Finally! This one's been on my cinematic bucket list for absolutely years, but various factors have always got in the way. My own innate cowardice in the face of scary stories, for one thing, not to mention the fact that it's only been readily available since relatively recently. After yesterday, though, I felt as though I could handle anything so long as it didn't come dressed up in ruffles and singing happy tunes.
It's hard to know where to begin with Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, to be honest, such is the extent to which its reputation precedes it. Certain facts are on the record, of course - that on release, it was so reviled that it effectively killed the career of one of the UK's most talented and distinctive directors - but despite having read everything I could find about the film, I still felt as though I was going in blind, with generally high expectations as my general expectation.
Okay, that's not strictly true; I knew the basics - that Peeping Tom was about a voyeuristic killer who filmed each murder, and that he had become this way thanks to his father, an experimental psychologist studying fear in childhood and using his own son as a guinea pig. I knew that the killer's boyhood self was played by Powell's son, and the father was played by Powell himself, although I kind of wished I didn't because even before watching, I found this staggeringly bloody creepy.
This is the thing about Peeping Tom, though; it's more interactive than a film has any right to be. Not in a gadgetry or bells and whistles way, but in the way it forces audience complicity and sends your mind down shady alleyways into some very dark places indeed. Largish chunks of it are viewed through the lens of the killer himself, one Mark Lewis, a softly-spoken and nervously twitchy individual played by Karlheinz Boehm. Lewis is a pitiable figure, certainly, and he tends to incite sympathy in those around him, who know nothing of his murderous secret.
There is no pleasure for Lewis in killing; instead, it's a compulsion, and when his downstairs neighbour Helen (Anna Massey) is kindly and flirtatious, he seems to want to do everything he can to protect her. Helen's blind mother, meanwhile, played by Maxine Audley, knows that Lewis is an unquiet soul - in one of the film's most powerful scenes, she confronts him in his darkroom and for a short while, it looks as though the tables might be turned. Peeping Tom is not a gentle enough film to use narrative convention to let us off the hook, however, and instead, we are forced to watch as the tragedy unfolds in front of our shocked but fascinated eyes.
Which, I think, is why the critics hated it. The line between fascination and revulsion is a thin one; it's easily blurred, and sometimes it can be improbably hard to tell the one emotion from the other. Film critics watch more films than almost anybody, and so, faced with a piece that implicates the viewer so soundly, perhaps it's natural that they should be the ones to judge it the most harshly. What probably compounds this, too, is that Peeping Tom is so very, very good, with Powell's trademark gorgeous cinematography. The film tells a simple story with expressionistic grace, and uncomfortable as it is to admit as much, I found the viewing experience a thoroughly enjoyable one. There are good or great films that have left me feeling drained and exhausted - Alien, for instance, or Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but this wasn't one of them; and even as the last images faded I found myself planning a repeat viewing in a month or so.
Humans, let's be blunt about this, like to watch. Horror films, traffic accidents, politically-motivated hostage murders. No matter what, where there is spectacle, there will always be an interested audience. I'm not sure what this says about us as a species, other than that we've evolved with our eyesight as our primary sense and that as a survival trait, we're biologically programmed to keep a close eye on anything out of the ordinary. Perhaps this is an uncomfortable truth for some - I honestly don't know. What I'm sure of, however, is that I yearn to see the films Powell might have gone on to make if the mores of the time hadn't left the powers that be so ill-at-ease with their own animal nature.
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