Life, the Universe and Curtains

There are many unanswered questions in the world, but sometimes it's the trivial ones that are the most annoying.

In the film I was watching last night, six fugitives had escaped from an embassy under siege and were hiding from the authorities and hostile locals. In a tense scene, they sat round discussing their perilous situation.

But I couldn't concentrate, because a small part of me was screaming at them, "Why don't you shut the curtains?"

The house was in the middle of a city and it was dark outside, yet the heavy drapes were open, leaving the full-length window screened only by net curtains; the occupants of the lit room would have been clearly visible to anyone looking in.

Film after film and in every American TV series it's the same thing. However great the need for privacy, no matter who or what might be lurking outside, no-one thinks to draw the curtains, 

Did anyone else wonder why, when the child in 'Poltergeist' is scared by the tree outside his window, it doesn't seem to occur to anyone that closing the curtains would help? Or why so many film characters leave their bedroom curtains wide open despite having been stalked or accosted on the way home?

I thought this must be a cinematic convention, leaving the way open for external shots of the house interior and its occupants, until a friend moved to the USA and discovered that the 'drapes' in her new city centre home would not close, and neither did anyone else's in the large apartment complex.

So why should this be? Does it hark back to the Puritans and a suggestion that God-fearing folk should have nothing to hide? After all, if Hollywood is anything to go by, the only people  in the USA who have the curtains closed are spies, serial killers and vampires.

Perhaps it stems from the tradition of the great outdoors. Legend has it that Daniel Boone looked out of his log cabin one day and saw the smoke from another chimney in the distance; he immediately declared his valley too crowded and moved on. Presumably wilderness heroes didn't have to worry about people looking in.

Of course, that sort of attitude is fine if your nearest neighbour is several miles away but rather less so in a ranch-style suburban duplex. And, while it's tempting to see a high-rise apartment as an invisible eyrie, it might be as well for the occupants to bear in mind the invention of the telescope.

Or could it possibly be that, given the impossibility of seeing out through the window of a lit room after dark, the Americans have simply decided that, if you can't see it, the outside world doesn't exist?