Here’s a post based on this week’s episode of Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics and (at the end) a player that lets you listen to the show. The post and the podcast don’t totally overlap: they complement each other. The post usually is a deeper look at a single idea raised in the podcast. We take requests, so leave a comment below if there’s a film you’d like us to cover. We’ve done 299 so far! Please subscribe to the show and listen wherever you get your podcasts and consider leaving a review on your platform of choice. Thanks.
“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” So said W. H. Auden and so we see demonstrated in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), which boldly employs every convention of the horror film in order to achieve a stunning, authentic portrait of a disturbing mind at work. We get the solitary, awkward killer who hates his own compulsion and wishes he could be rid of it. We get the unsuspecting women whom we know will be his victims and who become examples of dramatic irony as they talk to their future killers. There are the police, of course, who can’t get close enough to the killer and the psychologists who offer explanations that simultaneously explain the killer’s behavior and leave us thinking that the explanation is too simple. Michael Powell never worries about adding an original element to a genre well established by M (1931), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Gun Crazy (1950), Strangers on a Train (1951), or Night of the Hunter (1955). What he’s interested in is the authenticity of his protagonist, the ways in which he can communicate Mark Lewis’s specific strain of madness to an audience.
Despite the film’s title, that specific strain is not entirely connected to sex or voyeurism. Mark is not really a peeping Tom and is as interested in sex as the people making porn in Boogie Nights. More accurately, he is an artist who wants to create something perfect and lasting; his compulsion to kill is a way to think about the compulsion to create. Like the artist-figures of Vladimir Nabokov, Mark wants to get every detail perfect because he thinks he can see his subject in a way that others cannot. In Lolita, Humbert strives to “fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets”; in Peeping Tom, Mark wants to record a perfect moment of absolute fear on film. Their creators made them a pervert and a killer to show how criminal urges are like artistic ones. Joseph Conrad said his role as an artist was “to make you hear, to make you feel … before all, to make you see,” and that’s exactly what Humbert and Mark yearn to do.
Mark is an artist compelled to get every detail right. He wants to make the perfect film the way that Henry James wanted to write the perfect novel and would likely share my complaint that characters in films (except Wendy Torrence) never seem quite as afraid as they should; they usually become clever, brave, or even defiant in the face of monsters and murderers. Mark wants to create the perfect cinematic representation of fear, one that would (as Hamlet says) hold the mirror up to nature. This is why he takes such pains with Vivian when he films her dancing alone in the studio: he turns on the red light to indicate a closed set and we see him perform the roles of cinematographer, lighting director, sound designer, screenwriter, set designer, and, of course, director. It’s a stunning, hand-over-your-mouth sequence as tightly choreographed as anything by Gene Kelly; it’s Powell’s shower scene. And as the victim becomes more genuinely afraid, she gives a stronger performance. She acts herself to death.
There’s a Bugs Bunny short in which Daffy Duck does his last trick: something so spectacular that he can only do it once. It’s a comic version of what Mark does at the end of Peeping Tom: to outdo every other film he or anyone else has made, he has to give all he has. What sacrifices will an artist make for perfection? We read about directors jeopardizing their health, families, and sanity to fulfill their visions: think of Francis Ford Coppola in the Philippines or Werner Herzog in Peru. Mark Lewis would watch Hearts of Darkness and River of Dreams and nod along.
Peeping Tom was released the same year as Psycho and has much in common with Hitchcock’s film. The biggest difference is in the films’ receptions: Psycho earned Hitchcock accolades (and money), while Peeping Tom destroyed Powell’s career—and keep in mind, this is a career that already included The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Were I’m Going!, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes. (We’ve done FMFF episodes on all of these.) Upon its release, Derek Hill of the Tribune wrote, “The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer.” Luckily, the film’s admirers have thrown around their cultural weight to motivate more people to see it. Martin Scorsese, whose steady editor Thelma Schoonmaker is Powell’s widow, is the reason we can see the film today: he, Coppola, and Steven Spielberg were instrumental in restoring the print and Powell’s reputation. “From Peeping Tom and 8 1/2,” Scorsese said, “you can discover everything about people who make films, or at least people who express themselves through films.” David Thomson is equally impressed by the film, yet in his characteristic idiom describes it as “cold, nasty, alienated” and “akin to the reptile machinery of film itself.” Like Singin’ in the Rain, it’s one of the best movies about the people who make them.
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"Psycho" is scary. But "Peeping Tom" is creepy. I think people are more uncomfortable with creepy than scary. For more, see "uncanny valley."
I loved Peeping Tom but it is truly creepy. I felt especially bad that our Red Shoes heroine/martyr is a victim here. Sad how a great artist's career was fatally injured on something so truly interesting.