THE BODY OF VOUYERISM

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The Body of Voyeurism: Mapping a Discourse of the Senses in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom Elena del Río

The eye is not the mind, but a material organ. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception The visible caresses the eye. One sees and hears like one touches. — Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers

The theme of voyeurism unfolds in Peeping Tom (dir. Michael Powell, United Kingdom, 1960) as if through a magnifying lens. The organ of vision presides over the film in a number of both overt and substitute guises, from the first shot of the archers’ logo, an arrow hitting a bull’s eye introducing the opening credits, to the last frame, where a blank, reddish screen returns our gaze with the self-conscious reminder of our involvement in the film. Rather than seeking to dispute the centrality of voyeurism to the film’s meaning—a centrality already exhaustively examined by psychoanalytic readings1 —I want to draw attention to an aspect of Peeping Tom that has not been addressed by any published literature thus far. I am referring to Peeping Tom’s pervasive articulation Copyright © 2001 by Camera Obscura Camera Obscura 45, Volume 15, Number 3 Published by Duke University Press 115

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of a discourse of touch and the provocative ways this discourse is intertwined with the general thematics of vision for which the film is so acclaimed. This essay thus seeks to supplement traditional views on voyeurism by foregrounding the sensual and bodily foundations of voyeuristic acts. Additionally, my phenomenological analysis of voyeurism aims at showing the latter’s repressive and fetishizing dynamics in two interrelated spheres: on the one hand, the corporeal style or comportment attending voyeuristic perceptual operations, and on the other hand, the extension of such bodily repression to the level of the voyeur’s linguistic performance. Voyeurism, I will argue, exhibits its own specific corporeal conduct—one whose relation to the linguistic function may be at best fragile, yet possesses nonetheless its own signifying status as symptom. The relations between vision and tactility in Peeping Tom are indeed likely to provoke a rethinking of several major assumptions deemed ‘essential’ to the workings of voyeurism. Since the film itself works to minimize the difference between the diegetic voyeur turned murderer and the voyeur as mere (diegetic or nondiegetic) spectator, I think it is safe to extrapolate from its self-reflexive thematics onto the situation of the cinematic viewer. Film theory’s elaborations on the spectator-voyeur as a disembodied eye have decisively contributed to the ways cultural critics have come to regard voyeurism as a psychic disposition disconnected from the viewer’s corporeal engagement with the world of the film.2 As Linda Williams and Vivian Sobchack argue in their respective valuable work emphasizing the corporeality of vision, apparatus theories as well as feminist film theory have unwittingly reinforced the Platonic mind-body split through their tendency to overvalue the eye (as the more intellectual of the senses) and to devalue bodily senses and sensations that are deemed less intellectually compelling.3 Most paradoxical—and at the same time fascinating— about Peeping Tom’s way of contravening the mind-body dualistic separation is that this film sets itself worlds apart from the kind of overtly sensual scenarios that both Williams and Sobchack use to advance the notion of a sensorial mode of viewing. Peeping Tom

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might seem at the outset to provide the least likely of occasions for a joint discursive structuration of sight and touch. Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) shows no desire to engage sensually or sexually with the women he films and kills. As Kaja Silverman points out, ‘Mark tries to erect [a barrier] between himself and his victims so as to dissociate himself from them, and thereby consolidate his own claim to the paternal legacy. Here, too, Mark’s project converges with classic cinema, which also turns upon the fiction that an irreducible distance isolates the viewer from the spectacle.’4 If Mark replicates so seamlessly the classic voyeur’s need for distance and separation from the object, then, might it be possible to build a case for his nonetheless embodied voyeurism? How does the body function or signify its entailment in the world when the voyeur unconsciously decides to part with the world? Does the body become a mute surface or does it continue its hysterical ramblings through other means? These questions hinge on the concept of hysterical conversion as coined by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer in their collaborative work Studies on Hysteria.5 Given that Freud himself assigned such importance to the body’s insistent speech even—and especially—in the absence of a deliberate or conscious assumption of that speech, one should perhaps think twice before speaking of the ‘disembodied voyeur.’ From the exhaustive list of bodily symptoms Freud and Breuer compiled from their case studies, it would appear that the original psychoanalytic formulation of hysterical conversion is more consonant with the phenomenological insistence on embodied subjectivity than with film theory’s own appropriation of Lacanian psychoanalysis in its privileging of vision at the expense of many other sites of perceptual and bodily performance. Besides incorporating a general psychoanalytic focus on the symptom as a somatization of psychic conflict, my reading of Peeping Tom will also take into account an even more specific scenario that underpins the film’s representation of voyeurism: the child’s perceptual experience of the mirror as the inauguration of both identity and otherness. My analysis will borrow from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological description of the

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mirror as a mobilization of overlapping sensory channels and corporeal surfaces. Unlike the Lacanian model of specular identification, described as a purely visual encounter, the phenomenological model does not isolate vision from the other senses or from the corporeal realm in which it is inherently embedded. Whereas the Lacanian version accounts for the perceptual dynamics of the mirror as an unmistakable and definitive substitution of the image externally projected (seen object) for the body in front of the mirror (seeing subject), the Merleau-Pontian version, itself informed by the work of French and German psychologists, sees the specular exchange as a far more undecided/ambiguous and diversified circulation of sensual and postural information. The child, Merleau-Ponty argues, does not merely experience the mirror as an invisible psyche (here) confronting a visible body (there); rather, in this encounter, the perception of the body out there is simultaneously, if not seamlessly, correlated to “the image [the child has of his/her] body by means of the sense of touch or cenesthesia . . . the ‘introceptive image.’’’6 What I have said of the child’s experience of the mirror can also be said of the way Mark lives the voyeuristic relation between himself, his camera, and the women he films. As I noted earlier, Mark takes great pains at demarcating the boundaries between himself and his female victims, in this sense firmly adhering to the established psychoanalytic principle stressed by Christian Metz and others that “voyeurism . . . always keeps apart the object . . . and the source of the drive . . . (the eye).”7 However, while it is evident that Mark uses his camera as the material barrier that safely preserves his distance from and mastery over the women, it is equally evident that this distance is frequently in danger of collapsing. On such rare yet important occasions where the safety of voyeuristic separation is compromised, Mark’s bodily conduct insists on mirroring that of the object filmed. Besides corroborating Mark’s stagnation in a prelinguistic stage of narcissistic identification, these frequent instances of mimicry give further credence to the phenomenological description of the mirror—one that points not only to a transference between different sensory domains (synaesthesia), but also to the child’s reliance

