Peeping Tom
In college, I took a class on the horror film genre. Anyone who's seriously studied film in general, but specifically horror films, knows the theory of The Gaze - the idea that cinema is essentially a male gaze, that it's an instrument designed around male pleasure and for male gratification. One of the essays on the subject discussed at length a film called Peeping Tom, a film about a photographer who photographs his victims as he kills them. It sounded, to be frank, dry and academic, and as such, I never really actively sought it out.
A few months back, I was in a used DVD store with a friend when we discovered a relatively inexpensive copy of Criterion's DVD for the film. My friend was thrilled. "What a great fucking movie," he enthused. When I told him about my feelings on it, he simply said, "No. You're wrong. And you need to watch it."
So, a couple of months ago, I did. And he's right - I was very, very wrong.
"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." - Derek Hill, The Tribune, 29 Apr 1960
Released the same year as Hitchcock's Psycho, Peeping Tom attained none of the success or acclaim of that film, despite the fact that (in my opinion) it is far, far superior to Hitchcock's work in almost every way. In fact, Peeping Tom was positively reviled upon its release. The quote above from Derek Hill was probably one of the most vicious, but none of the reviews were particularly kind. Here's some choice samples:
- In the three and a half months since my name last appeared at the head of this page I have carted my travel-stained carcase to (among other places) some of the filthiest and most festering slums in Asia. But nothing, nothing, nothing - neither the hopeless leper colonies of East Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay nor the gutters of Calcutta - has left me with such a feeling of nausea and depression as I got this week while sitting through a new British film called Peeping Tom (Plaza).
- I don't propose to even name the players in this beastly picture.
- Why [Powell] has made it, however, I do not know. As a thriller, it fails to thrill. As a shocker, it succeeds only in being nauseating for the sake of nausea. This is a sick film - sick and nasty.
- From its slumbering, mildly salacious beginning to its appallingly masochistic and depraved climax, it is wholly evil.
- What-are-we-coming-to questions are apt to sound nannyish, like complaints about muddy boots, but after a film like Peeping Tom it's a question to ask quite straight. What are we coming to, what sort of people are we in this country, to make, or see, or seem to want (so that it gets made) a film like this?
The vitriol and widespread hatred of the film led it to tank. As it fell, it took Michael Powell's promising career with it. Despite a string of popular and critical successes (former MotM The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp among them), Powell had a hard time getting work from then on out. The film suffered a similar fate. In Powell's words, In his words, the distributors “canceled the British distribution, and they sold the negative as soon as they could to an obscure black-marketer of films, who tried to forget it, and forgotten it was, along with its director, for 20 years.”
However, a black-and-white edited version of the film that made its way to America became a cult hit in the 1960s, and was seen by one important man: Martin Scorsese. In 1978, Scorsese was approached by a New York distributor named Corinth Films who wanted some funding to re-distribute Peeping Tom. Scorsese put up the money and got the film a new release, and the reaction was quite, quite different.
"I have always felt that Peeping Tom and 8½ say everything that can be said about film-making, about the process of dealing with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it and the confusion between the two. 8½ captures the glamour and enjoyment of film-making, while Peeping Tom shows the aggression of it, how the camera violates... From studying them you can discover everything about people who make films, or at least people who express themselves through films." - Martin Scorsese, Scorsese on Scorsese
Peeping Tom, as mentioned above, is often compared to Hitchcock's Psycho. Whereas Hitch made a streamlined, suspenseful thriller, Powell took a very different approach to his tale, and made a far more psychologically-driven and disturbing horror film, one that pushed back at a lot of audiences. In his Great Movies essay on the film, Ebert wrote:
The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it. Michael Powell's ``Peeping Tom,'' a 1960 movie about a man who filmed his victims as they died, broke the rules and crossed the line.
The story of Peeping Tom is a simple one. It is the story of a studio camera operator named Mark Lewis, played by Karl Boehm. Lewis's father, as we come to understand, was a psychologist who used his own child for psychological experimentation. As an adult, the psychic scars leave Lewis a brutal killer who films his victims as he kills them. Well, not just films...but we'll come to that later.
The film opens with a long point-of-view shot in which a man (presumably) approaches a hooker, negotiates, follows her to her room, and kills her. All of this is shot through the viewfinder of a camera. For any serious fan of slasher cinema, it will remind you of the opening to Halloween. But Peeping Tom pushes the audience further. As Ebert points out:
"The opening shot is through Mark's viewfinder. Later, we see the same footage in Mark's screening room, in a remarkable shot from behind Mark's head. As the camera pulls back, the image on the screen moves in for a closeup, so the face of the victim effectively remains the same size as Mark's head shrinks. In one shot, Powell shows us a member of the audience being diminished by the power of the cinematic vision. Other movies let us enjoy voyeurism; this one extracts a price."
Indeed, for much of its running time, the film toys with notions of voyeurism, and there's no denying that the viewing experience is a disturbing one. Peeping Tom is an intensely uncomfortable film, made all the more so for the way it pushes its audience to places we're not sure that we're willing to go. From the notably sympathetic portrayal of Lewis, played by Boehm as a nervous, withdrawn man, to the reminders of our own culpability in all of this, Peeping Tom is a horror film that makes ourselves the true monsters.
And we haven't even begun to touch on Powell's choice of his own cameo. Done presumably for budgetary reasons, the fact that Powell plays Lewis's father, and that his son plays young Lewis, adds another strange and fascinating dimension to the film.
Far from the dry, academic film I thought it would be, Peeping Tom is about as thoughtful and disturbing a horror film as I've ever seen. Ebert had it right, I think, when he mused that the reason for its failure was that "it didn't allow the audience to lurk anonymously in the dark, but implicated us in the voyeurism of the title character." If you've never seen it, you're in for a unique and unsettling experience. It may not be the repulsive, depraved monstrosity it was once thought to be, but in many ways, it's more disturbing than many more intense and violent films.
Because I'm an English teacher, I'd be remiss if I didn't credit some of my sources: