University of Leiden Masters in Film and Photographic Studies Academic Short Essay: Film Theory Peeping Tom in reference to Nick Browne s Spectator-in-the-Text Date: 8 December 2011 Elan Gamaker Student number: S1197738
Take me to your cinema Peeping Tom in reference to Nick Browne s The-Spectator-in-the-Text Helen Stephens: What are you doing? Mark Lewis: Photographing you photographing me. 1 When Peeping Tom was released in the United Kingdom in March 1960, the star of its director Michael Powell was high in spite of a relatively quiet period in his career. He was a highly respected filmmaker following his collaboration on several films with Emeric Pressburger, productions still widely considered among the finest ever in British cinema. By the time the film s run had ended, Powell s career was in tatters. Critics, censors 2 and the general public alike were outraged by the film s content 3 and presentation, and Powell was disgraced. Indeed, it was only when the American director Martin Scorsese, whose own work was heavily influenced by Powell s, revived the film for a (sold out) public screening at the New York Film Festival in 1979 that Powell (and Peeping Tom) received any sort of reprieve from such opprobrium. Why was the initial response to the film so universally and energetically reactionary and hostile? Certainly, the film featured semi-nudity and violence somewhat risqué for its time. But this outrage seemed to stem from another impulse. Peeping Tom ruined its director s career not because it showed such depravity but because it asked us, the audience, to identify with this depravity. It was precisely this shifting point-of-view a shift between victim and perpetrator that so horrified the unsuspecting public, and it is where the film can be viewed from the perspective of Nick Browne s article The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach. The abovementioned shifting point-of-view here is between Mark Lewis, who, in both his official and part-time jobs as focus puller and photographer, watches for a living (along with killing with his camera), and us, who watch him watching and killing. While Mark is the film s protagonist we must surely struggle to identify with either his illness or the actions that represent its repercussions. Yet Powell, while offering us the pure character of Helen as a foil, a means of moral identification (just as he offers her to Mark as a means of moral and sexual confusion), never allows us fully to identify with her version of (pre-1960) wholesomeness. 1 Dialogue from a scene in Peeping Tom during which the protagonist, Mark Lewis (Carl Böhm) invites his tenant Helen Stephens (Anna Massey) to view his film processing equipment. As Helen looks at him through the viewfinder of a camera, Mark approaches her with another camera. She responds to his stealthy, almost threatening action by asking what he s doing, which he explains in this way. This is many ways summarises the thrust of this text and that of Powell s thematic: the oscillating gaze of the watcher and the watched. 2 The film s first BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) rating was X, the highest possible, and some scenes were cut. The first uncut cinema version was passed only in 1994. 3 Shy, awkward Mark Lewis (Carl Böhm) lives in his late parents London home, acting as anonymous landlord to several boarders. He works as focus puller on studio features and parttime as a photographer of young women for views, soft-core pornographic images sold in newsagents. Mark is also a voyeur and serial killer, murdering young women and filming their final moments of death by installing a knife on the end of his tripod. When he befriends and becomes affectionate towards the sweet, trusting Helen, one of his tenants, the origin and nature of his mental illness the result of his father s scientific experiments on him as a child comes bubbling to the surface, causing him to relent to his obsessions to avoid hurting Helen.
Powell s subjectivity here is Mark s, and it, in turn, is ours. The subjectivity is one of layered complicity in the horrible crimes we all (director, character and viewer) orchestrate and witness: we are complicit in watching him kill and do nothing as disaffected voyeurs of terrible crimes. Just as we watch the film s opening sequence 4, we watch the scene again just as Mark watches it again, and we step inside the camera and perform the act of deadly watching ourselves. We change from passive, complicit voyeurs to active, complicit participants and perpetrators. Peeping Tom here supports Browne s assertion about the structure of imagery, which to him refers to the action of an implied narrator ( ) and to the imaginative action occasioned by his placing and being placed by the spectator. (1976, p. 26) Powell s blurring of this role is so defined it is clearly intentional, and if we go further to place Browne s analysis of the notion of the position of the spectator (1976, p. 32) in the context of Peeping Tom, we get a better sense of this position. Browne talks about four key positions regarding the viewer in relation to the film. These are, briefly: the spectator s physical position in the auditorium; the fictional position as posited by the camera inside the action; the eye, and therefore the social system of a given character; and the figurative sense of place that allows us to identify with a character s position in a certain situation. (1976, p. 32) In Peeping Tom, we can best show the corresponding positions for Browne s hypothesis by using the opening sequence described above as case-in-point. As we witness Mark Lewis s murder of the prostitute through his eyes, in this case that of the viewfinder of his camera (see Fig 1.1), as viewers we sit in front of the screen (cinema, TV or otherwise) and view the action with the screen as a window and filter to the action in front of us; we can remain inactive even as we witness a horrible crime, like detached voyeurs in a dark apartment across the street. 4 The opening sequence shows a man (whose face we do not see beyond his eyes) propositioning a prostitute before murdering her. With the exception of the opening shot of the man s eye and his point-of-view of the insalubrious neighbourhood in which his prey awaits, the entire sequence is shot through the viewfinder of the hidden camera the man uses to record his crime. At one point we see a film box being discarded so we are sure we are recording the action.