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upon a corporeal schema as the ground for his/her self-image. Thus, Mark’s voyeuristic conduct before the bodies of others cannot be simply reduced to its visual axis, but it should rather be seen as an example of the body’s postural impregnation by the conduct it witnesses in others’ bodies.8 Two such instances of mimicry take place during the first part of the film, in the scene where we see Mark engaged in his “legal” filming activities at the photographic studio one floor above the news agent’s. This occasion provides for one of the starkest contrasts in terms of Mark’s attitudes toward the women he films. We first see Mark taking some ostensibly fetishistic snapshots of Millie (Pamela Green), a forward, promiscuous model who does not cease to provoke him with a string of scrutinizing questions about both his personal life and the murder perpetrated the night before. Although Mark chooses to remain aloof, vaguely responding with monosyllables and mechanically prompting Millie to adopt the desirable poses and looks, we witness a sign of his unconscious, yet undeniable, corporeal involvement in the image of Millie he is about to construct. At the sight of Millie’s inverted image tapping her lower back, an image projected inside Mark’s camera obscura, Mark unwittingly begins to emulate her gesture by tapping his photographic camera in sync with the woman’s movements. Repeatedly presented in the film, Mark’s tendency thus to in-corporate the object of his vision— literally to assimilate it in his own body—deserves further attention, and I will return to it later in this discussion. For now, I would simply like to juxtapose it to Mark’s radically different bodily response to Laraine (Brenda Bruce), the second woman Mark meets in his studio. A number of changes in the music and mise-en-scène accompany the transition from Millie to Laraine as objects of Mark’s look. From a light vaudeville music, the nondiegetic soundtrack switches to a passionate and melancholy piano score. The change in costume is equally noticeable—from Millie’s red and black negligee, accentuating and fetishizing her sexual body parts, to Laraine’s toreador hat and flower, her naked body loosely covered by a huge Spanish-style scarf. Even more significantly,

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Mark abandons the static, fetishistic, and distanced rapport with Millie—in part prompted by his use of the photographic camera—and instead decides to use his 16-mm film camera to capture Laraine’s image. The shift from photographic to cinematic camera is appropriately accompanied by movement—not only the movement of Laraine as she supplies her naked body to the camera in an effort to divert attention from her scarred lips (“They say you needn’t photograph my face”)—but, more importantly, Mark’s movement, as he yields to the attraction of Laraine’s “imperfection” and begins to walk toward the woman while filming her. Metaphorically, Laraine also figures movement in the ambiguity and undecidability of her sexuality; unlike the clear-cut commodified sexuality represented by Millie, Laraine is closer to the romanticized representation of the bohemian, mysterious woman, simultaneously exposed and withdrawn, naked and fully dressed, ugly and beautiful, forthcoming and vulnerable. Of course Mark’s use of his film camera and his physical approximation to the woman he films are not unique to this moment, and, in fact, both elements are also featured on those occasions in which Mark kills women with the bayonet hidden in the tripod of his camera.9 There is, however, a notable difference between moving in on the woman as her aggressor/murderer (as, for example, when Mark kills Vivian [Moira Shearer], the stand-in at the film studio) and moving in on her out of a sense of awe at her wounds—the kind of awe Laraine apparently instills in Mark. Mark’s filming of Laraine’s face exemplifies the shift from voyeurism to identification that Silverman ascribes to other scenes in the film. Silverman argues that Mark “literally crosses the imaginary dividing line separating viewer from spectacle. . . . Far from maintaining the requisite distance from the image of woman-aslack, Mark recognizes himself in that image, and tips over into it.”10 One might argue, then, that Mark’s habit of residing in the image enacts the scenario of the mirror stage, and that this reenactment of identification takes place not only at the level of vision, but at the level of a whole array of bodily faculties and senses.

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As Mark approaches Laraine, his camera is not so much a barrier or substitute (enhancing distance and mastery) as an extension/continuation of his fully embodied perception, the object of which—Laraine’s wound—is not simply an object, but rather the mirror image of Mark as the wounded perceiving subject. No longer is there a question of a strict separation between subject and object via the technological mediation provided by the camera; instead, one identifies a perceptual configuration where subject, instrument, and object overlap in a common sense of corporeality. Discussing this shared sense of embodiment— not necessarily reflectively or knowingly assumed by the subject— Merleau-Ponty writes: “As the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other person’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.”11 Mark’s bodily conduct as he films Laraine would be akin to a child’s inhabiting the mirror image projected in front of him. In this case, the seduction the other holds as mirror of oneself is enabled by a fetishistic overvaluation of a series of body parts as wounds—face, scarred lip, eyes. Yet the interaction between Mark and Laraine does not seem to be any less embodied for revolving around a fetishistic fixation. Even though Mark’s encounters with Millie and Laraine exhibit such different perceptual and kinetic economies, it is important to note that neither interaction is properly disembodied, insofar as both expose the effects Mark’s body registers from his identificatory residence in the image. Whether one considers Mark’s distanced mimicry of the image or his attempt to merge with it physically, his voyeurism cannot be described as merely an internal psychic disposition, but rather as an incarnated mode of perceiving and being in the world. Peeping Tom’s focus on voyeurism thus enacts phenomenology’s nondualistic concept of the psyche as “a ‘conduct’ of the body that describes (and makes visible in the world) a style of being, an intentional and postural schema.”12 The reason for favoring the term conduct over the term psyche is that the former serves more accurately to designate the

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idea that consciousness is not rigorously closed in on itself, but turned primarily toward the world, and that it fundamentally entails a certain way of comporting oneself toward the world. My concern with foregrounding a kind of bodily comportment that seems to accompany voyeuristic acts—heretofore described only as psychic/visual formations—does not aim at restoring a full consciousness of embodiment via the addition of touch as a potentially less fetishistic sense. On the contrary, this interrogation of voyeurism as a corporeally lived conduct seeks to describe the bodily style specific to the voyeur—a style that does not repair its fetishistic dynamics, but is likely to buttress them. Thus I want to argue that, far from neutralizing Mark’s excessive scopophilia by providing him with a sense of his own embodied participation in the scenarios he sees and films, his use of tactility often has the effect of working in the opposite direction, confirming on the one hand his regressive tendency to merge with the seen, and, concurrently, his inability to relate to it as an other— hence his social and emotional isolation. Mark’s body in Peeping Tom is clearly a repressed body, yet hardly a silent, static, or even invisible one. As I demonstrate in the following discussion, Mark utilizes both his senses of sight and touch in a fetishistic mode. Yet this shared and pervasive fetishization rather functions to confirm the ontological persistence of the body through all kinds of epistemological reductions and distortions. The spilling over of fetishism from sight to touch serves further to support the notion of the body as a sensual unit or synaesthetic structure whose various parts and senses, regardless of epistemological fragmentation, always operate according to mutual inflection and interchangeability. In more concrete terms, Mark/the voyeur cannot exercise his vision in a fetishistic way while using his sense of touch in a nonfetishistic way. The remainder of this essay discusses the dynamics of this correlation of sensual modes not only as exemplified by Mark, but also as refigured mainly in the idiosyncratic conjunction of blindness, touch, and language represented in the character of his neighbor and tenant Mrs. Stephens (Maxine Audley), Helen’s mother.

