Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Peeping Tom / UK / 1960

Sometimes events conspire to place a viewer in the perfect physical surroundings for watching a particular film, like the time I watched The Fog alone on a misty night in the country, or my trip to see The Prestige accompanied by a pair of identical twins. This was another: Peeping Tom projected onto the wall of a friend’s musty attic room, late at night, in the heart of London.

Reading contemporary reaction to the film’s release (it famously destroyed the career of arguably Britain’s greatest ever filmmaker), it’s easy to feel that the critical community went overboard. But watching Peeping Tom, it sort of makes sense. This is a wildly transgressive film, sexually deviant and brutally, shockingly violent. It paints the British public as seedy, repressed voyeurs, from the licentious businessman furtively buying porn to the blind mother urging her daughter to explore the possibilities offered by the mysterious boy upstairs: ‘We both have the key to the door. Mine needs oiling. Yours needs exercise’ (images of locks and keys recur throughout the film, an unsubtle but effective bit of psychosexual imagery).

And the problem, of course, is that it’s all so beautiful, luxuriating in the rich colours Powell had made his signature, rich reds and deep, impenetrable blacks. A horror film which provokes sympathy with the monster is nothing new, but here it’s taken to extremes. Mark is no nudge-nudge Freudian cipher like Norman Bates, and he’s certainly not a Michael Myers boogeyman. He’s a real boy, frightened and alone, utterly corrupted by his insane psychologist father, driven to carry out unforgivable acts. But it is the specific nature of these acts which distinguishes Peeping Tom from other serial killer movies, because through them the film is revealed as a work of extraordinary self hatred, a director explicitly depicting his own chosen medium as perverse and even dangerous, for viewer and artist alike. By simply watching the film we become the deviants Powell sees through the lens, an unbreakable cycle of corruption and titillation which, almost half a century later, shows no signs of slowing.

by Tom Huddleston | Source: DVD
20 Dec 2007 9:12 AM | Submit Comment