Here are some scattered notes from a presentation on the film "Peeping Tom" (1960). I strongly recommend it! (Note: the headings in parenthesis were sections for which my partner was responsible.)
Opening Film Sequence
Opening eye:
At its most basic, the eye alerts us to the fact that this is a movie about looking. But we need consider that it is an eye that opens upon us: we have come to the screen to watch, but the first sequence places us as the object of the gaze. A connection is thus made between being watched and watching: between being the passive object trapped in a powerful, intense gaze and being the subject who actively gazes, trying to hold others. We are also curious to know what this eye is looking at: us, or something in the world of the film?
This simple imagery reveals three things: (1) our discomfort at being held in the unrelenting eyes of another, (2) the desire to assume the knowing gaze as our own, and (3) the collapsing of the objects of the gaze (the audience and the events in the film become one identity). But we are given no context within the film to make sense of who’s eye it was, where it was looking from, or what it was looking at. Instead we are left to make sense of that opening shot with the next, non-sequitur sequence with the 16mm camera.
Camera:
The eye is replaced by a 16mm camera hidden in someone’s jacket. Another collapsing of two objects into one in order to form a metaphor that illuminates aspects of both. The eye is a kind of camera, it selects what it gazes at, it focuses on certain aspects, and it “captures” images. And the camera is an eye: it is a seeing apparatus and it looks at the world in a certain way that bespeaks a larger context and influence (with the eye, how one’s world habituates a specific way of looking; with film, what the director wants to say about that shared world).
Also, the hiddenness of the camera seems different from how we usually think of the eyes: the eyes are the window to the soul, where we usually think we and others are most exposed and vulnerable. Indeed, much psychoanalytic philosophy has been dedicated to encountering the eyes or the gaze of the other. But here we have eyes, or an eye, that is trying to be concealed, that does not want to be seen or encountered by those it sees. We can think of this as symptomatic of the voyeuristic gaze, the “peeping tom” who only sees from positions where he, or she, cannot be seen in return.
Our camera then goes out of focus as the other moves toward us. Our “objective gaze” is thrown out of focus and we soon find ourselves looking through the lens of the voyeuristic eye. Our objective gaze has been subjected to or subsumed within the gaze of the voyeur. All the imagery from these first few scenes are here being pieced together in ways that call both the audience and the film makers into uncomfortable territory.
That the camera, and later the projector, are used by this sadistic voyeur signifies an indictment, or confession, of the way cinema gazes and how it tells us, its audience, to gaze. In this scene and the later one where we see our murderer watching his film, we find a kind of self-indicting confession of the feedback loop of cinematic gazes: the camera is controlled by a director who both represents and communicates a way of looking at the world and others. The director is both part of the audience who dictates the acceptable ways to look at the world as well as outside the audience telling them how to look. We, as the audience, do not therefore have an objective status in the theater; we are part of this feedback loop. These three gazes: the film’s gaze, the voyeur’s gaze, and our gaze are shown to be bound up with one another in this tripartite dialogical identity.
That Michael Powell was intending to indict cinema itself in the act of voyeurism is again hinted at as our perspective from inside the voyeur’s camera is no longer shot from the position where we had seen his camera - at his hip. Instead, we are now at eye-level. And then, as we move toward the prostitute we catch a peculiar shadow on the ground. And while we know that we looking from the perspective of the character’s camera, we see in that shadow a different identity. Where we should catch our own shadow, insofar as we and the voyeur are one in this sequence, we see instead the shadow of the film crew. Watching the rest of the film reveals an incredible attention to detail and scene composition, so to write this off as accidental would be to ignore a purposeful hint that Powell is providing us here. This sequence reveals that we, the voyeur, and the cinema cannot be separated as easily as we would have them, as easily as would allow us the comfort, objectivity, and innocence we like to suppose our way of looking at the world provides us. This desire for separation and division between ourselves and the voyeuristic gaze proves to be a recurring theme in the film in very significant ways.
The clicking:
It provides a recurring theme of inevitability. After this scene, clicking is only heard in reference to the timer in Mark’s darkroom as his film develops. Thus, as we watch this first scene, the ticking indicates that we have begun in on a story that has already be seen, already been filmed. We are simply waiting for the film to develop, for the image to become fixed, for the story to take its inevitable shape, a shape that we know must be tragic given its origins in this scene of murder. We see, even if not fully, the end in the beginning.
