Semiotics Analysis on The Neighbor's Window

The Neighbors’ Window movie poster from Wikipeda

The grass will always greener on the other side. Someone’s life will always look better than ours, until the day we realized that it was not. The Neighbor’s Window is a short movie about how we took our life for granted and it only takes someone else’s misfortune to make us realize how lucky we have always been. the morale of the story is not the only thing amazing about this movie. The movie’s small details and symbolism are so simple yet strongly telling us about what happened in the scenes.

The story started with a woman cleaning legos under the table and she hit her head when she tried to stand. The lego is an icon telling us that there are (or are) children living there. How the table limiting and ended up hurting the woman’s head is an index about how she looking at their current condition. She is a married woman with children, it is very common that your life will be limited in some way or another once you get married and having children. This limitation might hurt you the same way it hurt the woman.

After the first scene, her husband came from their children’s room after he put them to bed. They finally have time to sit together and that is when we have a clear view that she is pregnant. When they sat together, they realized that they can see their neighbor from across the window. Their neighbor is a young couple who had sex without closing their curtain. Window in western culture is interpreted as eyes and in this case, their point of view. From their point of view, their young and energetic neighbor is so lucky that they can be partying every day and they have no children to take care of.

The wife expressed disgusted towards sex even though she is currently pregnant and already had children which are a direct result of sex itself. Judging from their appearance, they are much older than their neighbor so they are most likely grown up with old fashion ways of parenting where the parent is taught the children that sex is something taboo.

If the window is their eyes to see, the binocular they used to keep close attention to their neighbor is their perspective. Sometimes you can not help but see something even though you do not want to see it. That is an eye for you, but you will always have a choice to decide what your perspective will be. They choose to see their neighbor more intensely using binocular is their choice to see how others living is (in their opinion) much better than theirs. This will result in their argument in the next scene.

When she went home from out for shopping and taking care of three children, she dropped the apples and it scattered around. The apple in some cultures is a symbol of love. The husband trying to help her with the apples but she refused as she convinces herself that everything is under control. This scene soon followed by them arguing over their married life and binocular. It is the way to movie telling us that once you getting married and having children, there will be a moment when you feel like your love is shattered but you have no choice except trying to keeping the married for the greater good.

The moment the movie almost end we realize how months have been passed from the Christmas decoration to summer to fall outfit and pumpkin everywhere. The climax of the movie is when the wife saw her young husband neighbor had cancer and died. The view of the two windows separating the dead husband from his wife the same way the death do them apart. At that moment the wife goes downstairs and for the first time meets the young wife and she realized how her neighbor is also envied her happy life with children how ungrateful she had always been.