A Film Canon

The definitive cinematic contemplation of cinema's scopophilic tendencies, Peeping Tom posits and stimulates a direct nervous connection between eye and phallus, in the form of the peculiar camera wielded by protagonist and serial killer Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm). Equipped with an extended spike for stabbing its (exclusively female) victims, and a concave mirror that ensures that their last sight is of their own distorted and magnified fear, this device is identified with the viewer's perspective in the opening scene, and with the apparatus responsible for producing that perspective through Mark's own day job as a low-budget cinematographer, until the film itself comes to stand in as a cipher for Mark's dream of a "perfect film" - namely, one in which his own psychopathological project can be combined with a properly cinematographic palette, and the "new economy drive" replaced with an aesthetic vision "so perfect that the risks don't count." To this end, Powell takes his previous extrapolations of the horrific potential of Technicolor to their logical conclusion, building a redscape that bleeds out from the confines of Mark's private darkroom, disfigures the hair, face and accoutrements of every one of his actual or potential victims and, most spectacularly, reincarnates Moira Shearer's performance of The Red Shoes. It's this resurgence of Pressburger's collaborative influence - and, more specifically, his particular interest in fusing cinema with other media - that breaks down the distinctions between diegetic and non-diegetic space to the extent required for Powell to fully embody the scopophilia he is critiquing, as well as to implicitly extend the critique from cinema itself to a more general society of visual spectacle, as evinced in Mark's simultaneous commitment to pornographic "views". Accordingly, it is in this sequence that the film's radical gendering of the camera - and the cryptically psychoanalytic family drama that screenwriter Leo Marks presents as its back-story - produces the most tangible division of spectatorial labour; or, rather, the most eloquent evocation of that labour as an apparently seamless connection between male and female, objectifying and objectified, and castrated and castratable gazes. To this end Powell organises the mise-en-scene in such a way as to intensify and expand the elasticity, plasticity and voraciousness of Mark's lens until the audience only register Mark and Shearer as ripples at either end, objects peering in and out of the shared ocular ambience that becomes increasingly synonymous with Mark's presence: "...Why don't we make him a present of that window? He practically lives there."