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The Paternal Legacy of Voyeurism: Narcissistic Regression

Mark’s visual fixation upon the world/image intersects with touch mainly in two ways: first, in his proclivity to emulate the gestures of the body in front of him (in a reprise of the mirror stage), and second, in his fetishistic, albeit sensual, handling of his film camera. In both these guises, the overlapping of vision and touch instantiates what I would call a repressed epistemology of sensual comportment. In other words, Mark’s tactile engagement either with his own body or with his camera occurs as an unconscious, fragmented, and decontextualized symptom that signifies the stunted state of his identity and sexuality. The film locates the roots of Mark’s regressive solipsism in an exacerbated Oedipal scenario, which includes an abusive, sadistic father, and an ill mother who then dies and is soon replaced by a stepmother whose legitimacy Mark contemptuously derides by calling her a “successor.” On the occasion of Helen’s birthday, Mark shows Helen (Anna Massey), his neighbor and friend, a series of films his father, Professor Joseph Lewis (Michael Powell), made of him as a child. As Mark informs Helen, Professor Lewis intended to gather a complete record of Mark’s growth so as to use the resulting data in his scientific studies of children’s fear. Helen is shown a series of scenes that record Mark’s reactions to situations marking momentous stages in the young boy’s psychological development—as outlined by Silverman, “the castration threat, the primal scene, the loss of the mother, and access to the paternal legacy.”13 That cinematic session closes with a scene that features Mark’s father seemingly compensating Mark for that long-lasting victimization by offering him in turn the gift of a camera. The paternal legacy is thus represented as a closed exchange between victim and victimizer, a wavering between loss and fetishistic compensation that leaves no room outside the rigid binary relations therein established. Within this closed circuit of exchange, the victim is destined to become victimizer—not so much a reversal as a mirroring predicated on sameness. Even though the father’s

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giving of the camera may not be strictly motivated by a conscious desire to compensate the son, it is certainly driven by the desire to see himself perpetuated in the son, hence the mirroring implications of the exchange. Given this closed imaginary circuit of exchange set up by the father, Mark’s relations to the women he sees or films constitute a pathological case of the kind of narcissism Merleau-Ponty ascribes to the general exercise of vision. Instead of overlapping with an intercorporeal sense of the other’s existence, Mark’s narcissism seems to be an all-consuming trait in his relations to the world. The example I discussed earlier regarding Mark’s physical mimicry of another’s gestures, as well as further examples I will present shortly, indicate Mark’s total absorption into this singular aspect of vision, which Merleau-Ponty describes in this frequently quoted passage from The Visible and the Invisible : Since the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision . . . not to see in the outside . . . the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know who sees and which is seen.14

The inhabitation in the image described by Merleau-Ponty as a reversible exchange between subject/object, seer/seen shifts in Mark’s case to a fetishistic substitution of the image seen for the seeing body. In other words, as Mark’s consciousness parts with his body and becomes one with the image, the perceptual transaction enacted is no longer reciprocal, but rather one-dimensional.15 That Mark not only perceives the image, but lives it, as a substitute for the world is apparent in one of his comments to Helen during the same screening session previously mentioned. Referring to his unwelcome stepmother, Mark says that his father “married her six weeks after the previous sequence,” the sequence in question showing Mark’s mother’s death, funeral, and burial. Clearly, Mark’s history and identity—his memories of past events—exist merely as a series of filmed sequences; only that

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which has been filmed possesses for him the solidity and consistency of the real. In a sense, one might even say that Mark’s unconscious, yet operative, dwelling in the image aims at substituting past for present, the space of the image for the space beyond its edges. This condensation/displacement of times and spaces takes place via Mark’s bodily incorporation of the image—his corporeal inscription within or assimilation of the image in the form of mimicry. The scene of Mark’s mother lying in her deathbed offers an intriguing example of this idea. At this point during the screening session that Mark holds for Helen, Mark stands behind Helen, who sits on Mark’s directorial chair. The scene of the film Mark and Helen are watching begins with a medium shot of young Mark walking right to left toward the foreground as he approaches his mother’s bedside. As young Mark gets closer to his mother, kept off frame except for her bare arms and hands,16 Mark slowly walks away from Helen. Helen then forcefully expresses her desire to understand what she is shown, to which Mark laconically replies: “Saying goodbye . . . my . . . mother.” As he pronounces that affectively loaded word, we see young Mark touching his mother’s hand, while Mark mimics that gesture by coming back to his former position behind Helen and touching, almost grabbing, her shoulder. The substitutive, compensatory function of Mark’s gesture on this occasion is unequivocal. His bodily conduct is not merely a response to the image, but a reenactment of the image itself so as to make it and the mother present in their absence. As the film retroactively confirms, this scene hints at Helen’s subsequent surrogate role as Mark’s mother (a role that Helen later shares with her own mother, Mrs. Stephens). Even on those occasions when Mark’s vision is not mediated through his camera, he still performs a corporeal mimicry of the “sights” in front of him. Mark’s first impromptu twenty-first birthday present to Helen, the screening of his childhood films, has the twofold effect of both terrorizing and fascinating the young woman, riveting her to the screen with voyeuristic curiosity, yet, ultimately, scaring her away. To compensate for his tactless gift, Mark gives Helen a dragonfly brooch as a second twenty-first

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birthday present. This gift may no doubt still be marked by Mark’s obsessions with phallic mastery and castration (in this regard, not only may one consider the dragonfly itself as a large insect with two pairs of wings and a long, slender body, but also the pin attached to it, sharing the penetrating effect of the bayonet attached to Mark’s camera). It seems to me, however, that as a material, rather than an imaginary, object the dragonfly no longer represents Mark’s solipsistic entanglement in the image. Evidence of this is that Helen does not feel threatened by it, but rather excited and thankful, and that, after the gift is given, Mark and Helen engage in a conversation that proves to be one of the few utopian moments in the film. As in other scenes discussed, during the giving of the dragonfly brooch to Helen, Mark’s heightened scopic involvement in her accepting of the gift results in his total assimilation of the “seen”—its physical transmutation by way of Mark’s peculiar bodily conduct. As Mark watches Helen feeling the appropriate place for the brooch on her dress and suggesting two different places, Mark, the aspiring director, mirrors her movements and offers advice on which place looks more suitable. He then grabs the lapel of his jacket at the corresponding place where Helen is pinning the brooch onto her dress, looking apprehensively at her as if his own flesh were experiencing a piercing pain. Immediately after, Helen looks at her watch; this gesture is emulated both by Mark looking at his own watch and by the film itself briefly interjecting a close-up of the clock Mark uses in developing his films, accompanied by a magnified ticking sound. One may of course privilege Helen’s act of piercing her dress and read the whole exchange as another instance of Mark’s need to project his pain onto someone else. Instead, I would like to emphasize this instance of mimicry as an incipient form of exchange with an other. Unlike the substitutive operations of other acts of mimicry performed by Mark, where the body remains repressed (disengaged from consciousness), he is encouraged in this instance to take part in the exchange by responding through language to the call of the other. This scene, then, points, however tentatively, to language as the most effective tool for disrupting the enclosure of voyeurism.

