Most of the movies I write about, that move me– tend to be unique. But even among those, Peeping Tom is a singular experience…one that will leave you with nagging questions. It also will leave you feeling slimy… and that is no accident.
Peeping Tom came out at the wrong time and place—England, 1959. Its screenwriter Leo Marks and director Michael Powell realized that making it was a gamble. They paid a heavy price, especially Powell. His directing career in England (long and distinguished) was all but finished. Movie critics in England were highly offended—one actually walked up to Marks after the disastrous premiere and warned him never to do anything like this again. Clearly, critics felt that material like this has no place in
film.
Movies about killers will cut deeper if they make you empathize with the psycho character. Peeping Tom does this well…maybe too well. Another major reason critics attacked it so viciously.
Abuse in your family begets more abuse. That’s clearly a theme in Peeping Tom. The abuse Mark (the title peeping tom) got from his father has turned him into a killer. Only a tiny part of Mark can express his need to be loved.You see again and again that he never learned how to love. Abuse is another story—Mark could write a book about it.
.
Mark’s secret life–before Helen
Another theme you see clearly—identifying with the oppressor. Mark is carrying on his father’s abuse. Mark’s father was a scientist; his field of interest the reaction to fear. He wrote several books on the subject; knew it intimately. Hard as it is to believe, his research centered on Mark. His father taking notes, making
observations, recording Mark’s terror on film.
Now Mark is grown up, his father dead. But he is still obsessed with people’s reaction to fear—any sort of fear. His ultimate compulsion–photograph women experiencing the most frightening moment of their lives—then dying.
That compulsion led him to build his murder weapon. A tripod for an older 16 millimeter movie camera (ironically, a gift from his father) with one leg like a switchblade. A leg that can snap straight out, with razor-sharp metal at its far end. Mark lives for the moments he can film women—as they see the danger first, then understand they are about to die.
You realize right away that Mark is a killer. But Peeping Tom would be creepy even if he had never killed—he has the classic behaviors that get you sent to prison. Staring into people’s windows, stopping to watch couples embrace, listening to conversations in rooms wired for sound. Mark has done all of that. I think many of us have felt similar urges during periods of depression, periods of low self-esteem.
Today, people hear a lot of psychology on TV, radio, the internet. The 1950’s were a different story. That is one reason this movie felt so offensive when it came out. Most of us then did not have those insights. We felt Peeping Tom accused us of perversions, of vile desires at least. That was just what Powell and Marks wanted.
Early in Peeping Tom, Mark goes into work. A respectable-looking tobacco and newspaper shop. The owner dressed conservatively, like a banker or stockbroker. An older gentleman comes in, asking for two traditional daily papers. Then hesitantly, he asks for “views”—British slang for dirty pictures. Carefully, the owner shows him what he has. The man is thrilled; he even forgets his newspapers.
Not only does the owner make a subtle but sleazy remark: “Well he won’t be doing the crossword tonight,” but Powell cast a familiar, sympathetic actor as the customer. A man British audiences felt comfortable with.
You have already seen Mark murder a hooker the night before. Those scenes may make you feel creepy yourself, as much disgusted as you feel scared.
The street is quiet at night. An older whore, her glamorous days behind her. Few dreams left. “It’ll be two quid,” she tells Mark with no expression. He doesn’t say a word, but no surprise on her part. The last things she expects are emotion, sentiment. She starts to undress like she has every other time. Same shit different day. But she sees something that frightens her, something more frightening as Mark gets closer… Cut to a projector, film rolling.
A story like this can have an added sting if it includes a truly goodhearted character, able to see something good in the monster. Helen Stephens (Anna Massey) is that character. We hope for a miracle; that she can transform Mark.
But you know it is already too late. I don’t know if they used the term “serial killer” then but Mark is already through that door. Sadder still, Helen senses something kind in Mark– not all her imagination. When you first meet her, she seems shallow, good manners and no more. But Helen is more perceptive than she appears. You realize that fast. She wants something better for Mark.
She has lived in the same building as Mark for years, barely exchanging a word. People have warned her that he stares into her window. She bumps into him the night of her birthday and offers him a slice of cake. He is unwilling to join her party but she comes up to his apartment with the cake. To our surprise, he invites her in. He tells Helen his father had owned this building once; he is dead now.
Helen has a naïve side, but she has surprising
self-confidence; a strong sense of who she is. Without an
invitation she enters his darkroom—never dreaming this is the home of Mark’s secret life. She is impressed that Mark is in the film business. Everywhere she looks she sees movie film but Mark says he doesn’t know what to show her. (Ironic. As the old cliché goes, ‘that’s the understatement of the year.’) She tells Mark to show her whatever he was watching before.
Old movie footage. A young boy sleeping, then
woken suddenly by bright lights in his face. Mark tells her the
boy is him. His father shot the film. Helen actually jumps at what
she sees next; a large lizard dropped directly onto the boy’s
blanket, only inches from his face. Not a huge species but
terrifying from the boy’s point of view—so sudden, so close.
Most of us know a few kids–either gifted athletes or just used to springing into action at a moment’s notice. Who could flick the blanket like lightning and send the lizard to the floor. But kids like that are the exceptions; young Mark lies paralyzed with terror.
