Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” (1960) in the Age of Facebook and Selfies
Jennifer Tang
Upon its release in 1960, Peeping Tom, a film by the esteemed British director Michael Powell, auteur of such classics as The Red Shoes, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Black Narcissus, came under fire. Though his fellow Brit, Alfred Hitchcock, also inspired a similar kind of outrage thanks to the explicit violence in Psycho, Hitchcock’s career flourished after the film’s release; Powell’s did not. This psychologically complex work was called “depraved,” “perverted,” “pornographic,” and his film career, by all accounts, was destroyed (Moor 54). It wasn’t until the late 1970s that Martin Scorsese championed Peeping Tom and saved it from obscurity, but by that time, Powell’s prime filmmaking years had been lost.
What was the root of this outrage, this intellectual but also highly visceral rejection by critics that ultimately ended Powell’s career? The plot of Peeping Tom is roughly as follows: a handsome and diffident young man, Mark Lewis, who works as a “focus puller” for a film crew is actually a murderer of prostitutes, a modern day Jack the Ripper. Nothing new about that, except that the killer also happens to be an obsessed filmmaker who stabs his unwitting “stars” by using a knife concealed in the tripod of his camera. The police are mystified by the intense look of fright found on the victims’ faces. At the end the film, we learn why: the sadistic killer attached a mirror to his camera, forcing the victims to watch themselves die.
Critics in 1960 expressed revulsion. “The film is more nauseating and depressing than the leper colonies of East Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay, and the gutters of Calcutta,” wrote Len Mosley of the Daily Express. The London Times’ critic put it bluntly: “The only really satisfactory way to dispose of ‘Peeping Tom’ would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the sewer; even then the stench would remain” (Killer Reviews 1).
Roger Ebert, in his 1999 column on “Great Films,” attributed their anger to the fact Powell committed the apparently unpardonable sin of calling attention to the audience’s own love of voyeurism. The pleasure of a movie-going experience, after all, derives from the spectator’s ability to be “unseen,” to lose sense of who he or she is for a time by becoming the all-seeing eye of the camera: “We sit in the dark, watching other people’s lives” (Ebert 1). Like Hitchcock, Powell was a master manipulator of viewers’ emotions. When Mark stalks his victims, the director switches to a subjective camera, inviting the audience to “become” the murderer and share his bloodlust for killing. For the polite, sexually repressed and reserved Brits who had survived the horrors of WWII, but had not yet experienced The Beatles or Swinging London, this invitation was greeted with rage, a virtual assault on “civilized” society.
While much has been written about the film’s exploration of the moviemaking process, I believe the film has a lot to say about today’s social media culture. In re- cent years, voyeurism has become less a concern of the movie house than a phenomenon of the Internet and all the devices that keep us connected. For many, Face- book, the foremost social media platform, serves as a kind of daily, 24-hour reality show. The “stars” are people we know as well as ourselves. We watch and comment on our friends’ activities and they, in turn, watch us. These actions and reactions create a never-ending loop in which we end up continually staring at ourselves. This is a recurrent motif in Peeping Tom—Mark cannot stop filming and insists that everyone watch themselves on camera, whether they are going about their daily lives or are about to be killed. Throughout the film, he claims he is filming “a documentary,” but it soon becomes clear that this “movie” will only end with his death.
I believe Powell’s film poignantly addresses issues of privacy and voyeurism that our contemporary, highly narcissistic culture prefers to ignore. The older woman who rooms in Mark’s building ominously warns, “All this filming isn’t healthy.” The film’s heroine resents being treated like an object: the first time he attempts to film Helen, his soon-to-be girlfriend, she angrily pushes his camera away. Later, when they go on a first date, she firmly insists that he leave his camera behind (a situation eerily prescient of our current resistance to leaving behind our smartphones). Pow- ell’s message is clear: Mark’s urge to kill is an outgrowth of his addiction to voyeur- ism. His detachment from “real life” leads to a spiritual deadness that can only be escaped through the “hands on” act of murder.
In the sixty years since the film’s release, however, what was once presented as the symptoms of a madman has now become an everyday activity performed by millions of people behind their computer screens. Thanks to the ubiquitousness of the Internet and the photographic capability of smartphones, we now have the means at our disposal to record aurally and visually everything about our lives. If Mark Lewis, loner and wannabe filmmaker, had lived today and simply refrained from the still socially unacceptable act of killing strangers, he would have his own YouTube channel and be lauded as a prime member of the zeitgeist.
