1999: (out of print since 4/10)

directed by Michael Powell
story and screenplay by Leo Marks

Criterion #58.

I kept thinking of what Martin Scorsese said about Powell’s The Red Shoes, so here it is again:

What I like about it sometimes: it seems out of control, that their emotions are out of control. Not the characters but the people who made the film. That the passion is out of control and I think that’s something that’s very rare. Something very rare is created when that occurs.

This movie is also certainly something rare. As with The Red Shoes, the most striking thing is that it was made at all, in this particular spirit. Michael Powell must have been a very strange person. This madman slasher movie feels like a plea or a confession, like something fraught. Just the opposite of Hitchcock and Psycho, to which it is sometimes compared, apparently. Hitchcock was never, ever out of control.

(Well, I can’t speak for Frenzy because I’ve never seen it. Word is it’s very bad. From what I gather, it actually has more in common with Peeping Tom than Psycho does, but I may be wrong about that.)

Nowadays, the sicko serial killer genre has been very well established for decades. All such movies belong comfortably to a tradition; when someone makes a new one, it’s essentially a ritual act within that tradition, and thus unremarkable. But Peeping Tom came first, so it feels peculiarly purposeful. They created it deliberately, out of the infinite field of all potential movies. They really meant it. That’s why it remains creepy today: not because of the creepy goings-on, but because of its free and fervent interest in them.

I’ve said before that I generally find cheap, trashy movies much scarier than glossy prestige movies, because I do not trust their judgment. Well, Peeping Tom is certainly not itself seedy; rather, it’s a classy production that is determinedly fixated on seediness. But that ends up being similarly distressing. It is untrustworthy at one remove; it is dressed normally and speaking intelligently, but is making very strange conversation, all about madness. “I tell you this because, as an artist, I think you’ll understand.” Its intentions feel composed but unhinged.

So in the “will he or won’t he kill?” moments, whenever our protagonist drifts into a Peter Lorre trance while in conversation with an unsuspecting woman, I experienced a special kind of unease, different from anything in, say, Silence of the Lambs. In ordinary thrillers, I definitely squirm when the hook is put in me, but I know why I’ve been hooked: for the spice and the savor of it. I’m comfortable with that, within reason; that’s fair play. But at several points in Peeping Tom I had a more itchy and uncertain feeling, like maybe someone had only hooked me as bait for something else, whatever he was personally fishing for.

This is a portrait of a cameraman = voyeur = sociopath = murderer, made with an emphasis not so much on the horror as on the pathos of those equations. I’m not sure that I think those equations make much sense outside the confines of a horror movie. But this movie certainly takes its ideas quite seriously. It is a passable murder movie, but it is principally a psychology movie, an apparently heartfelt and sometimes intensely sentimental one. As such it’s very, very odd.

Psycho is a great murder movie that makes a hollow gesture toward being a psychology movie. I basically don’t believe in Norman’s rationale and never have; as far as I’m concerned, Norman Bates is just a type of villain schtick. Yes, each kink in the psychoanalysis at the end of the movie makes some sense, but it’s like three kinks too elaborate for the creepshow of the movie. If you take the time to follow the explanation and really think it through, Norman’s pathology as described is fascinatingly layered and interesting. But I’ll be frank with you: I had never fully and seriously thought it through until just now, because the movie doesn’t actually give a crap; it just knows it needs to unload that stuff so that the recipe will work out.

Lines like “Mother isn’t quite herself today” are only cute; they’re not a serious indication of anything. A Psycho that took Norman’s pain seriously would be quite a different beast. A harder movie to deliver, I think. The Silence of the Lambs devotes much more screen time to explicating Buffalo Bill’s mind, but it still comes off as mechanical (and/or prurient) rather than rich and humane and difficult. Our standard sympathies are never actually troubled. Peeping Tom really sincerely tries to care about what it’s like to be crazy. So it’s a little crazy.