Private cinema:
After the murder, we find the murderer in his own cinema watching the film he just recorded. As we watch him watching, we are again asked to consider how our position as the audience is not so different from his. Moreover, watching his film we see that certain parts of the film have been omitted: the film has been cut and edited in an attempt to produce a specific desired result. So, as we have been prompted thus far to work within a tripartite dialogical identity, seeing the murderer watching his edited film asks us to question our own editing and arrangement of our perceptions.
There is a sense then, that it is not only the gaze that is being brought under examination, but what we do with that gaze, how we arrange the pieces to create a narrative that forms our view of the world, and thereby, forms our identity. That cinema plays a role in the formation of our identities, insofar as we are exposed to it, is hinted again at by the superimposition of the director’s name on the murderer’s projector. In his review and analysis of the film, Scott Ashlin recounts that “Powell went so far as to deny that Peeping Tom was a horror movie at all, claiming instead that it was nothing more nor less than a commentary on the exploitation and indeed sadism inherent in any form of human interaction that involves watching and being watched.”
(Shop Scene & Mark’s Home Movie)
After this scene, we see Mark at work in the film studio. He has arranged a date with an extra there, a date which turns out to be for murderous purposes. In that scene we see Mark trapping Vivian, the extra, in the bright lights of the film set, rendering her momentarily blind, confused, and slightly afraid. There is a metaphorical link at work here between the light of these studio lights and the light we saw on the prostitute’s face when she was killed and on young Mark’s face when he was filmed by his father. Indeed, because we do not yet know what is causing that light to appear on their faces, the connection is all the stronger. So, as soon as we see all these lights turning on in the studio, all directed at and blinding Vivian, we are aware that there is something wrong. We feel uneasy because we know the fear that was connected with those lights before.
They are lights that exhibit a kind of power: they are able to hold their object captive in the fear of the unknown of what lies beyond it. One is reminded here of Bentham's Panopticon, a prison without bars, that instead kept prisoners confined to their cell by fear. It achieved this by shining a bright light from a central guard tower, and telling the prisoners that if they walked out of their cells when a guard was on duty they would be shot. The prisoners however, never knew whether or not a guard was on duty because of the bright lights. They were thus held captive by their fear of constantly being under the real or imaginary eye of the guards. The lights of Bentham's Panopticon are precisely like the lights Mark uses here, they are lights that illuminate the object of vision while hiding the viewer.
These lights are therefore just like Mark’s camera in the beginning: it sees, but is not seen. The lights of the film studio are thereby embodiments of, either metaphorically or literally, the voyeuristic gaze. Also, Vivian, who is training to be an actress, is yet another embodiment of one who willingly gives themselves over to the voyeuristic gaze, like the prostitute in the beginning, and like the women being pornographically photographed. Contrast this with Helen who refuses to be gazed at in such a manner in the scenes we just saw. However, in the curiosity she embodies, Helen almost becomes a voyeur herself in the following scene.
Helen Reading
Here we see Helen take out and begin to read one of the books written by Mark’s father in which he had written about fear. We and Helen learned earlier that Mark was the prime subject of these studies, that Mark was continually in his Father’s gaze. He even makes the comment to her that he never knew a private moment in his entire childhood. Helen knows this when she takes this book from Mark’s shelf. She knows that within these books are clues to who Mark is. If we look back to the beginning scenes in the shop where Mark works part-time, we remember that the store owner hands the older gentleman the “views” in a bag labeled “Educational Books." We thus had a foreshadowing of the books on Mark’s shelf. For just as the pornography that the gentleman purchases are women nakedly exposed to the prying eye of the pornographer and the viewing public, so too is Mark, in his father’s books, nakedly exposed to the prying eye of his father and the reading public. Therefore, in beginning to read that book, Helen comes very close to becoming a “peeping tom” herself, looking without being seen, safely distanced from her object of inspection—Mark—by his physical absence and his static representation in the books of his father.
