Film #4 — 1/1 Meta Horror Film; 4/9 Decades
By C. Ramsay
Mark Lewis spends his days working as a focus puller on a film production while also doing freelance pin-up photography, seeing the people in the world around him only as subjects for the work that he does, and in effect objectifying them. In his free time, he obsesses over filming and reviewing the next sequence in a documentary he’s making, a snuff film, in which he captures the fear on his current dying victim’s face while he kills them. A quintessential title in the psychosexual horror canon, Peeping Tom uses a meta approach to question voyeuristic complicity, conflating audience members as subject and object alike, and was so ahead of its time in these considerations upon its release that it virtually ended the career of its director, Michael Powell.
From the opening minute, the viewer is subjected to peering through the perspective of Mark’s rolling camera as he murders a sex worker. There is no time spent concealing or building up to revealing who Mark is; to proceed with watching the film for any amount of its runtime entails agreeing to be paired for its entirety with a perverted murderer with full knowledge of his capabilities and desires. “The morbid urge to gaze” is questioned as much for us as it is Mark, who has made himself such an essential part of his own cinema that it even occasionally projects over himself, alternatively stretching to encapsulate the people in his life, warping and melding place and time within the film and beyond. As we move with Mark, the audience risks being caught: at one point a flashlight shines directly on us, revealing our hiding spot through the screen, and at a couple others Mark chances a brief glance our way, an acknowledgment of our presence and inadvertent support in the actions he takes. In creating a film with the contents and focus that Peeping Tom has, Powell seeks—with the help of the viewer—to identify the line between exploitation and the artistry of perverse subjects such as pornography, violence, and death.
Women play an integral role in the psychology analyzed by the film, particularly concerning what men are expected to be owed by them. Disturbingly, at the least extreme, this expected debt consists of one’s body and agency in exchange for nothing more than the potential for a bit of money and the hope for some measure of safety. At the most extreme, when a woman is so dehumanized that she is not seen as capable of having anything to lose, it’s her life. Despite the fact that Mark struggles socially with everyone, he’s at times shown to try to relate to other men on a personal level through emulation, most prominently with respect to the memory of his abusive father, and to even be confident enough to be slightly standoffish in some cases. However, he rarely affords women the effort of empathy, instead only being willing to give them the time he requires to observe them for his own sick benefit before ultimately taking their life as if it’s nothing.
Where Mark’s actions tend to fit into established gendered expectations, his demeanor subverts them. He is well-dressed in a way that stands out next to the fashion of other men, his quiet step and soft-spokenness give him an effeminate quality, and he is regularly viewed as meek and unthreatening by women until it’s too late. After meeting his neighbour and tenant, Helen, who’s highly outgoing and self-assured, Mark is thrown into a crisis in which he suddenly, and seemingly for the first time in his life, recognizes that there are ways of operating outside of what’s expected of him or of what his father instilled in him as a child. Though he’d previously interacted with other outgoing women, some of whom we meet, the difference is that Helen maintains an equilibrium between her own confident self-interest and a genuine inquisitiveness regarding Mark. What’s more, some of Helen’s circumstances extend a familiarity to Mark that allows him to better open up around her without struggling to emulate the way he normally would around other people. Helen is both humanized as the first person Mark has been able to build some sort of genuine relationship with in his adult life and dehumanized as the catalyst that pushes him to act out more erratically in attempting not to hurt her.
Having Helen’s recognition and interest allows Mark to begin to understand what it means to be seen and to see her in return, but having this understanding also deepens his connection to his project. To see someone else is difficult, but to see oneself, something he has never truly reckoned with, is an affront. It’s revealing, damning, fundamentally a betrayal, and in paralleling the other dualities in the film, something he both leaps toward confronting and uses as a shield. Similarly, shadowing Mark throughout the film offers the audience a reflection, but before deciding how to respond to it we must first be willing to look.
Star rating (/5): ★★★★½
Recommend?: Yes