Mark Lewis, played by Carl Boehm, states during the film Peeping Tom that the reason he is constantly filming the goings-on around him is that he is making a documentary. In actuality, this was the metaphorical straw which broke the director’s back (Michael Powell) because it ended his career as a consequence in that it had the audacity to document the urges, desires, aesthetic hypocrisy, and sublimated violence of his audience and forced us to confront them.
Mark Lewis is a man who, as a child (played by Columba Powell, the director’s son), was subjected to the psychological studies of fear conducted by his father, A. N. Lewis (played by the director himself, thus further drawing the strings of unease all the more taunt for the audience). As a result, Mark is socially inept (he frequently mimics other characters in the film, like a child rehearsing social dictums) and can only approach the world through the lens of his camera. He too is fascinated by fear but, instead of analyzing it via quickly scribbled notes, he documents it firsthand by creating and filming it in its purest form–when people, in the wake his lens, know they are about to die. To assure his victims of the authenticity of their ensuing deaths, Mark has placed a mirror around the camera in order for the individuals to witness the fear upon their own faces.
Thus, we are given firsthand a person who creates snuff films. What’s worse is the commonality of the character of Mark (his name being the epitome of this). No longer are we allowed to sit back comfortably, rest assured of our safety in a Manichean universe where evil comes in the form of physically grotesque monsters. Mark is someone unidentifiable, as Mrs. Partridge (Peggy Thorpe-Bates) states in the film, thus we might very well be sitting next to a Mark and not even know it. Furthermore, Powell makes the events of the film all the more plausible in that the it takes place in an actual locale, London’s Soho district (as opposed to a fictitious or foreign land), where–if we don’t live there–we nonetheless identify with its familiar setting).
Yet, Powell doesn’t stop here. Not only are we restricted from our physical comfort, we are also stripped of our psychological distance. By implication, considering the audience has come to a horror film knowing, by the genre’s salient feature, it will more than likely disclose images involving another person’s pain and suffering, we are therefore willfully engaging in antisocial practices, making us that much more akin to the murder. If we qualify Mark’s violent urges by way of his affinity with the camera, we–by association–are unable to deny our own similarities, however dark, regardless of our past attempts to sublimate such desires. As a reminder of this, early in the film a distinguished male customer (Miles Malleson), rather embarrassingly, consigns himself to purchase pornography. As the man hurries to the door after paying, the owner of the store, Mister Peters (Bartlett Mullins), alerts him to the fact that he almost forgot his alibi for entering: two newspapers. To compound this issue, everywhere we turn, we find the frame populated with individuals engaging in voyeurism without the slightest reservation or notion of the possible implications of such an action: a film is being made as we watch Mark in his role as a focus puller on the set; after one of Mark’s victims is discovered, a detective (Keith Baxter) is sent to observe the suspect; the mother (Maxine Audley) of Mark’s love interest eavesdrops on him as he moves around in the flat above her; and a psychiatrist (Martin Miller) studies those on the set of the film in order to make evaluations. In Powell’s eyes, everyone is Mark and Mark is everyone.
Yet not everyone concedes that the film is not without fault. One of the main arguments against the film is its dependable choice of victims, women, and that Powell further displays this unabashed misogyny by having Mark murder them by way of a phallic spear (posited on the leg of his camera’s tripod). However, each time Mark is approached by a female (we see him talk more readily, but never comfortably, around males through the movie), he becomes nervous. When he goes out on a date with Helen Stephens (Anna Massey), she guilts him into leaving his beloved camera behind. When they return, he quivers, as if suffering from withdraw, as Helen goes to retrieve his camera. By deduction, we can assume that Mark’s choice of subjects is due to his subconscious anger over his inability to interact with females on any functional level due to his dependence, brought on by his father, upon his camera. Yet, it is his camera, not Mark, which is the instrument of death. Thus, instead of having Mark, for instance, physically strangle his victims, the camera keeps its owner safe from potential undue influence (and likely disposal thereof if the circumstance with a female were allowed to perpetuate itself), much like the manner in which Norman Bates’s mother buffers her child from the sway of women clientele entering the hotel. In essence, the camera acts, not like a mother, but rather as Mark’s father as it proceeds to defile every potential love interest for Mark before he is allowed the opportunity to engage them on any meaningful level.
Regardless of one’s reading of the film, Peeping Tom is a landmark of (meta-)cinema if, for no other reason, it forces the viewer think about what is being shown onscreen as opposed to allowing the option of it after the credits roll. Few films are as engaging or as subtlety executed as Powell’s masterpiece and deserves to be watched and rewatched in order to profit from its thoughtful, evoking images and philosophies and the discussions thereof.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