Five years ago, a friend of mine lost her beloved mother to cancer. In 2010, Facebook was still a relative novelty, a popular but not widely used social platform. As such, her early months of mourning, as it did for many others, took place in relative obscurity and privacy. Then, as the years passed, many of my friends began signing up for Facebook and encouraging me to do the same. At first I thought it was just an amusing, harmless little website; I learned it had been started by two immature Harvard geeks eager to compare notes on single women. But then I started to notice that my view of friendship and friends began to change radically. First, the effect seemed to be positive: I reunited with old pals and acquaintances I thought I had lost. But soon the content of my online relationships evolved: friends whom I had known only in passing acquaintance suddenly began to take on multidimensional aspects comparable to that of a literary character, thanks to my being privy to their lives on Facebook. People I thought I had known well for years turned out to be, thanks to their profiles and daily updates, quite at variance with their outward social appearances; and some relationships began to break away and sometimes crumble thanks to miscommunications that had begun (and ended) on Facebook message sites.
Then, the day after my friend mentioned that it was the anniversary of her mother’s death, I opened my Facebook account and was confronted by a photo of her mother’s headstone, obviously taken at the cemetery and strewn with roses. The dates of her birth and death could be clearly seen, etched in granite. “R.I.P.
Mom,” my friend captioned. “I will always love you.” It was clear my friend was in pain and only wanted sympathy from the Facebook world. I felt sorry for her, but the image of her mother’s grave haunted me for days. Perhaps it was my own fear of death, but I realized it was also because the photo had been so intimate. I felt I had been thrust into the depths of someone else’s grief and I wanted to look away. What was next, I wondered, a photo of the autopsy?
At the same time, the image itself struck me as strangely familiar. I felt I had seen something like it before. Then I remembered: the photo of the headstone reminded me of a scene in Peeping Tom. “Much of the tension in Peeping Tom comes from its constant scenes of people looking at things they shouldn’t,” writes an AMC critic (Movie Mashup 1). Some discerning critics noted that much of the horror of the film comes not from the killings themselves (which are shown mostly off-screen), but from the revelations of how a young man becomes a killer (Peary 116). Like Norman Bates, Mark is sociable and invites an earnest young woman, Helen, into his home to watch childhood home movies made by his father. The elder Lewis (played by Michael Powell himself) was a scientist fascinated by the nervous system and people’s reaction to fear. Unfortunately, he used his own son as a guinea pig.
In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, a movie-within-a movie shows a young Mark (played by Powell’s own son) jumping out of bed in fright after his father drops a lizard onto his bed. Mark defends his father’s actions, telling Helen that his father immortalized his reactions in his landmark research tomes in psychology. Helen, however, is shocked by his father’s lack of emotion and sensitivity. An even more disturbing sequence follows: the boy is seen approaching his mother’s deathbed. The camera follows his stricken face until two glaringly white hands, splayed out at odd angles to convey their lifelessness, come into view. The boy reaches down and grasps the corpse’s fingers. Helen lets out a gasp of disbelief as she realizes that the elder Lewis decided to film his son’s reaction at the exact moment that his beloved mother died.
Powell then cuts away to Mark and Helen watching the film. “And now, here’s my mother’s funeral. And here is her burial,” he continues breathlessly, though we are curiously denied this view. It was at this point that I remembered my friend’s dead mother – the image of the tombstone that even Powell had found too disturbing (or unnecessary) to show, had managed to make its way to my own Facebook page.
By demonstrating that nothing is sacred and that the camera is free to do whatever a director wants, Mark’s father conditioned his son to disregard the notion of privacy and accept that the violation of people’s boundaries is fine as long as you have a project in mind (a research study or a self-styled documentary). But Mark goes further than this: he later introduces his victims to an early concept of the “selfie” by making sure his victims watch themselves die. In the film’s final sequence, Mark commits suicide with his own “selfie stick”, impaling himself while filming and watching his own death throes in the mirror.
