Peeping Tom/ Michael Powell

The opening shot of Michael Powell's infamous film Peeping Tom is the unfortunate scopophiliac eye of Mark Lewis - pictured to the left, as used for the cover of a paperback introduction to hypnosis. Mark's pitiful director's chair, with his name, a boyish toy, is one of cinema's unforgettable props.

This is the year of Powell - the genius behind great but little-seen films like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Britain's Citizen Kane) and Black Narcissus - since it is his centenary. Amazingly, after the shock that greeted Peeping Tom (released the same year as Psycho) the director was never allowed to direct a film again, even though he was still only in his 40s, and would live several more decades. Powell was rediscovered and championed by Martin Scorsese, and Scorsese's longtime editor married Powell eventually, so almost a happy ending.

I saw the film (as peeping Todd) for the first time the other night - which is somewhat embarrassing, since I have lectured on voyeurism and cinema in the past, and this is the key film text of that subject (in fairness to myself, I have read a great deal about the film). In fact, I suspect, having been exposed to so much theory about the film, one of the most notorious and even loathed (as well as adored) in the British canon, I was afraid to see it - lest it disappoint.

My first reaction was that the film's frank use (discussion is not quite the right word) of themes such as visual desire, pornography, childhood abuse, and psychosexuality was more disturbing and intelligent (even) than Psycho, though Anthony Perkins is a better actor than Carl Boehme, the Tom of the title. Powell was a visual master, and his use of mis-en-scene impressive. The script is also playful and knowing, with its constant use of visual words - when asked if he is a reporter, Mark states he is with The Observer, for example.

The early scene, in a technicolour twilit East-end street where the killer seeks to film and kill a sex worker is so beautifully shot it is exponentially more upsetting (and potent) than the equivalent moments in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock chose a more austere visual palette for his film). The use of the footage of Mark as a little boy, being exposed to lizards by his research-scientist father, are bizarre and perhaps the most taboo element of the film, though the climactic scene where we are exposed to the killer's morbid use of reflection as a terror-device is so "twisted" and clearly the result of (transparent) trauma it induces both profound disgust and pity (as such crimes in actuality no doubt would). One point of comparison between PT and P is that both use the home as looming, central location for the site of crime (that is the locus of the primal, family drama remains into adulthood as the epicenter of distress) - in Mark's case, he still lives in the house his father used as a laboratory, and is now a landlord who rents out the rooms below to tenants who think of him as just another one of them.

This generates the classic uncanny (unhomed) state - where, as Freud says, one sometimes feels least at home at home. For Norman, the murders radiate from his home, namely, the motel's key room, where the keyhole allows him visual intercourse with his intended love objects/victims. Mark is more free-floating - that is, mobile: he takes pictures - and lives - by literally taking his hand-held camera (if only someone had held his hand when he was a child!) out into the world, as a comfort object (it stands in for his father, whose fetish-gift it was). Once again, while for Norman the mother is the big issue, for Mark (with his Viennese and unexplained accent) his father is the source of anguish.

If the movie has not aged as well as Psycho - and it hasn't - chalk it up to the acting, which is more 50s than 60s (the film was on the cusp of these very different decades) - and the fact that, while the world of American Gothic motel-land has become iconic, Powell's terrain of grubby conershops masking elaborate porn-studio locations featuring women dressed as Parisian tarts (Folies Legeres), complete with berets seems more from the hyper-surreal set of Moulin Rouge. Or perhaps that is the point: we are, after all, seeing the film through the killer's phantasmagoric eyes.

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My latest collection (2004), Rue du Regard, in fact partially explores themes that arise from the intersection of film and desire (in a Paris-London context) and reads like a sort of homage to Peeping Tom (so perhaps only imagining the film was best for my creation of the poems). I include one from this book below.


Total Film

Excitement and Entertainment
Are nearly the same word, I suggest.
Point the Swiss Binoculars.
Let God's eye do the rest.
It's not my fault if Miss X

Takes off her clothes so I can see:
What's it to her? Total Film to me.
While there's a light to cast a shadow,
Who needs the glossy page?
Every window is a stage.

I've come close to parlours where
Dress is in a state of disrepair. I know
To watch is not to do, that's sad.
Hamlet spied on his mother, another,
And it was doing that was the bother.

I blame this talent for observation
On my father. But it may extend
Back to the origins of animals and men;
In caves when it was hard to make
Things out. On dry plains where the prey

Looked small and far away, but came
Closer as you squinted, shaded by hand.
What you get is what you see, running
In the opposite direction, overland. It's
Retinal, no skin, the stock-in-trade regret.

poem by Todd Swift