presumption” in favor of parental liberty: parents have the right to direct their children’s education for the simple reason that parents typically know the unique needs and capacities of their children and desire what is best for them. As the Court wrote in Pierce, “those who nurture [a child] and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.” At their best, parents “recognize” what “additional obligations” their children are capable of and called to and then “direct” them to these ends.

In these same decisions, the Supreme Court also upheld the general authority of the state to compel school attendance and require schools to teach, in the language of Pierce, “certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship.”

The Supreme Court was able to balance the specific rights of parents to direct their children’s education and the general authority of the state to form educated citizens by drawing from seven decades of state supreme court decisions on the issue. Indeed, the Meyer Court alludes to this rich history when it identifies the right of parents to direct their children’s education as one of “those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”

The Supreme Court of Nebraska’s 1914 decision of State ex rel Kelley v. Ferguson beautifully summarizes this: on one hand, since the public school is “one of the main bulwarks of our nation,” the court pledged to “not knowingly do anything to undermine it.” On the other hand, it promised not to permit “our love for this noble institution” to destroy “the God-given and constitutional right of a parent to have some voice in the bringing up and education of his children.”

A Rising Tide of Homeschooling

The dramatic increase in the number of homeschooled students since the beginning of the COVID pandemic and the recent fervor over public-school curriculum corroborate the longstanding, common-sense presumption of American courts: parents do indeed care for their kids and, being present in their lives, have some inclination as to what is best for them.

According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the number of homeschooled children more than tripled in a year, since the start of the pandemic: 3.3% of children in the United States were educated at home in 2016. That number grew to 5.4% in spring 2020, 11.1% by October 2020, and 19.5% by May 2021. The population of Black students educated at home rose from 3% in May 2020 to 16% in October 2020. These latest numbers reflect students not in private or public school (and not students accessing public-school instruction online at home).

Why do parents choose to educate their children at home? Before the pandemic, in 2017, the National Center for Education Statistics (a federal agency) reported that 80% were concerned with the environment at school, “such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure”; 67% wanted to provide moral instruction; 61% were dissatisfied with the academic instruction at school; 51% want to provide religious instruction.

As of yet, the NCES has yet to report data since the start of the pandemic, but one can imagine a similarly diverse set of motivations: are not some parents, perhaps of immuno-compromised children, worried about the spread of COVID-19 in schools, just as other parents are concerned about the effects masking might have on their kids’ ability to socialize and make friends? Are not some parents worried about teaching that a child’s white skin makes her an oppressor, just as others are concerned that the mistreatment of Black people in America might be glossed over in history class? Are not many parents concerned about the consistency of their kids’ education as schools unpredictably vacillate between in-person and online learning in response to infection rates?

Parents of many religious, economic, and political backgrounds care about their kids.

Parental Rights in Public Schools

But what role should parents have in directing their children’s education inside public schools?

David French argues that parents should “send their kids to schools where they will thrive” rather than attempt to “dictate public school curriculum.” The substantial increase in at-home education suggests the prudence of this approach. This solution, however, leaves many parents without viable options for the foreseeable future; in addition, encouraging parents to withdraw their kids from public schools when they disagree with the curriculum might further polarize American life. At their best, public schools teach our increasingly diverse citizenry about our common history and shared commitment to equal liberty under the law.

But while the First Circuit Court ruled in 1995 that no parent has the right to dictate public school curriculum, there is a rich history of case law in the United States that upholds the right of parents to exempt their own children from certain activities in public school.

For example, in the early 1870s, parents in Wisconsin wanted their son excused from his geography class so that he could have more time to learn the skills necessary to keep the accounts of the family business. When the boy did not turn in his geography homework, his teacher beat him, and his parents sued. In court, the defense argued that “by the very act of sending his child to school,” the parent implicitly agrees to submit to “the judgment of the teacher.” When the case finally reached the Supreme Court of Wisconsin in 1874, the court disagreed, explaining that parents have the “paramount right to make a reasonable selection from the prescribed studies for [their children] to pursue” because parents likely “know the health, temperament, aptitude, and deficiencies” of their own children. “The parent,” the court wrote, “is quite as likely to make as wise and judicious selection [of his children’s curriculum] as the teacher.”

In California in 1920, parents objected to their children’s participation in the public school’s mandatory dance classes because it violated their religious beliefs. The parents proposed alternative ways to satisfy the state’s physical-exercise requirements, which the principal refused to consider. The children were expelled from the school for their absence from the class, and their parents sued. In the 1921 decision of Hardwick v. Board of School Trustees of Fruitridge School District, the Supreme Court of California ruled in favor of the parents: as long as the parents’ requests “relate to matters in rearing and education of their children,” are “not offensive to the moral well-being of the children,” and are not “inconsistent with the best interests of society,” the public school must accommodate. To rule otherwise, the Supreme Court of California asserted, would be to subvert “the home life so essential to the safety and security of society and the government which regulates it—the very opposite effect of what the public school system is designed to accomplish.”

Mere Creatures of the State?

“Common law and case law in the United States” uphold both the general authority of state governments to educate future citizens and the specific right of parents to direct their own children’s education. According to these state supreme-court decisions, state governments may, for example, enact compulsory school-attendance laws and minimum standards for homeschooling, but parents have wide discretion in determining where, when, how, and why their children will be educated. The reason is that, although there are exceptions to the rule, parents typically know and love their children—not “children” in the abstract or even individual students in a classroom. Their kids.

Long ago, the Supreme Court in Meyer rejected the austere educational measures of the Spartan regime that submerged the individual into the city. “The child is not the mere creature of the State,” the Supreme Court added in Pierce, two years later. In America, where homeschooling is legal in all fifty states and where countless parents have had their children exempted from particular activities in public schools, we’re far from these realities—and this thanks in large part to the legal protections secured almost one hundred years ago by the Supreme Court. But if the recent denigration of parents is a harbinger of things to come, then liberty-loving people need to make the case, once again, for the right of parents to direct their children’s education, including in public schools.

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