Peeping Tom

Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm, actually Karlheinz Böhm) is never without his camera—a camera of some kind, still or film. A shy young man, he works as a "focus-puller", hoping to become a film-maker. In his other job, he takes pin-up shots of models to be sold "under the counter" in plain brown envelopes. Photography is his passion, his aspiration, his raison d'etre. But, it is also a means to end.

For his hobby is terrorizing and killing women.

Mark is one of those people who, during a newscast of a lurid incident, it is always remarked "he seemed like such a nice young man—kept to himself." The intensity is never mentioned, though, or the creepiness. But, just  the fact that Mark ALWAYS has a camera with him should raise an alert.

It certainly should tip off Dora (Brenda Bruce), a prostitute Mark follows one night. Or maybe it shouldn't. He hides his movie camera under his coat (hmm..I sense a metaphor-based film thesis in the works) and we see what happens from the point of view of the view-finder, as he encounters on the street, follows her to her flat, and then murders her, filming it, then skulking off to his house, where he develops the film and watches it, transfixed...or turned on...or what? It's difficult to say exactly what is going on with this monster, but since we're watching the film...we're accessories. 

Peeping Tom (as the title suggests) is about voyeurism at it's cruel dark little heart. Mark "likes to watch." Not participate, really, but watch. To record and see it over and over again. He's a vicious killer, a sociopath, but as long as the camera is between him and his victims, there's a filter there, responsibility-once-removed, and all for the sake of "art," his footage is to be part of a documentary he is making—or at least recording—paralleling his experiences as a child as his father (played by director Powell) runs psychological experiments on him, while a documenting camera records the events. It is suggested (filmicly) that Mark is merely doing what he knows and is familiar with in his growing up. But, if so, where did he learn to kill?

And—like Mark—we watch, complicit in his actions. It adds another dimension to the experience of the movie. Perhaps it's a feeling of generated guilt that we're watching what he's watching—compounded by Mark's compulsion and utter lack of guilt—which gives us the universal experience of feeling out of control in the passive experience of watching a movie. You feel helpless when your instincts are challenged. This is a familiar feeling to anyone who's ever watched Hitchcock's voyeuristic classic, Rear Window.

And (it seems) you can't discuss Peeping Tom without also mentioning Hitchcock, whose film, Psycho, was released just two months after Powell's film.* Michael Powell had worked closely with Hitchcock during the director's "British"period, working as a still photographer on his shoots and the two were somewhat close throughout their careers. That they should simultaneously direct the most lurid films of their careers has more to do with the loosening of restraints in subject matter for film at the time than anything else. For Powell, whose career—as part of "The Archers" in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger—was a prestigious one, the subject matter of Peeping Tom was a departure from, say, The Red Shoes** or A Matter of Life and Death, although, it isn't too far afield from the hysteria of, say, Black Narcissus. But, the nuanced approach, the vital color palette, should be familiar to anyone familiar with the films produced by "The Archers."

Even as the movie makes us implicit voyeurs, we are also innocent bystanders, shocked by the new and the unexpected, looking for some sense of normalcy amidst all the creepiness. Peeping Tom provides this downstairs from Mark's austere flat—far more elaborate is his film room—where he rents out the ground floor of his family home to Helen (Anna Massey—who would be a victim in Hitchcock's Frenzy ten years later) and her blind mother (Maxine Audley) whom she cares for. Helen is empathetic towards the damaged, so she is drawn to mark for his shyness, his past—he shows her his father's home movies of his psychological experiments—and because she knows that he spies on her.

He might be drawn to her, too—or it's just because she shows him attention, which he's not accustomed to. Ego is a facet for both killers and film-makers, and perhaps she satisfies that need. Or she's just another victim for his secret hobby.

There's an added element to the murders that are noteworthy. Peeping Tom is full of reflections and refractions both in the film and the viewer's reaction to it. But, Mark's murder weapon is his own camera—one of the tripod's legs contains a sword with which he slays his victims—it serves double duty as both weapon and recorder. But the camera also holds a mirror to the victim, so they can see their own death, which own enhances the terror that Mark wants to record.

Peeping Tom is the complex daddy of the slasher films of the 1970's—which scaled the concept down to just a voyeuristic POV, unknowable killers and shock-cuts—but, even with the artistic sensibilities of Powell in play, it's still a creep-fest, that compels one to take a shower afterwards—that is, if Psycho isn't also on the double-bill.

* Peeping Tom received a critical thrashing in the press when it was released. Perhaps this is why Hitchcock did not have press previews of Psycho when it was released, instead emphasizing a "not-to-be-revealed" mystery in the film in its marketing to the public.

** The inclusion of the star of The Red Shoes, Moira Shearer, led to some controversy , as well.