By Michael Powell, 1960.
Starring Maxine Audley, Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer.
Rating: 9.5/10, 10/10.
I spent a long time searching for Peeping Tom. I went to video store after video store and searched for it on the shelves to no avail. I asked the people working at the video stores if they had it, to which they would almost always say, "I don’t think so...what would that be under, erotic thrillers?" I would sigh, say no, and move on. Eventually I gave up and ordered myself a copy on eBay, and boy, was it worth it.
The story goes a little something like this: there is a man, Mark Lewis (Boehm), who as a child was terrorized by his biologist father, who was interested in studying the human reaction to fear. As an adult, Mark (who still lives on the top floor of his childhood home, renting the rest out at reasonable prices) works two jobs: one as lighting director on the set of a movie, one taking erotic photographs of women for a convenience store. Incidentally, he is also a serial killer who videotapes his lady victims as he kills them. He meets and befriends—eventually falling in love with—one of his boarders, Helen (Massey). As he kills, first a prostitute, then the stand-in for the lead of the movie, the police eventually catch on to him, as does Helen’s blind, alcoholic mother (Audley).
As I rattle on about my theories about the movie, please bear in mind that I’m a little dense, a little slow, so if I’m saying anything stupid or obvious, just humor me. That said, the first time I saw Peeping Tom, I thought the murders were Mark’s way of trying to get back at his father for what he did to him, and that he killed women to get revenge on his father’s young second wife, whom he married just months after Mark’s mother died. Watching it again, I’m not so sure that this is all there is. Now I realize that Mark also murders in an attempt to further his father’s work. True, Mark is deeply, deeply angry at his father for what he did to him, but at the same time he is very proud of the older Lewis’s brilliance. We see this the most strongly in a scene in which Mark speaks with the psychiatrist the studio brings in to help the film’s lead with her trauma (she discovered the stand-in’s body). They speak of his father, and while Mark is obviously reaching out for help with his own psychosis, he there is also a pride and excitement evident in his manner as he discusses his father’s accomplishments. Mark here reveals that just before he died, his father was most interested in scoptophilia: the morbid urge to gaze, "what makes one into a peeping tom." In a way, then, Mark’s own scoptophilia, his focus on, obsession with, and eventual victimizing of, sexualized women, can almost be seen as having developed out of a sort of twisted respect for his father. As for the study of fear, Mark tries to document the fear in his victims on camera. By taking them as far into the realm of terror as possible—killing them, and with an added twist revealed only at the very end of the movie—he is pushing his father’s work to the extreme. In fact, it is implied that he only continues to kill (or at least this is how he rationalizes his continued need to kill) because he just cannot capture the moment of pure fear to his satisfaction. The camera angle is skewed, or the picture cuts off too soon.
Aside from the psychological issues, the film stands almost as an accusation to its audience: you, watching the personal lives of others unfold on the movie screen, are no less voyeurs, no less scoptophilic peeping toms, than Mark is. When the psychiatrist speaks of the "morbid urge to gaze," he is speaking, as far as he knows, on a theoretical level, but at the same time he is speaking to Mark and to everyone watching the movie. It is an unsettling feeling, and as we watch Mark watching his victims die, we realize that, although we are not murderers, in any other respect we are not much better than he.
As for technical prowess, Peeping Tom achieves near perfection. The script is taught and intelligent, and except for one or two scenes—mostly featuring the police inspectors—does not waste a line of dialogue or a moment of action. The acting is always impeccable, most especially that of Audley as Helen’s shut-in mother. Her character is distrustful, moody, suspicious, and brilliant, and her work in this character is some of the best work I have ever seen. The film is done in bright, contrasting, often sleazy colors, and every shot is disturbing and guilt-inducing.
Perhaps all my talk of accusation and voyeurism and guilt I’ve made it seem as though Peeping Tom were a struggle to sit through. Not the case. It is a difficult movie, true, but worth every second. It is one of those very rare epiphanic films, one that alters our perception of the world, and we cannot help but feel profoundly grateful to it for that.
read roger ebert's essay on peeping tom