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The second set of examples that I wish to analyze as evidence of the corporeal dynamics of voyeurism hinges on Mark’s sensual/bodily handling of his cinematic camera. Peeping Tom makes abundantly clear that Mark’s relation to his camera is a substitutive one. Not only in its filming capacities, but, even more crucially, in its status as a material object invested with tremendous affect and value, Mark’s camera takes on the intersubjective functions of sexuality and language, thereby compensating for his incompetence on both counts. Begging a kind of vulgar Freudian reading of objects as displacements for the male or female genital organs, Peeping Tom emphatically, almost literally, associates the camera with the phallus on at least one occasion. During the screening of his childhood films, Helen inquires about the lizard dropped on Mark’s bed. While she does so, we see a close-up of Mark leaning his head on his camera and stroking its sides with movements that express a bodily intentionality while remaining totally unconscious,17 as we gather from both his rhythmical fondling of the camera and his lost, unfocused gaze. As Helen asks, “ How did it get there, Mark? Was it a pet?” Mark begins to touch the camera’s lens with what are clearly repetitive, masturbatory movements. Lizard and camera are featured as mirror objects in this scene, respectively occasioning the terror of castration and the illusory possibility of its mastery. These affectively charged objects are further linked not only by their shared phallic connotations, but also by Helen’s allusion to a pet (Mark strokes the camera as a sexual organ, but also as one would a pet). Just as Mark attempts to reverse the threat of the lizard with the control provided by the camera, Helen attempts to disavow the lizard’s threatening presence by thinking of it as a cherished pet. Another instance of the camera as sexual fetish occurs after Mark and Helen return from their evening out at a restaurant. In some respects, however, this moment also represents an important deviation from Mark’s adherence to the voyeuristic legacy of the father: not only is this the first time Mark allows himself to be without his camera, but it is also worth noting that the camera—as well as Mark’s voyeuristic inclinations—now begins

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to fall under the supervisory gaze of the mother. Prior to their going out, Helen asks Mark to leave his camera behind, to which request Mark finally, though reluctantly, acquiesces. Helen (acting as one of Mark’s surrogate mothers), leaves the camera in her room, formerly Mark’s mother’s own room. While they are out in the street, Helen also observes Mark in two different guises— as the compulsive voyeur (on their way to the restaurant, Mark stops to gaze at a couple kissing in a dark street corner), and as the (almost) detached observer (on their way home, they see a woman undress through a window, yet Mark has no difficulty averting his gaze and continuing on). Moreover, while Mark and Helen have been out at the restaurant, Mrs. Stephens, Helen’s mother, has taken upon herself to intrude into Mark’s studio, thus taking over the supervision of his filming obsessions. Yet for all of these signs, which perhaps articulate a possible way out of voyeuristic isolation, the ending of this scene leads us more immediately to conclude that Mark remains stagnated in the fetishistic/voyeuristic dynamics he enacts through his physical relation to his camera. After Helen timidly and lightly kisses Mark goodnight, he stands still for a few moments, holds his camera up to his lips and reexperiences Helen’s kiss through the physical contact between his own lips and his camera. Figuring the camera in the position of kisser, this gesture makes evident that the camera’s function as fetish is not so much a literal displacement of the phallus as a particular male organ as it is a symbolic replacement for intersubjectivity/otherness. Insofar as Mark can relate to others only narcissistically, he can feel Helen’s kiss only by transferring her to an object that also substitutes for himself. Through this fetishistic operation, Mark reduces his intercorporeal relation with an other to a narcissistic relation with himself/his camera, thus closing down the possibility of an open circuit of exchange between himself and Helen. The moment I just described resonates with a previous moment in the same scene, where Mark’s inability to speak points metonymically to his attachment to his camera as that alone which can make good his linguistic incompetence. The camera is thus used as a substitute for the expressive function of language as well.

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The conversation we understand Mark and Helen to have had at the restaurant, involving their collaboration on Helen’s book of children’s stories, excites Mark in a new way. Before kissing him that evening, Helen asks Mark not to stay up and watch his films. Mark says he does have some work to do, explaining, “Then I go to bed and try to find your faces . . . faces which I . . . faces which . . .” As on other occasions, Mark stumbles upon his words and leaves his sentences unfinished, incapable of articulating his thoughts. No doubt only his camera will allow him to find and express/articulate those faces, as he implies shortly thereafter when he proposes that Mrs. Stephens be the object of one of his magic-camera photographs. In their previous talk in Mark’s flat, Helen does not tell Mark what the magic camera in her book is supposed to photograph (we do not know whether she does tell him later at the restaurant), yet when they part, Mark speaks of “faces.” Is Helen also attracted to faces, hence Mark’s enthusiastic reception of her project, or has he simply substituted his own obsession for hers? All we know is that, invariably, a woman’s terrorized face is the ultimate, most prized, target of Mark’s lethal camera. Mark’s filming of Laraine in the first scene I discussed presents a number of parallels with this moment as well. Mark is attracted to Laraine’s face out of an empathetic response to the woman’s wounded soul. Unlike Millie, master of concealment and manipulation, Laraine seems to wear her soul on her sleeve—literally, on her face. Mark’s immersion into that soul/ face confronts him with his own, filling him with an awe that arrests (as it did in the past) the rational operations of language. Echoing Millie’s request to have her bruises retouched and removed, Laraine suggests to Mark, “Maybe you can fix my bruises too,” a suggestion which, given the excessiveness of Laraine’s disfiguration, sounds less like a serious request than a defiantly ironic challenge. In response, Mark pulls out his film camera and, in a trancelike state of fascination, enigmatically replies to Laraine, “I want to” (perhaps meaning she need not be ashamed of her scarred lips because it is precisely that which makes him want to look at her). A few moments later, acknowledging Millie’s explanation that Laraine is shy in her first modeling assignment,

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Mark moves toward Laraine, saying, “Don’t be shy; for me it’s my first time too . . . in front of eyes like . . . eyes as full of . . .” As in his earlier exchange with Helen, this ritualistic moment of initiation suggests that Mark is at a loss for words; yet his camera comes to his aid in this instance and actually completes the expression of his emotion as he closes in on Laraine’s face. No longer is the camera a mere recording tool—a blank or neutral instrument of perception—but more emphatically, in this scene it functions as a writing tool that incorporates and expresses the unspoken affect of the user/observer behind it. Whereas the still camera is a fetish object to be touched or merely held close as a confirmation of identity, when running, the camera becomes no less a fetish, but a fetish that speaks, calling forth the pain in the subject filmed as a mirror image of the pain repressed in the filming subject. I should point out, however, that it is not by virtue of its expressive function alone that the camera becomes a substitute object in Peeping Tom. In a phenomenological sense, a camera (or any visual technology, for that matter) is supposed to perform in two guises—simultaneously as a channel of perception and a medium of expression. According to phenomenological description, perception and expression are not to be construed as two separate, oppositional epistemological modes, but rather as two commutable variants of the lived body’s engagement with the world: while perception refers to the subjective modality of that engagement, expression refers to its objective modality, the two modes “constituting the unity of meaningful experience.”18 What makes Mark’s deployment of the camera fetishistic is that it does not act in conjunction with the expressive faculties of language; instead, it remains disengaged from language, while attempting to function in its place. As I have attempted to demonstrate, Mark’s extreme voyeuristic inclinations serve as conclusive evidence of the joint dynamics of the senses—in this case, the concurrent fetishization of different sensory channels—while at the same time pointing to the signifying function that the body shares with language. Thus, if one recognizes the body as a ground of semiosis, and not merely

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a mechanistic performer of physical acts, one has to conclude that, in Mark’s case, the inhibition of the physical body (its compulsive mimicking conduct) constitutes a first level of semiotic repression, which finds a correlation in the repression of the properly linguistic symbolic structures of signification. Peeping Tom locates this repression of both the corporeal and the symbolic channels of signification in the paternal reduction of existence to masterful vision, while pointing the way out of this repression through a maternally sanctioned diversification of existence into a web of interrelated sensual and epistemological modes.