By exposing what an unhealthy obsession with film and filming can do to the mind, Powell seems to have had courted rejection by his peers. Despite his enormous success as a filmmaker, I speculate that he may have suffered some level of guilt over an inability to experience “real life”. Instead of being lauded for his honesty and willingness to delve into the less savory aspects of directing and movie- making (now recognized by Scorsese and others), Powell was attacked for depicting the destructive power of unfettered voyeurism and revealing one of his profession’s occupational hazards. Audiences and critics were mystified by this betrayal. What was Powell saying? Was he actually advocating a kind of censorship, that filmmakers should shy away from certain “taboo” topics, given that film can be used for evil as well as good? Or was he making the observation that film is by nature exploitative and that, as a filmmaker, this state is simply unavoidable?
While Peeping Tom remains, to date, thought-provoking and fascinating be- cause it invites questions such as these, I believe that much of its original power to haunt and horrify audiences has been lost. In addition to our high level of tolerance for graphic violence, which makes any horror film from the 1960s seem as tame as Disney programming for preschoolers, modern audiences will laugh at the film’s implicit idea that those addicted to selfies and/or filming themselves are disturbed or inclined to murder. In today’s “sharing” culture, where advertisers and friends alike encourage everyone to “share” their photos, hobbies, preferred products, likes and dislikes, even homes and phone numbers (Google Maps puts to the rest the idea that your remote country home is free from prying eyes), the idea that everyone is entitled to certain privacy rights that cannot and should not be broken feels arbitrary and rigid; the concept has become entirely subjective, dependent upon the will and cooperation of the subject. This belief appears to persist today despite tragedies: for example, the Sept. 22, 2012 suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi after his roommate secretly videotaped him having sex with another man (Foderaro 1).
Seen today, the elder Lewis’ treatment of his son would be considered abusive only in regard to his age: he was a child subject to unpleasant psychological experiments done without his permission. Filming his son at his mother’s deathbed, however, would no longer be viewed by society as an immoral desecration, which is what Powell may have intended. Had a real-life father done the same thing in 2015, such a sequence would have been posted on YouTube, inviting the public to share in the boy’s grief, much in the way my friend’s tombstone photo was. “Public exposure is not just a matter of egotism or idle voyeurism,” argues Steve Johnson in Time. He praises cancer-stricken friends for blogging their way to health, gaining support and useful advice on the way. He even cites “Zuckerberg’s Law”—a prediction by the Facebook CEO that “each year we’ll share twice as much information as we did the year before,” even as the list of social media casualties goes on: the thou- sands of faceless employees whose oblivious musings about his or her job, sexual life, or political opinions leads to dismissal; teenagers or young college students who ruin their chances to get into a good school, a good job, or even a nice place to live thanks to a misjudged or impulsive Facebook posting.
As we continue to immerse ourselves in data-sharing technology, blogging about our lives, taking selfies, holding up seas of smartphones at any event we deem worthy of recording, posting millions of photos and videos to Facebook and Youtube, Peeping Tom’s implicit message that “all this filming is unhealthy,” possibly leading to insanity and death, now feels as hysterically overblown as the harsh reviews the film originally received. It’s hard to see anything deviant or pathological about someone who is so much like us. In 2015, we have all become voyeurs. Jesuis Mark Lewis.
Works Cited
Ebert, Roger. “Reviews: Great Movie: Peeping Tom.” Review. Ebert Digital LLC, 2 May 1999.
Web. 6 Feb. 2015.
Foderaro, Lisa W. “Private Moment Made Public, Then a Fatal Jump.” The New York Times. 29 Sept. 2010. Web. 07 Feb. 2015.
Johnson, Steven. “Web Privacy: In Praise of Oversharing.” Time. Time Inc., 20 May 2010. Web. 07 Feb. 2015.
Moor, Andrew. Powell & Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces. London:
I.B. Tauris, 2005. Print.
“Movie Mashup (1960).” AMC Blogs Movie Mashup Comments. American Movie Classics, n.d.Web. 07 Feb. 2015.
Peary, Danny. Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful. New York: Dell, 1989. Print.
“Peeping Tom: The Killer Reviews.” The Powell & Pressburger Pages. Jan 2006. Web. 07 Feb. 2015.
Powell, Michael. A Life in Movies: An Autobiography. New York: Knopf, 1987. Print.