(Interrogation)
After the interrogation, Mark climbs to the rafters of the film studio to film more of the investigations, again assuming a position from which we can see but others cannot see him. When Mark arrives home he meets Helen’s blind mother, in front of whom he is visibly nervous. Mark and Helen then leave, with Helen leaving Mark’s camera behind in his mother’s room. The scenes that follow, though they are some of the most utopian scenes in the film, with Mark living in the present and truly enjoying Helen’s company, never quite escape from Mark’s disturbed subconscious. For almost the entirety of their date, we see a superimposed image of Mark’s dark room where the film is developing and we again hear the clicking of the timer, the same clicking we heard at the beginning with the prostitute. At the very moment in which we are so hopeful for Mark’s recovery, we are denied that hope by the inevitable development that that clicking implies. That their relationship is doomed is made even more tangible when, after they return to the house and Helen has kissed Mark and gone to bed, Mark pulls out his camera and kisses it in return. There is a lot that can be said about this scene, especially with a Freudian analysis, but I want to move on to what happens next when Mark returns to his dark room.
Mrs. Stevens
Blind Mrs. Stevens:
As Mark sits to watch his latest film, he is alerted to someone’s presence by a loud noise. He goes over and shines a stage light to where he heard the noise to reveal Mrs. Stevens calmly standing there against the wall. The usual power dynamics are altered though, and we see one reason why Mark was so afraid of her blindness: the light Mark now shines on blind Mrs. Stevens has no effect here. We see him cowering behind the instrument that he has so often used to assert domination over all his other victims, painfully aware that he is made completely powerless by her inability to see his means of domination.
And knowing that she cannot be blinded by his usual mechanics—the lights—he is stricken with fear that she sees, and therefore knows, everything. He is forced to recognize a vision that is more penetrating than his own. A vision more attuned with intuition, a kind of vision that needs no external mechanism to find truth, like Mark believes his camera to, and a vision that recognizes the often hidden nature of truth in things not visible, a recognition Mark does not, or cannot make. It is not so much that truth cannot be found in vision--hopefully we can acknowledge that since we’re trying to analyze a film--but rather that vision is sometimes distracting, blinding even. It is the over-privileging of the gaze, the ease of assuming a voyeuristic gaze, that is being critiqued here.
Living under rooms:
Walking away from the wall, Mrs. Stevens makes the comment that she visits Mark’s cinema every night, which she then clarifies by saying that “the blind always live in the rooms they live under.” I want to examine this quote in light of the film’s three main settings: the newsstand/pornography studio, Mark’s house, and the film studio.
First, in both the newsstand and Mark’s house, we have a downstairs area that is portrayed as a public space and an upstairs area that is private. At the store where Mark works part-time, all the pornographic photos on the walls immediately reveal that it is a somewhat sleazy establishment. And yet, one of its patrons is a young girl buying candy and the other is a seemingly respectable middle-class gentleman who is at least initially introduced as interested in buying two of London’s more respectable newspapers. We may therefore conclude, especially given the young girl’s presence, that going into this store does not necessarily make one guilty of being partial to pornography. And while it definitely does not make itself as socially acceptable as the downstairs of Mark’s house presented, it is still a place where one is able to turn a blind eye to its less seemly aspects. It is a location within the public sphere.
And this is precisely how we are introduced to the Stevens’ residence, the downstairs of Mark’s house. The first thing we see there is Helen’s 21st birthday cake, from which the camera zooms out to reveal a group singing happy birthday. One may note that here too, in this very public and respectable space, that Helen is given a large key as a joke. We may imply from Helen’s playful rebuke that the key likely represents access to Helen’s sexuality, a key to her chastity belt. Thus, like the pornography in the newsstand, the key represents a certain level of sexual expression that is more or less acceptable in the public sphere, given that the form which that expression takes here is much tamer due to its social location.
But now, returning to the shop, we see that the second floor is dedicated to the taking of pornographic pictures, a profession not at all socially acceptable, especially by English social standards in the 1960’s, though surely a profession for which there was a demand. Mark’s response to the store manager’s question about which magazines sell the most reveals that the dominant desire of their patrons is for magazines with, as he says, “girls on the front cover but no front covers on the girls.” The upstairs room of the store is the place where women are rendered “perfect” in their nudity and by the hiding of any abnormality, like Milly’s bruises and Lorraine’s scar. In this sense then, Mark’s darkroom in the upstairs of his house is a only a darker, more sadistic embodiment of that self-same act of production about the newsstand.