The Maternal Gift of Intersubjectivity: Returning the Gaze through Language and the Caress

Peeping Tom attempts to balance the paternal legacy of voyeuristic regression and solipsism with the possibility of a recognition of the other. Even if Mark ultimately fails to realize this possibility, his encounter with Helen and Mrs. Stephens, the mother and daughter who rent the downstairs apartment from him, nonetheless has the effect of disturbing the precarious mastery he derives from his state of voyeuristic isolation. The maze of references the film puts in place around the notion of the gift is crucial in identifying the transition (and difference) from the paternal gift— involving a narcissistic desire for self-perpetuation—to the maternal gift—offering the possibility of intersubjectivity. Thus, in a curious way, Peeping Tom subverts the customary psychoanalytic paradigm whereby the child is said to remain locked in an imaginary dyad with the mother until the disruption of plenitude provoked by the intrusion of a third term—the paternal law of language, prohibition, and desire. In Peeping Tom, the reverse paradigm takes place: While the paternal gift of the camera entails an obsessive preponderance of the image/imaginary at the expense of language and desire, the metaphorical advent of the maternal—in the form of Helen and Mrs. Stephens—signals an encounter with the other. Such an encounter makes apparent the importance of divesting from an epistemology of disembodied sight and of investing in an epistemology based on a plural

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exercise of the senses and of their expressive articulation in/ through language. In this respect, the alignment of the maternal with language in Powell’s film echoes Merleau-Ponty’s stress on the correlation between the child’s acquisition of language and his/her relation to the mother. In “The Child’s Relations with Others,” Merleau-Ponty to a large extent explains Mark’s linguistic incompetence when he says that “children who have been suddenly and forcibly separated from their mothers always show signs of a linguistic regression.”19 Merleau-Ponty then goes on to discuss the mother as the figure that facilitates the child’s smooth transition from a corporeally based kind of identification—the language of postures and gestures—to a kind of identification that is already mediated through language proper: The acquisition of language might be a phenomenon of the same kind as the relation to the mother. Just as the maternal relation is . . . a relation of identification, in which the subject projects on his mother what he himself experiences and assimilates the attitudes of his mother, so one could say that the acquisition of language is itself a phenomenon of identification. To learn to speak is to learn to play a series of roles, to assume a series of conducts or linguistic gestures.20

Just as, upon first impression, Peeping Tom’s emphatic focus on vision would seem to annul the effects of all other sensory channels in the film, the continuous presence of the camera would equally (and as deceitfully) seem to privilege the latter as the only psychically relevant gift presented to Mark. Through Mark’s interactions with Helen and her mother, however, Peeping Tom draws attention to a number of less conspicuous gifts or offerings that afford the possibility not only for Mark to encounter the other outside his voyeuristic manipulations, but also for this other reciprocally to encounter Mark as an irreducible other. Unlike the gifts exchanged between Professor Lewis and Mark (camera as transference of the paternal epistemology of vision) and Mark and Helen (film-screening and brooch as birthday presents), the second set of gifts offered by Helen and Mrs. Stephens to Mark do not seem to punctuate any

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special occasions or turning points. Instead of being presented as literal gifts, these metaphorical objects and acts have the discursive function of setting themselves off from the idea of the gift as imposition by claiming the unimposing, ungraspable quality of the gift. Jacques Derrida discusses this notion of the gift as that which avoids any sense of a measurable return or visible exchange. Even though someone still has to give something to someone other, “to recognize or name the gift as gift would be to constitute it in the economy of exchange, thereby simultaneously establishing its facticity in terms of equivalence and annulling it as gift.”21 This facticity of the gift, its implication of a sense of contractual obligation and equivalence, clearly characterizes the first set of gifts I referred to (as made especially evident in the narcissistic/aggressive relations set up between Mark and his father through the camera). On the other hand, the second set of gifts, which I will now discuss, lacks not only the factual naming or recognition of the gift, but also the reciprocal obligation it entails. The three most important gifts to be seen in this light are the window at the Stephens’s apartment, Helen’s book of children’s stories, and Mrs. Stephens’s caress. Mrs. Stephens’s apparent deficiencies—her blindness and heavy drinking—are balanced by a sober and controlled use of language, precisely calculated in its tone and diction so as to expose and disarm dissembling appearances. Mrs. Stephens exemplifies the idea of blindness as a difference in understanding rather than a literal absence of sight.22 As opposed to the predominance of vision characteristic of Mark, the blind mother is shown to rely on a diversified and mediate ontology that cannot be identified with a single sense, yet seems to integrate and partake of all of them at once. Instead of relegating the communicative or erotic function to the realm of disembodied vision, as is the case with Mark, the mother privileges this function both in her speech and in a knowledge she gathers from her bodily proximity to others. Mark is first introduced to Mrs. Stephens’s formidable persona on the evening he arrives to take Helen out to dinner. As Helen waits for Mark’s arrival, she reads the news of Vivian’s mur-

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der to her mother. Mrs. Stephens’s inquisitive and insightful mind immediately links the murder committed at the film studio with Mark: “Mark works in films, doesn’t he? . . . Which studio does he work at?” To Helen’s offer to introduce Mark to her, the mother replies, “I feel as if I know him.” A moment later, Mrs. Stephens sits up and pronounces, “He’s here,” while the camera tracks in on her alert, knowledgeable countenance. In the next shot, we see Mark from the waist up, standing outside the apartment looking in through a window, while the mother’s voice-off proposes: “Why don’t we make him a present of that window? He practically lives there.” As a metaphorical gift of vision issued by the blind mother, the window dismantles and makes ironic the power of voyeurism and its reliance upon the voyeur remaining invisible. Mrs. Stephens overturns the usual connotations of the window as an epistemological/visual figure of transparency, objectivity, and immediacy: while she may be the object surveyed by Mark through the window (moreover, a blind object facing away from the window), she nonetheless poses the insurmountable challenge of her subjectivity to his objectifying attempts. Thus, in this instance, as well as in the following exchange between Mark and Mrs. Stephens, the blind mother is ironically capable of returning the voyeur’s gaze and of disturbing its safe enclosure by using an instinctive knowledge beyond the physical exercise of vision. Amazed at her mother’s seeing abilities, Helen asks: “How did you know he was there?” Mrs. Stephens responds: “The back of my neck told me,” while in a voice audible only to the film’s audience, she continues: “The part that I talk out of.” By alluding to the “back of the neck” as the metaphoric source of her seeing, knowing, and speaking faculties, Mrs. Stephens situates herself ontologically and epistemologically in contradistinction to the frontal, instantaneous, and seemingly unmediated dynamics of voyeurism. Her vision, knowledge, and speech are all the more accurate and empowered in that they remain unlocalizable, heterogeneously dispersed through and in the body beyond a particularized/fetishized organ or sense. In the encounter that follows, Mrs. Stephens continues to return Mark’s already much weakened gaze upon her mainly

