Michael Powell | Peeping Tom / 1960

within ourselves

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leo Marks (screenwriter), Michael Powell (director) Peeping Tom / 1960

 

Today it is a bit difficult to comprehend the British reaction to director Michael Powell’s 1960 feature film, Peeping Tom, a work that literally ended his career in the United Kingdom. British audiences have often turned against some of their greatest artists, and even today, I would argue, British literature is far less adventurous than literature throughout Europe and in the United States.

     Yet, it is hard to forget that British-born director Alfred Hitchcock had already (even in his early British films) set up the very concerns of his younger friend’s and former assistant’s film. Surely Hitchcock’s American picture of the same year, Psycho, was far more brutally explicit in its “shower” scene than anything one actually sees in Peeping Tom. And by today’s standards, although Peeping Tom is still a very “perverse” film, its murder and sex scenes are completely understated.

 

    One is tempted to suggest that Powell somehow linked his audience with the voyeuristic actions, leading to the “hero’s” murder of several women. Like Powell himself, the central character,  Mark Lewis (the beautiful Karlheinz Böhm, son of Austrian conductor Karl Böhm, the son later working in three Fassbinder films) is a cinematographer, filming not only for a cinema studio, but working privately in filming porno and what he describes as a  “documentary” which reexplores the studies in fear that his psychiatrist father (played, in a cameo role, by Powell himself) had imposed upon his young child by awakening him with lights flashed into his eyes in the middle of the night, throwing lizards upon his bed, and even recording his reactions to his son’s death of his mother.

     The camera in Peeping Tom is in action almost constantly, catching every moment of terror, reaction, and investigation into the events. In Psycho, although the major character (Anthony Perkins) is certainly appealing in the same way as Lewis, he remains an outsider, a kind of freak or, at least, a tortured insane being; the woman he murders, moreover, is already a kind of marked woman: she has stolen money from her employer, while the prostitutes and simple would-be actors of Powell’s tale are relatively innocent of anything but desire. Yet Hitchcock had explored very similar themes already in Rear Window, where the central character, also a photographer, played a voyeur with destructive results to his neighbors. And in that film, the central character’s care-take even observes, at one point when she recognizes his voyeuristic fascination of peering through the neighbor’s windows: ““we’ve become a race of Peeping Toms.” In Vertigo, moreover, Hitchcock had explored a man following a woman with clearly obsessive tendencies, a situation which, once again, resulted in a murder, albeit not of the woman we first perceive her to be.

    Perhaps it is the very genius of Powell’s work that provoked his audience into seeing themselves as not very respectable people: his not so gentle poke in the ribs of conservative British gentlemen stopping into their local tobacconists for copies of the rightist papers while at the same time purchasing home-shot porno which they wrap within the papers themselves. Or Powell’s not so subtle attack on psychiatrists, who go so far as to torture their children in their search for comprehending psychological reactions (indeed, the father-son relationship here calls up the Nazi experiments on Jewish children).

     Maybe Powell’s utter put-down of the whole film-industry in which he was a major figure, mocking the popular medium of the time, whose plots consist of a woman fainting and asking, for a comic effect, for variously colored trucks. When Lewis, filming the always splendid Moira Shearer, kills her and locks her away in the blue trunk, the bogus filmmakers change the star’s request to see similarly “variously colored hats.”

 

   Powell also, unlike Hitchcock, involves a simply curious and pleasant individual, Helen Stephens (Anna Massey) and her often drunk but perceptively canny, blind mother, Mrs. Stephens (Maxine Audley) in his story, portraying them as tenants in Mark’s house. By doing this, Powell certainly arouses his audience’s fear for this intelligent and friendly Helen, and, when Helen’s mother confronts him, fear for her life as well. The very fact that in these cases our murderer resists his murderous impulses, partly by averting their eyes which might demonstrate their fears—the blind mother, obviously, having no vision, and therefore is not useful in Lewis’ tortured experiments—forces us to perceive the figure is not entirely as a fiend, which, given his several murders and his own suicide helps to make the film even more seemingly perverse. That someone may actually love the tortured psychopath Lewis may seem to many as utterly mad. The fact that he is so beautiful and mild-mannered further confronts our very sensibilities that evil should be easily identifiable and clearly marked. Here, the evil is presented as also existing within the society and within ourselves.

     Several critics such as Joe Corr and feminist scholar Carol Clover describe the central character, Mark Lewis as not only forcing us to share his “assaultive” gaze of the female figure, but given his own history of being tortured and filmed by his father, a reactive gaze as well, played out in the manipulative manner of his killing his victims by attaching a mirror to the camera so those at first willing to perform under the camera’s gaze, suddenly observing the knife contained in the camera coming toward, finally witness their own reactions as they struggle with the horror of perceiving their victimization.. Corr describes this most effectively by describing the scene in which Mark kills Vivien

 

“A moment in Peeping Tom that has received little discussion, from defenders or critics, is a moment between Mark and Viv, a stand-in for the star of the film Mark works on at his day job. Alone in an abandoned film studio, as Mark prepares his camera, Viv states that she’s never been behind the camera. Mark allows her behind the studio camera, and as she focuses on him, he films her. Though any audience could have guessed that Viv was doomed the moment she agreed to meet Mark and his camera alone, this is truly the moment where her fate is sealed. As she films Mark, and he films her, Viv steps into Mark’s game, and both of their positions on the binary slips — she is voyeur and object, and so is Mark. It’s a clear cut example of that aforementioned watching, being watched, and watching someone watching you. We see Mark and Viv through the eye of the camera, a shot which can only mean one thing in Peeping Tom — death. Sure enough, both characters are dead by the film’s conclusion.”

