It was a remarkable news item last week: The lookout point on the tower of the Sint-Niklaas Church in Mesen must be closed on Sundays by order of the justice of the peace. Because the neighbors, they say, have lost their privacy. They complain about visitors who shout from above, who look in with binoculars, who whistle at their daughter when she walks through the garden in a bikini. The story was reminiscent of that other case in London. There, residents of luxury flats had sued the Tate Modern last year, because the museum had built a viewing platform from which you could look into their apartment nearby. “It’s like being on display in a zoo,” he said. The judge also ruled in favor of those residents.
Insight. Inside view. It’s a thing. Especially in Flanders. You just have to visit someone who has just moved and the sentence is already uttered: “That there is no insight, oof.” It’s bizarre when you think about how scared we are that the outside world could be looking into our nest. How threatening strange looks are. How strange we find it that other people see us hanging on our sofa with a remote control in our hand, or a plate of spaghetti on our knees. That we kiss at the window, or make love at dawn.
Love on the other side
It also reminded me of the first chapters of Wellness, Nathan Hill’s latest novel. Jack and Elisabeth each live on one side of a street canyon in Chicago and look inside each other. They learn enough about each other to become fascinated by what they see. Their respective insights thus become the basis for their falling in love.
Okay, it’s Fiction, so let’s not over-romanticize the matter. On the other hand: somewhere I can imagine something like that happening. That an intimacy is created between two windows with an inside view. You see things that few other people see, you see people in their cocooned clothes, you see when they get up, when they go to sleep.
I should know, because I have insight. Not close enough to show neighbors what vegetables I put in the soup or to see what brand of coffee they use. But I don’t have curtains in the living room myself, and a few neighbors in the building across the street hold the same belief. I have no idea what they think about it, but – shoot me – for me there is something reassuring about it. On dark winter days I know that if the light is on there, it must already be seven o’clock. Their moving evening shadows make me feel like I’m not alone in the world (the same goes for the pee sounds you inevitably hear in a residential block).
Look in the basement
I thought less positively about it a few days ago when I walked through a Brussels neighborhood where apparently quite a lot of people live at sidewalk height. If I wanted, I could unashamedly peek into someone’s living room or kitchen every step of the way. You probably don’t feel like having curtains if you live in a basement. But it felt weird, more embarrassing than my neighbor’s silhouettes. I saw packets of pasta, a jar of sauce, I saw someone in a white sweater, I saw an uncleaned table and next to it a head watching television. With the latter I immediately had an opinion about how on earth a person can relax and watch TV next to so much rubbish and filth. I felt guilty for watching, for judging, and I suspect they felt the same way down there.
I learn a little more about the latter when I peek into Reddit discussion forums. Under the thread ‘How normal is it to peek into people’s homes?’ I read, for example: “I have such a house with the living room directly on the sidewalk, without a front garden. If I don’t feel like peeping toms, I close the pleated blinds. And if they are open, I accept that people can look inside. I sometimes wave or smile to neighbors from the couch.” Someone else writes laconically: “I always watch the walkers from my couch, it’s always nice when I get contact when someone looks in. The I-don’t-look-in-away look of the in-ward viewer is always laughing.” It is even more laconic under the thread ‘How do you deal with people who can look inside you?’ For example, I read: “Maintain eye contact, shit your pants and helicopter like crazy.” For someone else, clearly a Dutch person, it says: “Isn’t it to do with the Protestant-Calvinist doctrine that honest citizens have nothing to hide? By leaving your curtains open you are essentially saying ‘look at me being an honest person’.”
Peeking like Hitchcock
Another thing it is reminiscent of is Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window, from 1954. That original insightful story is about a photographer (James Stewart) who recovers from a broken leg in his apartment and kills time by looking at his neighbors. . Visibility everywhere: no window coverings and lights on everywhere. Privacy zero. There is a nice story behind every window. While this undisguised voyeurism is strongly disapproved by those around him at the beginning of the film, this changes as the story progresses and the murder is solved. Half doctorates have been written about Rear window and our need for privacy. Also about how Hitchcock seemed to suggest that privacy is not a basic right. According to some analysts, the film is even a metaphor for McCarthyism, the hunt for communists in America in the 1950s. Because hey, every neighbor could be a communist, and then you better have seen it in time.
I may be attached to the abstract silhouette game with the neighbors across the street, but the thought of a life without privacy would drive me to the (non-existent) curtains. It is, as I read in the scientific journal Science, also an evolutionary issue. By keeping strangers out and installing a system that allowed you to see, hear or feel them arrive, people increased their chances of survival. What is also at play is a primal urge around personal PR management, write the authors of the same piece. By guarding your privacy, you can determine which information about yourself reaches the outside world.
Well, these are all things that are reflected in the discussions we have been having about online privacy in recent years, of course. But in the complexity of cookies, GDPR, deepfakes and other 21st century privacy issues, it is sometimes nice to think back to the risks of a curtain-less window and the joy of not being able to see through.
You can read more thoughts about life in the blog From the heart.
