New Work Scotland Programme 9

MARY ANN TUCKERMAN YOU LOOKING AT ME?

Scopophillia – the practice of obtaining sexual pleasure from things seen Scopophobia- fear of being looked at.

The room goes dark; you are plunged into that familiar, strangely comforting blackness. A flicker of light falls on the screen. Then the image bursts forth. A large, unblinking eye. Pupils fixed and dilated, staring directly at you. The credits roll. The title "Peeping Tom".

Michael Powell’s 1958 film, in which the protagonist Mark Lewis murders women with the tripod leg of his camera while filming their final moments of life, is one of the few, truly great films about the act of movie making. The films self-reflexive insight into the gaze of the filmmaker and the viewer is simultaneously highly revealing and shockingly disturbing.

Although the film makes it abundantly clear that we are not watching a healthy, responsible individual, but rather a murderously, sick creature, Peeping Tom deliberately, and very unsettlingly, refuses to allow us to maintain a secure critical and moral distance from the character. Rather than being permitted to enjoy the luxury of gazing quietly as the action unfolds, Peeping Tom ruptures our fondness for this kind of detached participation for the viewer. Instead, Powell’s film is cinematically constructed in such a way as to break down the usual distance between viewer and screen. Primarily this is achieved by Powell’s trademark use of point of view shots.

Powell had utilized this cinematic ‘trick’ before. Famously in ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ a false eyelid appears to close shut over the lens, as if we are literally inside the protagonist’s head. In Peeping Tom, the view through Mark’s hand held camera as he murders his victims manages to dissolve the boundary between our own passive consumption in the darkened cinema and the screen, placing us instead in the position of the murderer.

Consequently, the film plunges us into an uncomfortable position of complicity, where we are forced to examine our own rituals of looking. The title ‘Peeping Tom’ seems to apply to us, the viewer, as much as it does to the films protagonist. The real horror of the film rests precisely on this growing self -awareness of having ones own unhealthy hunger for looking (scopophillia) fed. Peeping Tom insists that although we might like to think we of ourselves as above and beyond the murderous, sick scopophillic desires of Mark Lewis, our hunger for cinematic pleasure reveals that we closer to such perversion, than we might like to think. Here Powell mischievous streak finds full voice in a film that takes great, devious delight in exposing that the normal pleasures of watching celluloid are far from innocent.

Looking at films, after seeing ‘Peeping Tom’ becomes a far more problematic activity. In effect, the film turns the camera on us, exposing our own scophillia. The deeply uncomfortable experience of this, perversely, has often had the effect of infecting the scophilic with scopophobia. The looker becomes very uneasy about being looked at.

John Beagles 2002

New Work Scotland Programme 9
Maurice Doherty, Mary Ann Tuckerman