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through her questioning of him, but also through a bodily contact that enables her both to see and to look back at Mark. After a brief handshake, Mark makes a move to let go of Mrs. Stephens’s hand. She, instead, grabs his more firmly with both her hands. With the magnified sound of a heartbeat, the film materializes/ somatizes Mrs. Stephens’s corporeal reading of Mark. Her embodied look at Mark thus entails a synoptic exercise of touch and hearing that delivers the knowledge of his anxiety and vulnerability—as manifest in his rapid pulse and probably in his sweating skin as well. As Mark leaves after Helen and prepares to close the door behind him, he halts to look at Mrs. Stephens’s back one last time (in a reprise of his first look at her back through the window). Mrs. Stephens again feels his gaze upon her and slightly turns around toward the door. Significantly, then, the two most foregrounded moments in the interaction between the voyeur and the blind in this scene seem to coincide with the two subjects not looking at each other face to face, but rather with Mark looking at Mrs. Stephens’s back and the latter instinctively sensing that gaze at the “back of her neck.” Returning the gaze, Mrs. Stephens’s behavior seems to imply, does not require a frontal ontology casting oneself in opposition to the other, but it may certainly require being present to one’s body and to the bodies of others as well. Not lacking in its own kind of power, Mrs. Stephens’s corporeally grounded epistemology nonetheless represents the antinomy of the mastery claimed by the fetishized vision of the voyeur. During her later confrontation with Mark at the studio, Mrs. Stephens makes several remarks that attest to her belief that vision is not always the most effective or reliable tool of epistemological certainty. Feeling the objects and props in the room with her cane, Mrs. Stephens declares: “I feel at home here. I visit this room every night. . . . the blind always live in the rooms they live under.” Unlike the voyeur, pursuing mastery of that which he can appropriate by means of an instantaneous and spatially circumscribed exercise of vision, Mrs. Stephens’s blindness allows her to extend the boundaries of “home”—the myriad sensory details that one associates with one’s home—beyond the physical space

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of her own apartment into the space of the other—not to appropriate, however, but to understand. Thus Mrs. Stephens’s range of vision and understanding epitomizes a chiasmic intertwining of identity and otherness. She lives in her apartment, hence under Mark’s, but she also inhabits Mark’s (“the blind always live in the rooms they live under”). Mrs. Stephens lives both in and under Mark’s apartment in more ways than one. As a blind woman, she can see Mark as he moves around in his studio by making use of her acute sense of spatial orientation, hearing, and touch (Mark’s steps are not merely heard, but also supposedly felt as reverberations absorbed and transmitted by the ceiling). As if her body were endowed with a number of extending limbs or tentacles, Mrs. Stephens feels at home in an elsewhere. Moreover, in a metaphoric sense, Mrs. Stephens lives/stands under, but also under-stands—not only Mark’s apartment, but more importantly, Mark’s pain. This spatial metaphorics yields some interesting ontological and gendered implications. Mark, the masterful subject of visual surveillance (and house owner), occupies the upper floor, while Mrs. Stephens, the blind, empathetic subject (and tenant), seemingly lives under his dominion. From a gender perspective, the female subject stands under the pathological male subject (is affected by and suffers the consequences of that pathology), and yet she can also under-stand it with both detachment and compassion. As enacted in Mrs. Stephens’s confrontation with Mark, the predominance of embodied feeling over disembodied sight ultimately signals the vulnerability entailed by an excessive reliance on the immediately visible, and, conversely, it speaks to the power of those who (either by necessity or by choice) do not yield to the deceptive security provided by an indiscriminate belief in visible appearances. Thus, in her blindness, the mother proves an unassailable victim for Mark. Even though Mark identifies her as his superior—“You would know at once,” he tells her— it remains unclear whether he can locate the source of that power: her knowledge (and open acknowledgment) of her own vulnerability. Instead of making an ostentatious show of her

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power, Mrs. Stephens discloses to Mark the castrating event that made her choose instinct over visibility: the loss of her physical sight. Thus, when Mark decides to end the already aborted photographic session, Mrs. Stephens confronts him with his own fear and ironically remarks: “Instinct’s a wonderful thing. . . . A pity it can’t be photographed. If I’d listened to it years ago, I might have kept my sight.” As in the example of the window-as-gift formerly discussed, Mrs. Stephens implies that only by making appropriate use of something invisible can one keep one’s sight. Mrs. Stephens’s ability to live in Mark is thus not simply the result of her acutely developed sensorium, but, more crucially, the outcome of her empathetic experience of the delusions of the visible, an experience that makes her not so much Mark’s opponent or superior as his equal. In contrast to the analytic, disembodied gaze presiding over the scientific discourse of the many volumes written by Mark’s father, the aforementioned examples demonstrate that Mrs. Stephens’s penetrating speech is far from abstract or disembodied. Unlike Professor Lewis, who annihilates Mark’s very ability to see, Mrs. Stephens’s speech merely returns Mark’s gaze— with as piercing and unavoidable an edge, however, as Mark’s own bayonet. The mother’s speech thus discloses the truth of voyeurism by qualifying the unidirectional dynamics of its power as fragile, limited, and illusive. Mrs. Stephens’s daughter, on the other hand, plays a no less significant role in ushering the intersubjective dynamics of language into the regressive imaginary dynamics characteristic of Mark’s voyeurism. The mother’s selfconsciously assumed use of language finds its logical correlative in the daughter’s spontaneous ability to combine image and language in her book of children’s stories. Thus, Helen’s involvement with children’s reading habits further suggests the absent mother’s point of view: her role in encouraging the child to accept the gift from the other. After Mark offers Helen the dragonfly brooch, Helen asks for Mark’s advice on the issue of the suitability of photographs in a book aimed at children. As made evident by Helen’s inclusion of Mark in her project as well as by her

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dedication to him inside the book—“From one magic camera who needs the help of Another”—an intersubjective impulse marks their exchange from the outset. No sooner does Helen mention her book than Mark’s whole demeanor instantly changes: his fists pound the chair’s arms with childlike excitement and he snaps out of his mute solipsism by asking questions about the book’s subject matter. By signifying his willing involvement in Helen’s book through both his unguarded bodily conduct and his words, the film obliquely suggests that Mark is indeed one of the children for whom the book is intended. Mark’s ongoing reductive immersion in the realm of the image at the expense of language has kept him locked into a lifelong state of infantile subjectivity. The poignancy of this scene lies in the altogether belated and irrecoverable nature of its promise: the possibility of a utopian coexistence of image and word is revealed too late. After Mark recovers from his initial apprehension upon knowing the book’s topic (“a magic camera and what it photographs”), Helen proceeds to disclose the problem that concerns her: she thinks the children ought to see the photographs the camera takes, whereas her publishers think those pictures would be impossible to take and they suggest drawings instead. In sync with Helen’s point of view, and also echoing the utopian undertones of this scene, Mark replies, “Oh, no. Nothing’s impossible.” Although Helen does not dwell on the publishers’ arguments for dismissing the use of photographs, it is easy to surmise that they might share in Mark’s initial rejection of photography as a vehicle wholly inadequate for supplying an imaginative, childlike form of vision. For the publishers, as initially for Mark as well, photography might serve only the instrumental, productivist interests of a realist aesthetic practice, divorced from the uncertain effects and goals of a fantasy-based mode of representation. It would seem therefore ironic that Helen turns to Mark—the ultimate fetishist of camera users, yet at the same time, the ultimate child—for a reinforcement of her beliefs on this issue, and even more ironic that Mark agrees with her wishes and is adamant on taking those pictures for her. The faintly utopian echoes of this scene, how-

