Peeping Tom (film)
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Peeping Tom is a 1960 psychological horror film by the British film director Michael Powell. The film takes its title from the character 'peeping Tom' (the voyeur in the tale of Lady Godiva), and is an horrific tale of voyeurism, serial murder and child abuse.
The film was written by the World War II cryptographer and polymath Leo Marks. The story revolves around a young man who murders women while using a portable movie camera to record their dying expressions of terror.
Synopsis
The film begins with an eerie scene where the protagonist, Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), stalks a prostitute all the while filming her with a camera hidden in his pocket. This scene, shown from the point-of-view of the camera viewfinder, generates high tension as the character follows the girl into her house, murders her and later watches the film in a den at his house as the credits roll over the screen.
Mark Lewis, it transpires is a member of a film crew who aspires to become a film-maker himself and who works part-time by photographing lurid pictures of women. He is a shy reclusive young man who hardly ever socializes outside of his workplace. He lives in his father's house, who leased his house to other tenants and now he serves as their landlord. Mark is fascinated by the boisterous family living downstairs and especially by Helen (Anna Massey), a vivacious sweet-natured girl who pities him. A friendship and later relationship develops between them.
Mark reveals to Anna through home-movies taken by his father (played by director Powell in a cameo) that as a child he was used as a guinea pig for his father's psychological experiments. In arguably the film's most gruesome scene, we see how Mark's father would experiment on his son by studying his reaction to stimuli such as lizards which he would put on his bed and would stalk the boy with a camera and went as far as recording his son's reactions as he sat with his mother on her deathbed. His father, whose studies made him a respected psychologist, was interested in studying the behaviour and habits of a voyeur and its subesequent effects and so kept his son under constant watch and even wired all his rooms so that he could hear him and spy on him.
Mark arranges with Vivian (a stand-in) to make a film after the set is closed. He kills her and in a famous scene, stuffs her in a prop trunk which is discovered later by the film crew, much to their horror. The police recognize links between the two murders and notice that both victims died with a look of utter terror on their faces. They interview everyone on the set and become suspicious of Mark, who constantly has his camera always running, always recording and who claims that he's making a documentary.
A psychiatrist called to the set to console the upset star of the movie-in-production converses with Mark and tells him that he was familiar with his father's work. The psychiatrist relays the conversation to the police, noting that Mark had 'his father's eyes.'
Mark is then tailed by the police who follow him to the building where he takes photographs. He kills his subject and heads home.
Helen, who is suspicious of Mark's films, finally comes across one of his films and is visibly upset and frightened when he enters the room and catches her. During their confrontation, Mark reveals that he tapes and makes movies so that he can capture the fear of his victims and reveals that he has a round mirror mounted above his camera, so that he can capture the reactions of his victims as they see their own deaths.
The police finally arrive at his house and Mark realizes that he's finished. As he had planned from the very beginning, he impales himself with a knife attached to one of the camera's tripod legs, just like his victims, and with the camera running, becomes the final part of his own documentary.
Themes
Peeping Tom is an immensely disturbing film about voyeurism and is known and exalted for its psychological complexity. On the surface, the film is about the decidedly Freudian relationship between the protagonist and his father and the protagonist and his victims. However, several critics consider Peeping Tom an overt tale of voyeurism in which the film is as much about the voyeurism of the protagonist as the audience is a voyeur of the protagonist's actions. Martin Scorsese, who has long been an admirer of Powell's works, stated that this film, along with Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, contain all that can be said about directing.In this way, Lewis is allegorical for a director of a horror film. In horror movies, the directors kill victims, often innocents, to provoke responses from the audiences and to manipulate their responses. Lewis records the deaths of his victims with his camera and by using the mirror and showing each of his victims their last moments, provokes their own fear even as he kills them.
Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, stated that 'The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it.' [link].
Reaction and Current Perception
Peeping Tom was a notorious and immensely controversial film on initial release and the critical backlash heaped on the film all but finished Powell's career. However the controversy surrounding the film earned it a cult following and over the last thirty years has earned it a critical reappraisal that not only salvaged Powell's reputation but also earned the film a re-evaluation. Today, the film is considered a masterpiece and one of the best British horror films. In 2004 the magazine Total Film named Peeping Tom the 24th greatest British movie of all time and was part of the BFI poll for the best British films of all time. It was listed at #38 on Bravo Channel 100 Scariest Movie Moments. Ebert entered it into his [Great Movies] column.Comparisons have often been drawn between Peeping Tom and Psycho. Both feature atypically mild mannered serial killer protagonists who are emotionally obsessed with their parents. And while Psycho arguably contained even more disturbing material than this film it became a box-office success and made its director Alfred Hitchcock even more famous. It has been suggested that this was because Hitchcock, seeing the press reaction to Peeping Tom, decided to release Psycho without a press screening.
Trivia
The band Peeping Tom featuring Mike Patton is named in tribute to this movie.External links
- [Peeping Tom and its aftermath]
- [Reviews and articles] at the [Powell & Pressburger Pages].
- [Laura Mulvey essay at criterionco.com]
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