In the Joseph Stefano screenplay for Psycho, after the psychologist is done explaining Norman, we read:

Lila begins to weep softly, for Mary, for Arbogast, for Norman, for all the destroyed human beings of this world.

But that sure doesn’t happen in the movie! (Hitchcock: “Who said anything about human beings?”) It happens in Peeping Tom.

Phase two of this response. Because I’m willing to go deeper if that’s what’s required of me! (Hint: nothing is required of me.)

Let’s return to the Duane Hall reference. The joke of the scene, essentially, is that Duane is obsessively troubled by his own ordinary capacity for perverse thoughts (e.g. driving into traffic) and unable to make peace with this part of his mind because he has been brought up in an emotionally-repressed WASP household. When a Jewish writer appears in his life, Duane imagines that this person will be more emotionally open and sophisticated, and so sees in Woody an opportunity to establish a sense of his own social normalcy, something that his family cannot provide. But the joke’s on him, because actually Woody is more terrified of Duane’s perverse thoughts than he is, because he is a completely fear-based person and in the Hall household is already completely preoccupied with his sense of being on hostile ground. His passive-aggressive punchline about being due back on Earth is a rigid refusal to dare to take Duane’s appeal seriously. Depending on the audience member’s psychology, the comedy in the scene is either that we are similarly fearful and passive-aggressive, and feel the relief of identification with Woody’s predicament (“Yeah: we’re all due back on planet Earth, weirdo! Sock it to that creep, Woody! Sock it to fear itself!”) or that we feel a compassion for Woody-as-author’s implicit self-recognition (“Yeah, it’s hard for cowards; one has to smile, sadly, at the pathos of all the coping he does just to deal with ordinary reality — and at the sad fact that people don’t understand this, and constantly expect more of him.”)

Anyway, above I invoked this moment to try to get sympathy for my uneasiness about the psychological needs of Powell and Marks as sublimated in Peeping Tom. But in so doing I’m just being a coward like Woody. The filmmakers offered up their fears to see what was out there. (Which is what the antihero of the movie can’t quite bring himself to do.) In historical reality, the critical condemnation of this movie basically ended Michael Powell’s career: “We’re due back on the planet Earth,” said the press. Do I really have to be part of that mob? If Michael and Leo happen to feel like perverts and psychopaths, like M, when they retreat behind their pens and cameras, and they’re brave enough to share those feelings, why can’t I sit here and take it? Gosh, guys, that’s interesting. No, I don’t think you’re as bad as all that; there’s no need to worry so much about this stuff. But it’s certainly an interesting nightmare you had. Thanks for making a movie of it.

In fact I can sit here and take it, and did, and got something out of it. I heard what they were saying and took it seriously. So this isn’t a fair critique of me, me.

A third possible reading of the Annie Hall scene, the one that I think probably best describes the way I tend to see it, is that there is something fun, savorable in itself, about this sort of fear-tinged social confrontation. “This is my room.” Woody has wandered someplace strange and now something strange is confronting him. Strange is kind of fun! Strange is satisfying!

So actually I think that’s what I was trying to say above. Yes, Peeping Tom isn’t just weird but also weird for being so weird… but that can be satisfying. Because any kind of distinction can be valuable, can be valued. Positive vs. negative judgments are a false paradigm. More true to experience is what Marty said: “Something very rare.” Rare is a nice word.

I know, this has really wandered off and I’ve talked about Annie Hall almost as much as Peeping Tom, but I can do what I like.

Music by Powell & Pressburger regular Brian Easdale is part of the oddness; there is some orchestral underscore, but the protagonist’s psychosis and the snuff films that embody it are always accompanied by clangy “modern music” piano solos, which sound like something between a dance rehearsal and a tied-to-the-railroad-tracks melodrama accompaniment. Often these are not really very compositionally expressive, though I’m not certain how intentional that was. To me they functioned more like an ambient anxiety, like a descent into the claustrophobic conservatory practice room of his diseased mind. Here then is the main title, surely one of the most bizarre main title cues ever written for a commercial movie. Piano performance is by Gordon Watson.

