Peeping Tom Michael Powell
Peeping Tom Michael Powell; Script: Leo Marks (UK; 1960) Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, Maxime Audley.
viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema 20 Sept 2024; ticket: £7
cracking the code
Before becoming an author, Leo Marks, Michael Powell’s scriptwriter was a leading Army cryptographer during World War ll. Perhaps embedded in the imagery of Peeping Tom there’s a coded message; perhaps it’s no coincidence that ‘Peeping Tom’s’ protagonist and his creator share the same name: Mark (s).
In nearly all Powell and Pressburger films women play a key role. In titles such as ‘One of our Aircraft is Missing’, ‘Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ the women characters tend towards being angelic types, handmaidens resourceful and brave; but the parts they play more or less revolve about a male narrative. But in the late 1940’s the writer/directorial team made series of films in which women were at the core of the action. ‘I Know where I’m Going’ ‘Black Narcissus’ and ‘Red Shoes’, all feature women as the protagonists, the characters making the decisions. These movies all have a mythic substrate. The scripts locate the protagonists at the liminal bounds of competing and contrasting worlds, at which point they have to make the conscious irrevocable decision to step over a boundary line and embrace a new affirming reality. In these films the women characters exist in psychic space outside the stereotypes of Hollywood, space in which women assert agency and in which they live life on their own terms without reference to the male.
The scripts reflect perhaps Powell and Pressburger’s perception not just of the growing influence of women in society during the war years but also of the manner in which feminine agency might differ from the male.
Cue 1960 ten years later: Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’. Everything’s become dark. The women in ‘Peeping Tom’ (with the exception of Helen, of whom more later) are victims chosen by Mark so that he can inflict upon them lethal sadistic force. The women have no agency no life no choice. They are reduced to ‘things’ that exist only for the satisfaction of Mark’s needs.
In the course of some ten years there has been a complete reversal of Powell’s understanding of women’s situation. Powell’s film is structured about the creation of image. The opening shot comprises a big close up of an eye intently peering through the viewfinder of a movie camera at the object of the lens: a prostitute. With the exception of a couple of establishment shots, for the rest of the pre-title sequence the audience share the frame of that privileged peering ‘eye’. We see with Mark through the viewfinder of his movie camera; we share with him his murder of the prostitute who is killed as he is in the act of filming her. Objectification. Life has become a process of objectification. Mark films women as he murders them; skewering them through the neck with a stiletto (sic) attached to one of the legs of his tripod. Fixed to the body of the camera is a mirror, Mark’s devilish refinement, so that the women can witness their own deaths as the steel pierces their throats. In death they witness their own becoming object.
Mark wants to film fear, to understand fear, as if his camera can capture in the very moment of heightened terror, the essence of fear as an objective record. But the camera reveals only an image, a surface that is detached from the actual.
The camera takes and feeds us images. The camera captures flat two dimensional images, particles of light, that feed the desire of the eye corrupting the eye trapping the eye into an amplified feedback loop that does not deliver understanding only demands an endless cycle of intensification and repetition. ‘Peeping Tom’ cuts between the film images that Mark’s father has taken of him in his childhood and Mark’s reciprocal filming of women. Both are psychically locked into the same demented compulsion.
Like father like son. In a spurious faux scientific exercise (calling to mind the work of the Nazi’s in their death camps), Mark’s father, in the quest for ever more decisive imagery, is incited to inflict upon his son ever increasing pain and humiliation, deluded by the belief that image in itself can reveal some sort of truth.
Images have a strong tendency to became ends in themselves, to detach themselves from any rationale or justification and take on a life of their own. For the image seeker they have their own in-built logic of multiplication intensification acceleration and subversion of being. One image is not enough we need to be immersed in multiple series of images that eventually overwhelm us.
The rise of the image was an explosive element in culture in the ‘50s. The huge expansion of TV (along with an advertising industry that becomes increasingly image rather than information biased), the spread of ownership of both still and 8mm movie cameras, and the pop music industry driving fashion all attest to development of an image based culture. Not least in importance is the imaging of women as singular objects of male sexual desire, evidenced in the development of the porn magazine industry.
Two of Mark’s victims are sex industry workers. They are the ultimate psychic objects of male vilification and reduced by Mark to dead objects. The third victim, Vivienne (name means life) is more interesting. She’s an actress working as ‘a stand in’ for a Star of a film being made in the studio where Mark works as a focus puller. Vivienne is alive. Believing she is going to be filmed (not killed by Mark) she warms up with a dance. Wearing ‘slacks’ and jumper she executes in the studio a modern routine that calls to mind Gene Kelly. Her movement exhibits athleticism rhythm assertion. It’s a dance that takes her into another realm of being where she crosses an existential border into an expressive world of her own making. This is dance. But there is no escape for her. Her movement incorporating the spirit of freedom has condemned her. Her dance is over. Mark has selected her because he sees she has life, she resists becoming object. He thus commits to consigning her to body objectification, literally slamming her dead body back down in a trunk and closing the lid. Andrew Tait and others can be seen as Mark’s direct descendants.
Both Powell and script writer Marks will have absorbed the pervasive incremental dominance of image in our society. Powell as an image worker and Marks as a screen writer whose father ran a Charing Cross Road book shop, located in the centre of Soho’s ‘under the counter’ and ‘top shelf’ porn business. I somehow imagine them both repulsed and attracted by the film industry but in ‘Peeping Tom’ they faithfully track the consequences of those who live by the image.
As mentioned the Powell Press burger partnership also represented women as ‘Madonna’ types’ – ‘angels’. Women who were male enablers and whose function in the script was to be a partner to the men in helping them achieve their goals. But in “Peeping Tom’ Helen, who is such a character, is helpless in her attempts to ‘save’ Mark. Mark who lives by the image is slated to die by the image. No one not even a handmaiden can help.
The mis-en-scene of ‘Peeping Tom’ works to outwardly reflect something of Mark’s inner state of mind. The characteristic feature of Powell’s sets is that they compress the space. The sets are so filled out with matter, so full there’s no room to squeeze in anything more. The newsagents, the film set, Mark’s photographic studio every square inch is taken up by some sign artefact or machine. This compression of the space represented by the sets feels like a simulation of the internal stresses and contractions experienced by Mark as he carries out his compulsive murders.
Only the blind can see. Perhaps that’s Leo Marks’ coda. Helen’s mum, blind Mrs Stevens is the only person who feels there is something wrong. Today as we move into social and cultural matrix where the camera incorporated into the smart phone dominates, there is image after image after image. Like Mark we live by the image. We are as Powell and Mark’s foretold on the path to psychic destitution.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk