Peeping Tom

[Amy]

Thoughts after watching Peeping Tom:
- The movie is shot at familiar angles so that you as the viewer feel like you are participating within the ‘cinematic perversion’/ male gaze. You feel ‘pulled in’ to Mark’s impulses and emotions even when his behavior is uncomfortable to watch. Especially since in contrast he mostly comes across as seeming nervous and almost* endearing, but not truly. Though he mostly just seems like he’s waiting for something/ someone as you watch him interact with unsuspecting characters). Helen’s mother is the one character so far to really see him as not simply nervous, but ‘stealthy’.
- It’s also a look at what happens when we choose curiosity about the idea of someone over their consent (especially in these times where everything can be recorded and posted). Whether this be Mark’s perversion over women’s’ fear or his father’s ‘research’ on Mark’s and other children’s fears.
- There’s also the sense that Mark gains a feeling of control by being able to control the emotion (fear) and moment of someone’s final moments. He may specifically choose women, instead of, children, like he was for example, or men, like his father, because he wants to gain back the separation that he had from his mother due to her early passing (and he’s only known being able to ‘connect’ to his family through a camera lens). Similarly, to how Sarah mentioned facilitating ‘closeness’ with his victims. Mark gets to both take their final moments through his own invasiveness while also maintaining a wall behind the camera for himself. I think he also takes control by ‘reliving;’ his own childhood by only being able to take his victims lives when he sees them afraid.
- The dynamic between him and Helen’s mother is specifically interesting as well. He captures her fear despite her blindness but can’t follow through on the kill. Pity has never been a motive to stop before, so I don’t think it’s that, possibly pity for Helen, but even then, he seems way too self-absorbed for that. I think she (the mother) is the only one to truly see something ‘off’ with him, and he’s not used to that level of invasiveness being turned on him, and that both terrifies him and stuns him from reliving his usual patterns through her.
- The final moment of control/ satisfaction for Mark is when he turns his voyeurism/ invasiveness literally _into_ himself by spearing himself like he did his victims.

[Vincent]

So I copied and saved these next two into one draft because I keep changing them anyway. Now the question is where is this draft?
Vincent

There should be a "load draft" button, left to the "save draft" one Roshan
Clicking on it will give you a link to your saved draft. Clicking on that link will bring back the saved content in the posting area.

[e-ssam]

Peeping Tom & Psycho came out with months in between, and Psycho was the bigger commercial success. you could say it mostly has to do with the marketing strategy & Hitchcock being already a household name in hollywood at the time compared to Powell, and is usually accredited as the first slasher for that.
Not to say Peeping's influence wasn't acknowledged either.


But also, Psycho isn't about the gaze itself. It remains at a distance, we watch someone else do it. It doesn't attempt to challenge the viewer's perception by identification, nor does it attempt to show exactly how a camera is both an identifying and separating device by the very fact that it captures an "image".
Mark wants to capture the fear which was within himself in an other, but really it's all in preparation to capture himself. And although he staged the deliberateness in a more or less complete improv to focus on a singular camera. His final kill can't be, he isn't the one behind the viewfinder anymore, what he saw in the people is.

*Which could be one of the reasons he doesn't kill the mother, not only because she can "sense him" as she is blind, she can't see her own fear and she isn't capable of playing the voyeurism game, but i just had that thought and no idea *

[e-ssam]

And it opened the way for Michael Haneke(and others) to keep teasing everyone with the estrangement and self reflexivity caused by the cinematic gaze.

[Vincent]

So the original communications medium that inspired the film was code, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, not film. Not even image. It was words, but words that represented different words, ones that were absolutely critical and functional. And the words he used as codes were poems. Then these codes would be transmitted, and intercepted. Marks seems to be grappling painfully with the double-edged sword of 'technics', and life-giving, life-destroying sword.. In his mind, Marks converted code as weapon to film as weapon to exorcise these demons through the film's main character, Mark.

It's also not insignificant that he was mourning the death of his girlfriend in a plane crash while writing said code. It's all media and transportation, which is all technics and civilization.

I should have posted this a LOT earlier but i do feel like this is deeply, deeply true.

It's not just about film and the (oedipian) triangle Actor / Director / Spectator.
It's about technics and civilization indeed.

When i first watched the movie, one of the things that crossed my mind is that Peeping Tom had something to do with Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus
(Etymologically, Prometheus means foresight, btw)

I feel like, in some sense, Mark is like the photographic negative of Frankenstein's monster.
Like Frankenstein's monster, Mark has been created. He has been made into a killer, and he is born from a scientific experiment, one that has also something to do with shocks, and with the nervous system.
Then pretty much everything else is reversed between the two characters :
Frankenstein's monster is internally beautiful and externally creepy. Mark is the opposite.
Frankenstein's monster is looking for a Bride. Mark is looking away from her.
Frankenstein's monster is fleeing to Antartica, Mark is melding with the crowd of London's underbelly, and he dies in his lair.
I'm pretty sure there is more of those chasms and parallels.

The thing is, to borrow Roshan's expression from a recent discussion, Frankenstein was one of the first "romantic reaction to the downside of technology in the arts".
And i think the reason i kept thinking about it when i was watching Peeping Tom is because this is also true for Peeping Tom.
Both stories captures a different Zeitgeist, but they are both about the essential ambivalence of technics and civilization.
And both stories explores it from within, since writing and filming ARE techniques.

tbcd.