     In short, Corr argues, as Clover suggests, in the evidence that the audience is both serving in the relationship of assault and reaction—the reason, after all, why most of us attend any horror film—we are admitting our own sadistic and masochistic tendencies simultaneously, something which surely British audiences of 1960 were not ready to analyze.

     Finally, as critic Brian Kieper observes, in Hitchcock’s horror film, the script calls for the final explanation of why Norman Bates has become mad, in a long and (today) totally absurd gobbledygook of fake Freudian psychology explains how the seemingly gay boy was actually denied female companionship by his manipulative mother, after killing her and becoming his mother to qualm his guilt, playing out his own imagination of her jealousies that her son might abandon her son for another woman.

     Peeping Tom, as Keiper points out, offers no such simplistic explanation for Mark’s crimes. In fact, the writer of the screenplay, Leo Marks was not only highly interested in psychotherapy but was a professional code-breaker who worked for the British government throughout the war and beyond. He had lived as an expert creating and analyzing secret codes. As he wrote of his own script, “I became convinced that all cryptographers are basically voyeurs and I wanted to write a study of one particular voyeur from a little boy to the time that he died. I wanted to show what made him a Peeping Tom and scatter throughout that as many clues, visual clues as I could find in the hope that the audience would want to discover the clear text of this man’s code for themselves.”

      What Keiper hints, although he does not openly argue for it, is that Powell’s screenwriter purposely kept information from his audience, and in a far more complex manner that even many of screenwriters of the day, hyper-coded the film, perhaps with a buried queer story which, if viewers couldn’t precisely “read” it, still felt its existence. Something was not only wrong with Mark Lewis, but as some reviewers and commentators argued, he was “evil,” insinuating that Powell’s film itself was not only perverse but purposely hiding the reasons for the central character’s obsessions. And if there were no “reasons,” the film was moving closer to the territory of pure purposeless pornography.

      Although Keiper does not attempt to resolve such deep coding, he certainly comes close to it in his own quite original assertion that Peeping Tom demands the audience feel a great deal of sympathy for the perverted hero:

 

“Peeping Tom was hardly the first film to make such demands on its audience, Fritz Lang’s monumental film M (1931) comes to mind, but no other film up to that point asks for so much sympathy for its depraved lead. Mark is depicted early on, through a series of home movies in which his father (played by director Michael Powell) torments young Mark (played by Powell’s son Columba) as a victim, a guinea pig in his father’s cruel experiments in fear. As with Psycho, there are hints of incest in Peeping Tom, a sexual desire for the overbearing parent. The fact that it is not only incest but homosexual incest in Peeping Tom, no doubt gave the British critics of the time another reason to bristle. Mark has something of a reverse Oedipus complex where he desires the love and approval of his tormenter father, but intensely hates the woman his father married after his mother’s death. Her greatest crime? She allowed a shot of him and his father to be out of focus, motivating an obsession with perfection that permeates into every facet of his life: his pin-up photography side hustle, his on-set job as a focus puller, and of course his murderous activities.”

 

     Keiper goes on to argue that Mark is forced to continue in his killing because he can never quite get the scene right, just like a director who must continue with endless reshoots because the scene he’s captured remains imperfect. Perhaps only if he can create the perfect scene can he please his father (read studio chieftains) and simultaneously bring his love to focus back upon himself.

     I doubt that most audiences perceived the central character’s incestual love urges concerning his dead father or his resultant urges to destroy the gender that came between them, but certainly audiences in 1960 sensed that there was something else about Mark that was unspoken, and given the British laws of the day, homophobia was probably among the instinctual reasons why this work seemed to be so to British culture, the released film being almost immediately recalled and unshipped to most other countries, including the US. Although Powell continued to direct films in other nations, his career was basically over.

     Looking back, Peeping Tom does not seem so very far from the obsessive figures—the young overwrought nun of Black Narcissus, the endless dancing beauty of The Red Shoes or even the self-assured, possible lesbian figure of I Know Where I’m Going!—who Powell and Pressburger had successfully presented in his other highly theatrical, artificed, hot-house movies. Fortunately, the critical blacklash of 1960 has now been replaced with recognition of just how truly great Peeping Tom is.

      I’d certainly agree with Martin Scorsese’s comments, that Peeping Tom and Fellini’s 81/2 “say about everything that can be said about film-making, about the process of dealing with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it and the confusion between the two.”*

     And clearly Powell was not the first of film geniuses to be unrecognized and even vilified within his own time—there are dozens of examples—but the very sadness of those reactions, even as temporary as they may be, always brings tears to my eyes. Where might have Powell gone from Peeping Tom? No matter how much you might like all of Hitchcock’s films, one still has to recognize that from Psycho on, even with some few exceptions, his career was also in decline. Perhaps, Powell also had taken his concerns to the end of where he dared not continue. We shall never know.

 

*You can clearly see the effects of Peeping Tom on Scorsese's Taxi Driver, where the mirror becomes the camera for its deranged hero.

 

Los Angeles, July 21, 2015

Reprinted in Nth Position (August 2015), [England], on-line in a different version.

Full version reprinted from My Queer Cinema (April 2024).