Shudder bug
Peeping Tom looks at the primal screen
by Peter Keough
PEEPING TOM, Directed by Michael Powell. Written by Leo Marks. With Carl
Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley, Esmond Knight, Bartlet
Mullins, and Brenda Bruce. A Rialto Films release. At the Brattle, March
19 and 20.
In its first few minutes, Michael Powell's regaled and reviled 1960 film
Peeping Tom composes, among other achievements, a trenchant essay
in film theory. In extreme close-up, an eye opens. A cut is made to a city
street, to a woman in the shadows, and to a camera. The rest is seen from
the point of view of the camera's cross-haired viewfinder: the negotiation,
the walk upstairs, the disrobing, the look of horror preceded by a curious
light in the eye -- then dissolve to a projector and it's all repeated again
in silence and black and white for a lone viewer in the darkness. Then the
title: Peeping Tom.
Freud and a generation of deconstructionists would have a field day. Cinema
as sublimated sexual aggression and death wish, the camera as phallus, photography
as violation, and film as ritualized voyeurism -- or as a jolly psychiatrist
describes it later in the film, "scoptophilia -- the morbid gaze."
The British press that denounced Peeping Tom upon its release in
1960 probably weren't aware of such pointy-headed concepts. But they may
have gotten an inkling of them from the incriminating placement of the title:
it implicates both filmmaker -- formerly famed for such baroque and agreeable
fantasies as The Red Shoes -- and audience in what would later come
to be known as a "snuff film." Appalled, one newspaper writer suggested
that "the only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom
would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even
then the stench would remain." And so it has, hardly touched by the different
kind of stink made by a film like 8MM. Re-released in a new print
at the Brattle, Peeping Tom remains a disturbing masterpiece of film
psychology and pathology -- a critique and vindication of the century's
foremost compulsion and art form, and a suspenseful, mordantly witty, ultimately
moving entertainment.
Taking solitary satisfaction at his handiwork in Peeping Tom's assaultive
credit sequence is Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm, with Jon Voight's cherubic looks
and Peter Lorre's creepy voice), who works as a focus puller for a movie
studio and as a part-time photographer of girly pictures for a corner news
shop. (In what might be a nod to Psycho, which was released the same
year, a Hitchcock look-alike appears in cameo to make a purchase.) A loner
except for the constant companionship of his film camera, Mark suffers the
legacy of his biologist father, who used him as a guinea pig from infancy
in a study of fear in children, filming and recording him continually and
subjecting him to sadistic experiments (The Truman Show via B.F.
Skinner).
Mark shows some of these films -- him as a child awakening to a lizard tossed
on his bed, his response to his mother on her deathbed, his father (played
ominously by Powell himself) cavorting with his mother's "successor," and
images of his face with that mystery light in his eyes -- to his winsome
neighbor Helen (Anna Massey). It's a good first-date ploy, shocking her
but arousing her maternal instincts and perhaps her own morbid gaze (she
is writing a children's book about "a magic camera and what it photographs").
Nonetheless, he stirs the suspicions of Helen's blind, sibyl-like mother
(Maxine Audley).
The visually virginal Helen, however, does not fulfill Mark's specialized
sexual needs. ("It will never see you!" he tells her, when she offers to
pose for his Bolex. "Whatever I photograph I always lose.") These have a
confused Oedipal origin (a scene in which he confronts Helen's mom in his
darkroom is breathlessly ambiguous) and a fetishistically homicidal expression.
In addition to prostitutes, aspiring actresses fill his bill, such as sportive
Vivian (Moira Shearer, the doomed dancer in The Red Shoes, in a sinister
allusion), an understudy on the film -- titled The Walls Are Closing
In -- that Mark is working on at the studio. They find her body in a
trunk while shooting on the set in a scene of ruefully funny, self-reflexive
black comedy.
The rushes from that liaison fail to do the trick; meanwhile the crime causes
the police to begin snooping close to home. For Mark, though, this is all
according to his script, and he records the ongoing investigation blithely,
for he has one more killing in mind, the images of which will be "so perfect"
that even "he" -- his father, presumably, or God, or Powell, or the audience
-- will be satisfied. "Do you know what the most frightening thing in the
world is?" he asks Helen near the end. The answer to that question is almost
anticlimactic, as is the origin of the flickering light that torments Mark's
camera's victims. What is perhaps more frightening is that we cannot tear
our eyes away.