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ever, are further qualified by Mark’s ambiguous and abstracted bodily demeanor even as he insists on participating in Helen’s project. As Helen brings up the inevitably commodified nature of their exchange (“But the money!”), Mark no longer seems to be currently engaged in a conversation with her. As he replies, “There are some things which I photograph for nothing,” Mark is shown in a three-quarter-profile close-up that replicates his enthrallment with Laraine’s face in a former scene. Once again, his gaze is unfocused and drawn inward, no longer interested in Helen’s presence or in her ideas, but compelled to tend to demands of his own. Helen’s unexplained reluctance to disclose the exact content of the photographs to be included in the book affords Mark the opportunity to substitute his own fantasy, instantly deciding that the book’s photographs should feature faces, the privileged object of his habitual obsession. As in the case of the window-as-gift presented by Mrs. Stephens, Helen’s book of children’s stories constitutes a gift lacking in a measurable or recognizable reciprocity. Whereas the window is identified with a gift only by way of an ironic metaphor intended to mock the isolationist distance of voyeurism, the book of children’s stories functions as a gift that goes unnamed. Helen does not explicitly offer the book to Mark as a gift, nor does she expect his acceptance of it or his recognition of its value. Moreover, Mark’s understanding of its value is left undecided—we never know whether he comes to see it as a way out of his voyeuristic machinations or, probably more likely, whether he imposes his reductive perspective on the gift’s disruptive and expansive potential. In this light, the gift of language proffered by Helen’s book may be read as a missed encounter, though no less important as a possibility. The third and final metaphorical gift I would like to discuss concerns Mrs. Stephens’s caressing touch upon Mark’s face. Given Mark’s long-standing compulsive filming of women’s (terrorized) faces, the film seems to endow the mother’s touch upon his own face with remarkable significance. At the close of Mark and Mrs. Stephens’s eventful meeting at his studio, Mrs. Stephens asks Mark not to see Helen until he gets help. As Mark acquiesces

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to Mrs. Stephens’s desires, she in turn takes on a compassionate, almost maternal, attitude toward him. Mark then helps the blind woman walk down the stairs, upon reaching the bottom of which they stand face to face (if not visually, at least bodily). Echoing a previous moment that also takes place at the bottom of the staircase, where Mark is kissed by Helen (and then substitutes his own camera as kisser), Mrs. Stephens now proceeds to touch Mark’s face with a continuous and slow caress that, after covering Mark’s eyes, comes to rest behind his ears. Mark then asks Mrs. Stephens, “Taking my picture? . . . It’s a long time since anyone did.” As Mark’s enigmatic comment suggests, Mark’s only knowledge of touch is the phallic touch delivered by the camera—the invasive touch of the paternal camera’s blinding light,23 which, as shown in his reenactment of Helen’s kiss through the camera, he eventually comes to invest with libidinal significance. Mark’s response here thus alludes to the long-awaited possibility of another’s gaze returning his own—a gaze that he identifies not so much with the camera’s distant, uninvolved apprehension as with the never fully realized touch of the absent mother. Mrs. Stephens’s caressing contact with Mark’s face is shown to be the radical opposite of Mark’s own overpowering visual hold over women’s faces. Emmanuel Levinas’s conceptual use of the face as a metaphor for an irreducible otherness is rather pertinent here. As a face, the other does not present itself as “a set of qualities forming an image”; rather, its ungraspable expressiveness continually “destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves in me.”24 Free from the speculation of the gaze, Mrs. Stephens’s caress exemplifies a care that refuses to turn the other’s face into an object of visual knowledge. The caress does not pursue the specular reduction of difference into sameness, an operation repeatedly enacted in Mark’s filming-killing of women. There is no expectation of a reciprocity in Mrs. Stephens’s caress, but, more precisely, a summons to hear the other’s call. Through its giving of the caress, the subject understands the other as its neighbor and stands next to it in a vulnerable proximity that defies sameness. “The caress,” Levinas writes,

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is a mode of the subject’s being, where the subject who is in contact with another goes beyond this contact. . . . what is caressed is not touched, properly speaking. It is not the softness or warmth of the hand given in contact that the other seeks. The seeking of the caress constitutes its essence by the fact that the caress does not know what it seeks. This “not knowing,” this fundamental disorder, is the essential.25

The caress does not seek to overwhelm the other’s otherness with its grasp. As evinced by Mrs. Stephens’s tentative touch upon Mark’s face, it is not the forcefulness of the physical contact that makes it important, but the gesture’s porous receptivity to the call of the other in the other’s own terms. The caress clearly does not know what it seeks, which is why Mrs. Stephens ends it by asking, “What’s troubling you, Mark?”26 With this question, Mrs. Stephens seeks to provide Mark with the ground of care necessary for his call to be uttered and heard. He is, however, much too troubled to accept the offering, and, instead, disengages himself from her hands and runs up the stairs. From below, Mrs. Stephens warns, “You’ll have to tell someone! You’ll have to!” The mother’s final words serve as a most appropriate ending to the scene. Mark’s voyeuristic fixations constitute not only a repression of the body’s other sensory faculties, but also a repression of language. Thus, more generally, one may argue that if the predominance of the look over the other senses in our culture has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations, it must surely have caused the additional impoverishment of language. As Mark Lewis unequivocally proves in Peeping Tom, a language disengaged from the body and its sensual operations retreats into solipsistic and reductive instrumentality and, in this sense, is as voyeuristic in its quality and effects as voyeurism itself. Consequently, what are usually considered as three distinct and alienated spheres in the realm of voyeurism—vision, the body, and language—can be seen to work as cooperative reinforcers of the same voyeuristic paradigm. As implied in Mrs. Stephens’s final advice to Mark, psychic repression cannot be mitigated or lifted without its being understood, and it cannot be understood unless it is allowed articula-

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tion in language by the very subject who suffers from it. This argument may sound too commonplace and obvious to require reiteration. After all, the symbolization of repression is one of the foundational principles of psychoanalysis itself as both a medical practice and a textual interpretive practice. What needs to be stressed, however, is that the repression not only affects the psyche, nor is it expressed only through language. The body also registers the effects of repression and it likewise signifies it through those very effects. Current psychoanalytic criticism does not sufficiently account for the synoptic organization/dynamics of the psyche and the body; instead, it tends to abstract psychic formations from their bodily ground, hence replicating the repressive mechanisms at work in those very formations. I would suggest, then, that psychoanalytic criticism would benefit from a return to Freud’s own findings on hysterical conversion, encouraging it to become more attentive to the bodily comportment of the psyche. For those of us who read films, this would translate into a more vigilant and receptive look into the characters’/actors’ bodies so as to foreground the signifying potential of the many kinetic and gestural discourses intersecting with all other discursive modalities in a film. That, in part, has been my aim here—to acknowledge the body’s capacity to speak beyond its traditional subordinate role as the inert, mute carrier of an intelligent, even transcendental, consciousness; in short, to validate the body’s own intelligence, whether engaged or disengaged from reflective consciousness. A more specific line of argumentation in my discussion of Peeping Tom has identified two rather distinct sensorial and epistemological configurations that the film unequivocally bifurcates along gender lines—while the masculine/paternal is aligned with a masterful gaze that seeks to subjugate the other into the terms of the same, the feminine/maternal is defined as a holistic exercise of the senses that lets the other exist in its own terms. However, rather than enacting this gender-based differentiation of modes of knowing and sensing as an incontrovertible or essentialized schema, Peeping Tom’s narrative gradually makes manifest a desire to subvert the inflexible boundaries that discriminate along both