Radically different reactions to the same film; Helen feels
disgust and anger; Mark–much more complicated
You see a lot happening at once. Helen watches with horror and disgust. Meanwhile Mark has his camera out and begins filming her face. No doubt he is turned on by her expression. It’s too good not to record. He shines bright light into her face too, though she barely notices.
Helen is angry but not at Mark, angry about the film. The child abuse and Mark’s lack of emotion. She speaks for us; you got abused. (She never realizes how turned-on he is, as many of us might not, given the impact of the film.) A strange moment. She may be naïve, but she is totally on target. What the boy experienced is every bit as bad as she thinks.
Meanwhile Mark caresses his camera—he looks like he’s about to come; so excited, so out of breath he can barely speak. “What was he trying to do to you?” Helen asks. The old film goes on; Mark at his mother’s deathbed, then watching an attractive woman stepping onto a beach—a woman his father married soon afterward.
An intense turn-on that only Mark understands
Finally Helen says, let’s get out of here. Mark doesn’t scare her;
it is this film that he shows her so casually.Mark’s reaction is strange. It’s not that he shares Helen’s anger but keeps denying it. Anger simply doesn’t seem part of his make-up. Even when he says he never knew a moment’s privacy as a child, you don’t hear much emotion. He doesn’t try to convince her that his father was a great man…or an abusive man. Just somebody who did what he did.
Mark does say that his father’s research probably helped a lot of people. But that barely registers with him; you realize how cut off he is from the world of psychology. If you don’t know it already, you realize later how absolutely cold Mark’s father was.
Mark is equally cold; a stranger from normal relationships; addicted to his obsessions. The rest of his life an empty shell. Not that what he films is better than sex; it is a no-contest. He felt his father had the upper hand while he was alive. Now, shooting his murders is the only time he has the upper hand. Now I get to be (the all-powerful) daddy.If you know the show Criminal Minds,
you probably remember episodes where the BAU people mention a killer’s growing confidence. Mark has reached that stage. Besides his work in porn, Mark has a technical job at a major studio, working in feature movies. Vivian is an actress with a small part in the movie he is working on.
She is no longer a kid, but still dreams about getting her big break, especially in musicals. Mark seems to be someone who could help her out. Their plan is to use the studio set after everyone else goes home. Then Mark can shoot some footage of Vivian; perhaps she can use it to help her career.
You don’t get to know Vivian enough to care
that much about her. Yet these scenes pull you in—in several
different ways. First, you know Mark is taking a huge chance;
killing where he works. He is breaking the old rule, “Don’t shit
where you eat.” And all his other victims were strangers; if
anything happened to Vivian, Mark is a sure suspect.
Mark is also making a huge jump from the down-and-out women he has killed before. Vivian may have a small role in the movie but she projects confidence and self-assurance. She moves around like she’s saying: here I am, world, just watch me. Mark is determined to show her (and himself) that he is running the show. Before Vivian ever sees him, he snaps floodlights on, straight into her face, one after the other, blinding her. Finally he reveals himself—on a platform, looking down on her.
For a long while, Vivian believes he is flirting—that this is about, “well let’s see what you’ve got…if you’ve got it, leave it all out there.” A playful game of one-ups-man ship. She has no clue that each time Mark woke in terror, it started with bright light in his face. Now Mark needs his own bright lights to give him the feeling of power necessary to kill.
Powell’s casting of ballerina Moira Shearer (The Red Shoes) adds to the impact. Shearer plays the role like someone ready to put everything she has out there. Someone willing to listen to all Mark’s ideas—to say to him in effect—tell me your wildest ideas, I’m up for it.
Vivian’s confidence in herself actually makes her more
vulnerable–never suspecting what Mark is feeling
She doesn’t know she is heading straight into his trap. That it means nothing to him how she dances, what music she dances to. Mark is miles ahead, adapting his familiar rituals to this new location. Getting set for the inevitable moment he longs for. When he says, show me the most intense emotion you can… and make that emotion fear.
Casting this otherworldly, almost angelic woman, then having her die this way probably infuriated critics even more. But perhaps Powell suspected (correctly I think) that seeing someone with this near-magic aura die this way would jolt you. To put it simply, it would feel wrong to his audiences. It definitely struck me that way; like watching Janet Leigh stabbed to death in Psycho, or hearing that JFK just had his head blown off.
When Vivian’s body is discovered on the film set, Mark can no longer fly under the radar. He knows he is on borrowed time.
Peeping Tom had the bad luck to come out about the time of some of Hammer Films’ nastiest releases, The Revenge of Frankenstein, The Stranglers of Bombay, for example. Even worse, it was released by the same company which had just produced two entertaining but trashy features, Horrors of the Black Museum and Circus of Horrors.
We all know that movies can be used as escape. To give just one example, you watch Clint Eastwood tell someone exactly where to go…then back it up with his fists or his Magnum 44. Such movies are like a drug.
Perhaps people watching Peeping Tom then, felt this way. That it told them, this time, don’t be The Man With no Name or Dirty Harry
Callahan (Eastwood roles). Be Mark instead. Live inside him for an
hour and forty minutes.
Their reaction: What kind of sick invitation is that? He’s a pervert, for Christ’s sake. Then worst of all, you saw and remembered Mark’s kind side, that lets him spare Helen from harm, as he promised he would. You want to tell yourself he’s still a sociopath. But you know he is much more than that.