Lead performances by Carl Boehm (son of Karl Böhm!) and Anna Massey are quite good, in the way of this movie. Second-billing for Moira Shearer doing a single 14-minute scene, in which she finds an excuse to dance, seems like a commercial calculation, but I like her. (She dances to “Percussion Number by Wally Stott.” Wait, where have I heard of Wally Stott again? Oh right, he’s Angela Morley). Pamela Green as the pinup model has a nicely casual presence; I learn that she was an actual pinup model and left this chatty memoir of the making of the movie, which I find completely credible and which substantiates my impression that the movie is odd because Powell was odd.

Commentary, taken from the original 1994 laserdisc, is by Laura “the male gaze” Mulvey, a genuinely distinguished film scholar for a change and a fitting choice. She gives a very film-studies gender-studies critical-theory type reading, but it’s palatable enough, because she isn’t addicted to jargon or counter-intuitive claims. And because, of all movies, this one really does seem to invite it. It is literally about the Freudian psychology of a woman-murdering cameraman, it is literally about pornography and studio films in parallel, and is full of references to the actual filmmakers. And it’s pretty much titled “The Male Gaze.”

Watching it a second time behind the commentary, I see that it is a bit of a second-time film. The problem with the first time is that one is waiting for the chills and shocks and reveals, which are all reasonable enough but not actually the movie’s strongest suit. It works much better as a “text” to be returned to than as a show to be watched, probably because that’s how it was felt while it was being made. It makes perfect sense that this movie would have crashed and burned on first release, and then been substantially rehabilitated later: later is when you’ll like it.

Further thought. At the deep emotional level where I want to be when I watch movies, the complexities of this movie don’t ring true for me. I can’t find feelings here that I can use, other than the very simple horror movie feelings. At a high intellectual level I do understand all the games and ideas, but somehow they don’t manage to filter down to the ground floor. To me that’s the ultimate test of whether those ideas are valid: if the irrational, instinctual mind believes them too. Here I suspect that they are not valid because they are the rational preoccupations of the filmmakers rather than the irrational shadows they purport to be. The real irrational mind simply isn’t as complicated or dangerous as all that.

My simple mind watches this movie and feels the dual pull: the movie tells me that this man is a monster to be feared, who might hurt me if I were around him, and it tells me that he is sympathetic and good, that this is a movie where he’s allowed to kill these women. My deep mind feels this duality, but does not find an emotional way of making use of it. It only feels like a mistake, or a simple fork in the road: well, I can either like him or not. How do you want me to do this? Do you want me to alternate? It doesn’t really matter to me! There will be plenty of other movies, so the stakes are low.

At this level I think it fails to be what it aspires to be, which is interesting as a movie. It’s definitely interesting as a text. It’s not bad as a movie, but it’s no Psycho. And no Annie Hall for that matter.

And a final thought, now that I’ve seen everything on the disc. Better than the commentary is the UK “Channel 4” documentary from 1997, with satisfying appearances by all the right people. Much is made of the enigmatic personality of Leo Marks, who is certainly a fascinating figure, someone straight out of John le Carré. His sensitivity to psychology, as seen in the screenplay and in his interview segments, seems quite clearly genuine and distinctive: he is a dabbler but also certainly a “real artist” of some kind. But his veiled, obscurely but confidently composed personality — his guru-like demeanor — is exactly the gap in his technique. The documentary filmmaker understands this and frames him accordingly: the man is certainly a mystery, but it’s probably only because he carries his own obsession with mystery around with him everywhere. A codebreaker looks at the self and sees codes. But self-knowledge is not the same as self-decipherment; quite the opposite. Candor is not a form of cunning. The movie is eager to decode, but not to admit.

That’s its own kind of danger, and governs its own sort of thriller. I expect I’ll enjoy the movie next time I see it, because now I know: it is the patient. But I am safe with it. It wouldn’t hurt a fly.