Fig 1.1 As Mark Lewis kills, his eyes are his camera, and our eyes are his. Next, the camera positions us inside the action, granting us Browne s fictional position in the form of Mark Lewis, making us simultaneously passive and active watchers (for, above all else, Lewis, even while killing, is watching). Then, we enter the social system of the given character because we are compelled to this action without the necessary abhorrence (or fear of reproach) to halt our actions. And finally we enter Browne s figurative sense of place because we, whether we like it or not, begin to identify with the character whose actions we have watched, whose eyes we have taken on and whose moral universe we have accepted. It is precisely this orchestration on the part of Powell that makes Peeping Tom a profoundly visceral experience, and why it received such a hostile reception. Powell s mastery of the form in both mise-en-scène and narrative can thus be seen as an example of what Browne refers to as the cumulative effect of the narrator s strategy of placement of the spectator. (1976, p. 37). Powell s visual narrative takes this positional identification further by constructing layers of viewing and being viewed and thus pushing our involvement into the diegesis itself. After we have watched (and identified with) Mark Lewis killing a prostitute, by watching him watching what we have just shared in seeing (and doing), any moral judgement on the character is dispelled. This is carried through to the film s climax, when the unsuspecting Helen finally comes face to face with Mark s secret. Fig 1.2 As Helen discovers Mark s violent footage, the camera stays on her reaction. When Helen, exploring Mark s studio alone, discovers the morbid footage of his crimes (see Fig 1.2), she is horrified. But Powell does not show us what she is looking at (even though, given what has transpired, we have a pretty good idea of what it must be). Doing so would allow us to do more than identify with Helen we would gain her point-of-view, which, for the purposes of Powell s narrative, would be objective. We would share in her horror for Mark s crimes and thus step outside the world of the protagonist, which would have been a fatal misstep in terms of emotional engagement (and would nullify the cumulative effect described above).
Rather, Powell enforces his thematic with a confidence and boldness for which audiences in 1960 were not prepared. We watch Anna watching and, like Mark, we record (and register, as on film) her facial expressions and how they shift as the true horror slowly reveals itself. As the camera stays on her reaction, rather than sharing in her horror (and thus sympathising with it), we share in Mark s fetish of witnessing the moment of fear, and we can t take our eyes off her. One might argue here that Powell s decision to shoot the scene in this way supports feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey s assertion that: As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. (1992 [1975], p. 751) While it is true that Powell is asking us to identify with the main male protagonist who, for Mulvey, is the power figure in the dynamic of the gaze, his depiction of the same character s impotence is, for me, a mitigating factor. Lewis s impotence is complete, for it is both literal his inability to form relationships or activate his sexuality symbolised by the replacement phallus of the bladed tripod leg (see Fig 1.3) and figurative, expressed by his desperate attempts to stop Helen from viewing his footage and thus have his overwhelming obsession be held up to the scrutiny of her care. Fig 1.3 Mark s blade as phallus substitute for his impotence. This places Powell more in the category of Browne than Mulvey for, just as Mulvey argues that the scopophilia of the cinema offers, at its extreme, obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms (1992 [1975] p. 748), Powell s expression of scopophilia is an enacted rather than viewed fetish. This is crucial, because Powell wants us to live as a voyeur rather than merely watch one. The latter leads to detachment and judgement (the kind reserved for censors), while the former breeds identification and sympathy and, after Browne:
The experience of the passage is a feeling of empathy and humiliation [and] a repudiation (of) prejudice and unjust. There is ( ) a mechanism of the narrative (so) closely related, formally, (to) point-of-view, and interests. (1976, p. 32) Powell does not wish us to either look away or be complicit and horrified. In 1960 he dared to make us care for a sick man, whose own father had produced his illness (Powell himself appears briefly in the film as the young Mark s sadistic father). He wishes rather to lead us into the scopophiliac world of his (and others ) cinema, just as Helen s mother, blind and thus unable to partake or judge via the moral framework of the visual, says to Mark: Take me to your cinema. Powell takes us to his cinema and suffers for it, not because he shows us something we haven t asked to see, but precisely because he makes us admit it was why we turned up in the first place.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Books Mast, C., Cohen, M., Braudy, L. (eds.) (1992) Film Theory and Criticism, Fourth Edition. Oxford University Press, New York. Films Powell, M. (director), Peeping Tom, The Archers, Amalgamated International Pictures, 1960. Ford, T. (director), Stagecoach, Walter Wagner Productions, 1939. Journal Articles Browne, N. (1976) The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach. In: Film Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Winter 1975-76), University of California Press, Berkeley. pp. 26-38. Websites PEEPING TOM rated X by the BBFC, Classified 22 March 1960, The British Board of Film Classification, http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ New York Times Review, 17 th New York Film Festival: Peeping Tom (1960), New York Times Online, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review