Peeping Tom: He Has His Father’s Eyes

Today, Peeping Tom is considered a masterpiece, a virtuoso achievement of craft and cunning that has profoundly influenced generations of directors (from Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma to Michael Haneke and Kathryn Bigelow) and helped inspire an entire subgenre of “slasher” movies centered on a psychopathic killer and a cast of beautiful women who fall under his knife, axe, machete. But Peeping Tom’s current canonical status must have seemed impossible at the time of its British release in April 1960. Infamously, a deluge of negative reviews doomed the film for years to come. And the reviews weren’t just bad—they were aggressive, outraged. The Observer’s C. A. Lejeune, once Powell’s greatest champion, wrote, “It’s a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom.” Derek Hill at the Tribune offered, “The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer.” The Times’ Dilys Powell warned that the movie’s director “cannot wash his hands of responsibility for this essentially vicious film.” (Ironically, she would later call the film a “masterpiece.”)

This press reception has long been blamed for ending Powell’s exalted career as a director. Of course, Powell was far from done with movies. He would go on to make films such as The Queen’s Guards (1961) and They’re a Weird Mob (1966)—the latter a hit in Australia—though nothing approached the success of his 1940s and ’50s heyday. While Peeping Tom’s initial reviews undoubtedly did significant damage to his position in the industry, the industry itself had, by 1960, already become a less hospitable place for Powell, with once stalwart British studios like J. Arthur Rank and heavy hitters like Alexander Korda declining in power. With Peeping Tom, Powell ended up working with Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors, which was known mostly for the Carry On series. Anglo-Amalgamated, as it turned out, showed a surprising lack of agility in dealing with the early reviews and effectively deserted the movie in Britain. In the United States, the film received even more limited distribution, and in butchered form. For the next twenty years, Powell writes, “the film practically vanished, and me with it.”

It’s irresistible to contrast Peeping Tom’s calamitous release with Alfred Hitchcock’s blockbuster success just two months later with the thematically and tonally similar Psycho. Perhaps the key factor in the films’ wildly different receptions was Hitchcock’s insistence on a slow rollout, and on his own genius marketing approach, which included forbidding admission to the movie once it had started. In fact, one might speculate that Hitchcock had Powell’s press burial in mind when he refused to hold advance screenings of Psycho for critics. By the time reviews did appear, they were decidedly mixed. But it hardly mattered: Psycho was already a tremendous hit.

Differences in release strategy aside, one must also consider the way the two films’ respective stories are told. While both place a killer at the center, Hitchcock begins Psycho with Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) as its protagonist; conversely, Peeping Tom begins with Mark and stays with him for the bulk of the movie—for better or for worse. Further, in Psycho, we only learn the putative cause for Norman Bates’s pathology in the film’s heavily expository final moments. In Peeping Tom, however, we learn the source of Mark’s pathology very early in the movie. And, most critically, we learn it from Mark himself, as he reveals to the kind and intelligent Helen (beautifully played by Anna Massey) that in childhood he was the subject of his father’s sadistic experiments in fear. In this way, Helen stands in for us and her response cues our own: Mark is the victim of his father’s tyranny, and Boehm’s tender performance never lets us forget he is a child of trauma.

Leo Marks, of course, was the first here to play with meta-meanings, by naming his main character, Mark, after himself—and by summoning his own wartime expertise as a code-breaker to embed a constellation of hidden meanings in the screenplay. “I wanted to disclose [Mark] step-by-step to the audience,” he once said, “as if they were unraveling a code themselves.”

