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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
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