Film & Talk

Upon viewing Peeping Tom in 1960, film critic Isabel Quigly declared it to be the “sickest and filthiest film [she] had ever seen”, echoing the overwhelmingly negative contemporary reviews which almost ended “once respected” filmmaker Michael Powell’s career (20). What so repulsed Quigly – the film’s effort “to make it look as if [the film] isn’t for nuts but for normal homely filmgoers like you and me” – ultimately became the very impetus for its re-evaluation by foundational psychoanalytic film theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Carol J. Clover and Kaja Silverman in later decades. Through its self-reflective staging of the Schautrieb – the drive to both see and show – Peeping Tom involves its audience as spectator and spectacle, “making it[self] look” back at us looking – and lacking. In doing so, it exposes the role of visual pleasures and terrors in our inherently contradictory psychic structuring in relation to the social and the political.

In this talk, I will explore Peeping Tom through a snapshot tour of different psychoanalytic theories of visuality from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to Mulvey to post-70s Lacanian theorists like Joan Copjec and Todd McGowan. Refracted in the film’s story and form are a range of possible psychoanalytic perspectives on ‘the gaze’ and ‘the look’, their role in the process of subjectification and the (im)possibility of visual pleasures beyond the desire for mastery. By staging the press, the police and pornography as linked to psychoanalysis by a common gaze, the film finally examines the discipline’s practice of looking itself as a historically contingent expression power, in what we might call a Foucaultian approach to psychoanalytic sight. Rather than positing one theory of visuality to be at the film’s core, this talk explores Peeping Tom as a nuanced constellation of different positions on the intersections between psychoanalysis, power, the pictures and ‘peeping’.

Quigly, Isabel. “Filthy Pictures.” The Spectator (April 15, 1960): 20–21.