While the patrons of the newsstand want one kind of perfection in the images produced upstairs, Mark wants another, not all too dissimilar perfection in the images produced in his upstairs studio. His room, like the pornography studio, is hidden from the public, it is a place dedicated to the voyeuristic gaze and to capturing that gaze on film. And while the pornographic images deprive their objects of life by reducing them to still images whose only value is in their immediately accessible appearance, Mark's images, in the words of Mulvey, animate the image of death. That animation of the image of death is manifested in one of the most brilliant scenes of the film as Mark is showing blind Mrs. Stevens’ his latest film. As they watch, we see Vivian’s horrified face as a skull on the back of Mark’s jacket. Thus, the pornography studio looks for perfection in the gaze that robs its objects of life, while Mark looks for perfection in the gaze that gives life to the image of death. The two gazes are thereby shown to be two sides of one and the same coin, with Mark’s sadistic gaze merely being the darker side that is either at the root of voyeurism, or of voyeurism taken to its extreme, depending on how you interpret the relation of Mark’s darkroom to the pornography studio.
Moving now to the film studio in “Peeping Tom,” there exists an interesting relation between its function and the two-tiered structures we've just looked at. First of all, we can detect in the farcical nature of what is being filmed there a criticism of the current British film industry by Michael Powell and Leo Marks. The only thing of any merit in the film seems to be the attractive main actress who obviously cannot act. The film they are making there is thus nothing more than a socially acceptable voyeurism.
Mark however, uses the film studio for different means. When Vivian’s body is found, the extra whom Mark killed in the studio, it is found in a blue box. Note that the color blue has also been used throughout the film as the color of Helen’s clothes. In her clothing, Helen represents a very modest, socially acceptable image. So in having Vivian’s body fall into a blue trunk in his film, and in filming her body being discovered on the movie set in that same blue box, Mark presents us with a different picture of cinema than that constructed by Don Jarvis, the studio's owner who embodied for Powell everything wrong with British cinema. With Mark's camera, we get a cinema that sees its task as uncovering what is beneath the surface of the socially presentable. This is an image then, that says the film studio and cinema in general, should be a merging of the two worlds, of the two levels, of the public spaces and the private ones. In his films, Mark wants to reveal what is hidden, to make manifest the private upper rooms in public the downstairs rooms. The problem however, is that Mark thinks that all there is to be seen, what ultimately lies hidden up there, is only fear and death.
Returning now to Mrs. Steven’s comment that “the blind always live in the rooms they live under,” we can now understand her to be saying that she possess an insight into the truth of these hidden things, these private rooms, because she is free of a physical vision that is too often preoccupied with itself. Indeed, her disregard for the “social acceptability” associated with the downstairs space may be seen in her propensity to hard liquor, drinking Whiskey in about every scene. Instead, she lives predominately in those upper rooms that those with vision either try to ignore or go there only in perversion, in the broadest sense of that word. Mark’s fear of her is rooted here.
In her blindness, she sees that which Mark has been trying to capture on film: she sees the truth of what lies in the hidden places of one's self. And this is why he cannot stand her presence: he feels her blindness as an intense light of the same kind which he knew to be there when he would wake up screaming with his father at his bedside. And while she may believe there to be hope, seeing in him a possibility of redemption, all that Mark thinks exists in these upper rooms is death, whether that be in the form of pornography or in the fear captured his own films. And this is what Mark thinks she sees, and this is why he cannot stand to be in her gaze, which is to say, in her presence.
Lastly, Mark thinks his film of Vivian's death to be a failure because “the lights fade too soon." As we have seen, lights represent a power which is both able to hold its object and to expose the hidden nature of what is going on. (An interesting example that demonstrates the inability of light to provide even an adequate survey of the physical is when a police officer shines a light on Mark as he climbs down from the rafters and yet fails to see him.) But Mark has faith in these lights, they are his means of control, they are the embodiment for him of the controlling and revealing gaze, the voyeur’s gaze.
That the lights fade too soon thus represents his inability to fully control and reveal the other. Mrs. Stevens’ response that “the lights always fade too soon,” thus represents her acknowledgement that such complete control and insight is impossible, even in blindness with the access it provides her to those secret spaces. She knows the gaze will always fall short, that it will never be able to fully appropriate the other, that it will never be perfect. But the serenity with which Mrs. Stevens’ says this is an indication that she knows this is OK. She makes this comment to condole Mark, not to condemn him. But Mark can’t hear this; for him the gaze is a matter of science, his father has taught him that, and science needs perfect proofs and irrefutable evidence. And that’s what he has to find, or die trying.
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