Peeping Tom

Inherent to the idea of cinema (and, indeed, all stories) is the idea of voyeurism. Caught in the throes of film’s misé-en-scene, we find ourselves emotionally invested in the lives of those on screen. Michael Powell’s ground-breaking Peeping Tom (1960) takes this emotional engagement and subverts it, so that the film in fact critiques our complicity.

The main character, Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), is an example of the unimaginable damage that comes from childhood abuse. Mark’s father continually forced him to assimilate images and sounds of fear, and the damage this inflicted upon Mark’s psyche is now irreversible. Though Mark works as a focus puller at a British movie studio, he has begun killing women with a knife attached to the end of his camera’s tripod. However, he also films the women as they die, so that they must watch their own death vis-à-vis a mirror he has at the end of the camera. (Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) extends this idea in a horrifying manner.)

After showing the first murder of a prostitute, Powell begins the credit sequence by looping back to the murder as seen through the camera lens that Mark now watches at his development studio. This implication immediately sets up the critique of the audience as willing participants in the death of the prostitute, which was obviously an unsettling thought in 1960. However, it was also revolutionary. Hitchcock’s Psycho would come out six months later and likewise invert our sympathies, but Peeping Tom executes this idea with contemporary sophistication.

Most interesting is Mark’s relationship with one of the tenants in the house, Helen (Anna Massey). Though Mark is a recluse, her efforts to reach out to him and understand him demonstrate an awareness on his part that he may be able to recover from the abuse and affliction that haunts him now. Much of the film’s strength comes from Helen’s purity and Mark’s struggle to never taint that purity. The end is inevitable, but the investment that Powell creates is masterful.

Long appreciated for its thrills and suspense, and it has plenty, Peeping Tom is now recognized by feminist writers as one of the first cinematic examples of how the camera’s gaze is inherently male. As a result, those classic films which have always threatened an innocent woman now became consciously exploitative, capturing the panic, fear, and horror of imminent death with raw power.

Peeping Tom is a classic that endures, and, moreover, it is a film which is just as demanding and rewarding as when it was first released.

Peeping Tom: 10/10