All this meta-play—the playful reflexivity (about filmmaking) and self-reflexivity (about the filmmakers themselves)—announces Peeping Tom as a deliciously postmodern text and an eerily prescient one. Watching it now—more than sixty years since its release—it also feels keenly relevant in its sophisticated and nuanced representation of family trauma and gender trouble. Mark’s violence is deeply connected to his feelings of impotence, his atrophied masculinity, his arrested development at the hands of his father’s dominating presence. Women are a lethal threat to Mark, who penetrates them the only way he can: with his tricked-out tripod. At the same time, Mark seems to identify deeply with women. Consider again Mark’s tender treatment of the model Lorraine when she reveals her cleft palate. As one who believes himself similarly “marked” (in his case by trauma), Mark is profoundly affected by Lorraine, so moved by her that he needs to capture it on film. “It’s my first time, too,” Mark assures her, as if suggesting he and Lorraine are one. Though he’s taken thousands of pictures, here he feels like he’s in front of the camera as well, revealing himself to her, exposing his “secret.”

At the same time, the women in Peeping Tom are also astonishingly active forces. They speak their minds, they probe, they—foremost Helen—are also the detectives, the ones looking, watching, demanding to understand, as Helen says, what they are shown. We may see Helen as a kind of “final girl” more than a decade before Black Christmas or Halloween, but she is so much more. She is the one who, charmingly, pushes her way into Mark’s life, invading his private quarters on first meeting, probing him with questions, seeking to penetrate his mysteries. Fascinatingly, rather than being threatened, he responds in kind, opening himself up to her. When he shows her his father’s movies of him as a child, an astonishing act of intimacy, Helen responds with horror over his father’s actions, and a profound sympathy.

Quickly, the pair also become potential collaborators, with the aspiring writer Helen seeking Mark’s help in providing the photos for her first children’s book. The story itself—about a frightened little boy whose viewfinder reassuringly shows him adults as they were when children—reflects her intuitive understanding of Mark’s childlike nature and his dependence on his camera as a way to navigate the world. And her desire to look, to see, to push herself into Mark’s life marks her as a kind of Peeping Tom. But she “looks” not in order to destroy but to understand Mark and his secret, his compulsions. As a result, Mark doesn’t experience her attention as a threat but as a gift, because (1) he responds so deeply to her intrusion and feels a kinship with her so instantly, effectively laying himself bare even before the first date; and (2) he seems to want, as befits the Freudian logic of the film, to be caught—or, at least, to be stopped.

It is one of Powell’s giddy achievements that we almost find ourselves thinking that maybe, with Helen’s help, everything will work out after all with Mark. When Helen presses him to leave his camera behind when they have dinner, he has only a moment’s hesitation before he surrenders it to her. The film even plays with its Freudian connotations: “I thought it was growing into an extra limb,” Helen jokes, reminding us that, as with Mark’s phallic tripod, sometimes a camera is not just a camera. What Mark seems to intuit but can’t quite embrace is that Helen is trying to show him that there’s a different way to look. Looking in order to understand, not control; looking in order to connect, not destroy. And her connection with Mark is ultimately what protects Helen. She can never simply be the girl in the viewfinder.

In a 1986 interview, Michael Powell reflected on the critical drubbing that Peeping Tom received on release. “I had no idea that critics were so innocent,” he said, and one can almost hear the wink. Ultimately, there’s something so knowing about the way Peeping Tom plays with us—critics and general audiences alike. Like the man in the newsagent’s shop who wants Mark’s “dirty pictures” but is aghast at the offer to join the shop owner’s mailing list, we want to look, desperately, but only under the cloak of anonymity. Only in the dark of the cinema.

There’s a small but telling moment in that first scene when Helen visits Mark’s projection room. The script reads: “From his POV, we see her brushing the hair out of her eyes as she looks slowly round. He brushes the hair out of his.” Together, they will look, unobstructed, unashamed. And, throughout the movie, it is Helen who wants to turn on the lights, to lift the blinds, to pull back the veil: “I like to understand what I’m shown.” With Peeping Tom, Powell forces us to understand what we’re being shown, what in fact we’ve been craning our neck to see—and now can’t unsee. We can’t pretend we don’t understand any longer. We can’t deny the aggression of looking, the seamy pleasures film affords us by permitting a peep into its keyhole. We can no longer feign innocence. After all, the eyes at the peephole are our own.