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the axes of gender and the senses (sensual discrimination understood here as the prioritizing of one sense over others as the dominant foundation of knowledge and perception). Albeit tentative and unfulfilled, Mark Lewis’s con-tact (getting in touch) with the more integrated sensual and linguistic economy exemplified by both Helen and Mrs. Stephens points beyond the intractably binarized ideology of gender that subtends the speechless and solipsistic relation between the voyeur and her or his fetish. Part of Peeping Tom’s effective dismantling of the gender divisions decreed by a patriarchal ideology lies in the way the film redefines the role of the maternal. In this regard, Peeping Tom seems to endow the figure of the mother with a significance denied to her in Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis. By presenting us with a narrative where child and mother do not meet at their appointed time, the film posits the absent mother as the missing link that, under normal conditions, might allow for the child’s smooth passage from the semiotic activity of the body to that of language proper, as well as for the subsequent integrated coexistence of both these levels. Thus, Peeping Tom implies that the mother’s closeness to the child’s body is by no means restricted to the mute confines of biology. Rather, as the child’s caretaker and first model of identification, the mother performs for the child the ontological slippage between the gestures of the body and those of language. In this regard, and however unsuccessfully, Peeping Tom features both Mrs. Stephens and Helen as the surrogate mothers who retroactively try to suture Mark into the continuous thread woven by the sensual and the linguistic strands of signification. As I have tried to demonstrate in this essay, the understanding of voyeurism may gain in complexity when assessed from the phenomenological perspective of the lived body. As my reading of Peeping Tom indicates, the voyeur’s psychic repression exhibits its own particular bodily conduct and signification. From this perspective, above and beyond the epistemological reification of vision entailed in voyeurism, the body does not become utterly mute, for it continues to voice its dormant and inhibited state. The various examples of sensual and linguistic repression

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in Peeping Tom examined here point to voyeurism as a bodily configuration of mimicry, a corporeal style wherein the seeing body elides/represses its conscious participation in the emulation and incorporation of the gestures of the seen body. On the other hand, I am not suggesting that all voyeurs remain at the nonlinguistic/“aphanisic” stage where Mark Lewis almost perpetually resides,27 but I am saying that, at least for the duration of the voyeuristic act, the voyeur is bent on avoiding an encounter where the narcissistic terms of her or his satisfaction might be compromised by the inherently different terms proposed by the other. In that regard, language itself may represent the most overt articulation of that compromise: naming the subject’s existence through that which is arbitrarily given, always invoking, yet rarely evoking, a recognition in the other.

Notes

I wish to thank Vivian Sobchack for her very encouraging comments and the editors of Camera Obscura for their thoughtful suggestions. 1.

Among the psychoanalytic analyses of Peeping Tom, the following are worth mentioning: Kaja Silverman, “Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects,” in The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 32–41; Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Patricia Mellencamp, Mary Ann Doane, and Linda Williams (Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1984), 83–99; Raymond Durgnat, “The Man(iac) with the Movie Camera,” in Framework 9 (1978–79): 3–9; Reynold Humphries, “Peeping Tom: Voyeurism, the Camera, the Spectator,” in Film Reader 4, ed. Bill Nichols (Evanston, IL : Northwestern University Press, 1980), 193–200; Carol Clover, “The Eye of Horror” in Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Peter Wollen, “Dying for Art,” in Sight and Sound 4.12 (1994): 18–21.

2.

For an in-depth phenomenological description of the cinematic situation as corporeally lived by both film and viewer, see Vivian

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Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Linda Williams’s analysis of certain film genres as capable of eliciting gross bodily reactions likewise presents a view of cinema that discourages the classical separation between spectator and spectacle. See Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess,” in Film Genre Reader II, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). 3.

See, for example, Sobchack’s critique of film theory’s suspicious guard against the sensual/sensational pleasures of film viewing in “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh,” in Carnal Thoughts: Bodies, Texts, Scenes, and Screens (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming). Linda Williams, on the other hand, looks at pornographic visual practices of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries as examples of sight engaging “carnal density and tactility” (“Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the ‘Carnal Density of Vision,’” in Fugitive Images, ed. Patrice Petro [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995]).

4.

Silverman, “Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects,” in The Acoustic Mirror, 34.

5.

Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic, 1955). For a fascinating account of the relations between the psychoanalytic talking cure and the performative aspects of the symptom, see Peggy Phelan’s “Dance and the History of Hysteria,” in Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Culture, and Power (New York: Routledge, 1996).

6.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” in The Primacy of Perception, trans. William Cobb (Evanston, IL : Northwestern University Press, 1964), 115; my emphasis.

7.

Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 59.

8.

Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 118.

9.

On this point, I concur with Raymond Durgnat, who describes the bayonet’s penetration into the women’s (and Mark’s own) throats as “an excess of touching.” (Durgnat, “The Man(iac) with

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the Movie Camera,” 4). Of all the analyses of Peeping Tom I have found, Durgnat’s comes closest to at least recognizing, albeit in an asystematic and cursory way, the noteworthy presence in the film of sensory channels other than vision. 10. Silverman, “Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects,” 35. 11. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 353–54. 12. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye, 122; my emphasis. 13. Silverman, “Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects,” 33. 14. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 139; my emphasis. 15. Mark’s pathological relation to the image or physical body in front of him may be more fittingly aligned with the Lacanian description of the mirror stage (a fetishistic/substitutive formation) than with the phenomenological account of the latter (a relation of reciprocity/reversibility between seer and seen). 16. In its patterning of sensual discourses, the film seems to align motherhood with hands/touch instead of eyes/vision. 17. In phenomenology, the concept of intentionality is first and foremost predicated upon the idea of flesh as anonymous/ prereflective existence. In its enworlded nature, the lived body is always already guided by intentionality, whether it may do so in a conscious or unconscious manner. 18. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye, 40. 19. Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 109. 20. Ibid. A notable difference arises between the phenomenological and the psychoanalytic accounts of the relationship between the child’s development of identification and his/her acquisition of language. While Lacan posits the two stages as absolutely distinct, and even in contradiction, Merleau-Ponty sees the development of language as itself informed by and subsumed under the larger phenomenon of identification. Under the encompassing umbrella of identification, the child’s corporeal gestures are

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deemed as expressive and filled with intentionality as the linguistic gestures she or he will eventually and gradually assume. 21. Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty (New York: Routledge, 1998), 62; my emphasis. 22. Ibid., 87. 23. As Vasseleu explains, light can, under certain conditions, be experienced as touch as well: “At the point of light’s contact with the eye, the objectivity of the visual standpoint becomes a perception of the presence of difference, where light is experienced as a non-rational subjection to feelings such as being penetrated, dazzlement, ecstasy or pain” (Textures of Light, 12). 24. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 50–51. 25. Levinas, “Time and the Other,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sèan Hand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 51; my emphasis. 26. Levinas’s statement that “the caress does not know what it seeks” is curiously akin to Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “the psychologist does not know what he is dealing with.” 27. I am using the term aphanisic (from the Greek aphanisis) in the sense Lacan gives it in “The Signification of the Phallus,” as “the disappearance of sexual desire” (Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Norton, 1977], 291), but also as the withdrawal of language. I think the slippage from desire to language is warranted by Lacan’s own notion that the phallus is a signifier of both, and by the fact that psychoanalysis describes the advent of desire and language as contemporaneous.

Elena del Río is assistant professor of film studies at the University

of Northern Colorado. She has contributed to Camera Obscura and Discourse with essays that examine questions of embodiment in media technologies. She is currently working on a book that explores choreographic representations of the female body in melodrama and the avant-garde.

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