NUMBER FIVE: "What have you done with her?"

NUMBER FIVE: REAR WINDOW

After spending a very long time in a cast with little but a high powered lens at his disposal, Jimmy Stewart finds himself peeping in on the lives of his neighbors, across the way through their windows. He sees their desperation, loneliness, celebration along with overhearing the intimate details of their erotic lives and relationships. It's a kind of reality television decades before the genre took off and became what it is now.

Jimmy Stewart becomes so entangled in the details of their lives - and the arguments between a husband and a wife who live near him - that he begins to suspect the husband of murder once he goes a few days without seeing the wife make an appearance.

This provokes a detective friend of Stewart to make an incisive observation as he casts multiple shades of doubt on Stewart's theories: "People do all kinds of things in private that they couldn't possibly explain in public."

REAR WINDOW becomes more delicious and troubling every time I watch it. Of course I get why Jimmy is watching. We're all curious about the people around us, perhaps more than we'd like to admit. People wonder what others are doing, how they're living and see maybe just glimpses of their lives here and there and make an assumption, fill in the details and run with them based on whatever is haunting their own cerebral cortex. There's an entire GOSSIP SHOW INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX to fill our need to look into the lives of the famous.

And now there's Facebook. I can't help but think the social media site is so successful because it - in part - makes it possible to look in on the lives of others without necessarily having to participate, react, etc. We become silent digital voyeurs - albeit to the extent that someone invites us in with their posts - scrolling through our feeds.

It's certainly not all bad. I can tell you personally that nothing's easier than sharing an important moment like Stella's birth through Facebook. I was downright thankful to be able to invite friends and family into the experience in an instant, rather than having to stage a time-consuming upload to Shutterfly when Rob and I were both exhausted.

But there can be something else there. Sometimes lives viewed through the Facebook rear window look much, much better than they really are. Few people post about the brain numbing difficulties of their daily lives or even the major challenges. So, there can be a high gloss on what you see and I'm not sure if that makes you feel closer to someone or further away.

In any case, we know we all like to watch. And sometimes we go out of our way to be watched as well.