Luke
stu-kicks
CibbuanoPeeping Tom
February 22nd 2010 07:05
When we first get to know the protagonist of Peeping Tom we've already witnessed him committing a rather disturbing murder, seemingly just for the purpose of filming such a thing. It's a strange way of introducing a film's 'hero', by rights the audience should be ready to hate him, but as Peeping Tom progresses we're consumed by an overriding need to understand this guy and he becomes a kind of sympathetic figure in spite of the horrendous murders. It's quite easy to see why veteran director Michael Powell became a focal point for so much outrage after making this oddly macabre thriller, and it's a movie that's very much ahead of it's time and seems downright anachronistic for something made in the early 60s.
The opening murder scene is highly stylised and almost Hitchcockian, playing out like a silent film complete with vaudiville musical accompaniment, but beyond this establishing sequence Peeping Tom is a one-of-a-kind experience. I guess it feels so unique because it takes what would normally be the villain of the movie and turns him into the protagonist... the plot isn't driven by a manhunt or an investigation of his killings, it's more a series of vignettes where we explore this character, Mark, and what makes him tick.
Mark is a shy, peculiar man dispassionately obsessed with voyeurism due to an unusual and traumatising childhood. He seeks to capture a certain fear of death on film by killing women whilst moving a camera towards their faces. Peeping Tom explores our fascination with voyeurism, exemplified by a scene where Mark shows his young neighbour, Helen, some footage of himself as a child. She's horrified and disturbed by these films, but she also can't stop watching them. This mesmerising pull of what frightens the viewer is a sort of metaphor for the power of film itself, just as Helen feels compelled to watch Mark's videos, we also feel compelled to watch Peeping Tom. It's not surprising that critics at the time became so vocally angry at this movie... it probably affected them on a deeper level than most of them cared to admit, with Mark's quest to capture the face of death an outright microcosm of the history of violence in cinema itself, and why it continues to fascinate us.
Karlheinz Bohm as Mark has a strange presence that goes a long way to explaining the film's cult appeal... he has a prematurely aged look that belies his character's past, and comes across as a blond, handsome version of Peter Lorre. He inhabits the role so completely that he convincingly engages the audience's sympathy without ever losing the wrongness inherent in his character. Peeping Tom's bold dissection of a serial killer's motivations are on par with psychoanalysis in modern film today, clearly demonstrating the cause-and-effect cycle that led to Mark's emotional deficiencies... he tries to film Helen's reactions to his childhood footage just as his own father filmed him, and seems to be suffering from a sense of displacement where he sees his own life from outside himself, making him the ultimate voyeur.
Peeping Tom isn't a particularly gruesome movie by today's standards, but it does remain quite shocking. It also offers an unexpected early peek at the sordid side of life (Mark works on the side as a pornographer, amongst women of dubious moral character). The final scenes are like a kick in a gut, resonating well beyond the film's end because of the level of care and intimacy the director invests in a character who should be absolutely repulsive. Peeping Tom shares a few similarities with Psycho (which was released in the same year) but is actually a lot more interesting and less dated due to it's more complex treatment of a very dark subject matter, and it's worth the time of anyone who was ever a fan of M, Se7en, The Silence of the Lambs or any other decent crime-horror film.
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