Peeping Tom opens with evocations of the smell of the city: trash and stone, cigarettes and gum, stale perfume, talc, lipstick, wet wool and leather, petrol, candy and tobacco. It’s evoked by the sex worker’s fur collar, her back-seamed stockings, the tawdry upstairs room in which Mark (Carl Boehm) shoots cheesecake pin-up photos, and the tobacconist that caters to his male clients’ taste for “educational books” aka porn.
One of the other things that’s interesting about Peeping Tom is that much of it takes place in bedsitting rooms, in places where people live at close quarters, where you can smell your neighbours whether you want to or not. Mark Hyatt’s novel Love, Leda (published in 2023 by Peninsula Press, but written in the early 60s) captures some of the tone of working class London of this period, and of the experience of living in bedsits. This is a much more itinerant experience than what we see in Peeping Tom, but the way in which Leda gets around London, and the way he experiences sexual encounters as a queer man feel startling modern, in the way that Helen (Anna Massey) in Peeping Tom defies convention. Helen seems like a good girl, but not so good that she doesn’t ask for what she wants, not so good that isn’t afraid to make the first move. She cultivates Mark, bringing him a single slice of her twenty-first birthday cake, covered in white icing, and he offers her a glass of milk.
If Helen’s aroma is vanilla birthday cake and milk, Mark’s is old books and photo developing chemicals. Helen seems like the kind of girl who would wear l’Air du Temps or perhaps Penhaligon’s Lily of the Valley. But, there is also a kind of Angela Carter vibe here, as if Helen is a girl who does not know how to shiver. This also makes me think of Fever Ray’s song Shiver, with its lyric “Some girls will make you blush/Some girls will make you shiver.”
Leda, eyeing up a lover on a station platform: “I look him over as he stands, a knowing bird about to be shot. I could eat him and he knows it.” (Hyatt: 12)
Helen doesn’t exactly want to eat Mark, but she doesn’t not want to eat him either. There’s a strange tension about who, exactly, is cake in this scenario. There’s a strange quality to Anna Massey’s performance that feels to me as if Helen is wrestling with being good and doing what’s expected of her, and doing what she wants. She is torn between duty and pleasure.
“Look, when you live in a one bed-sitter, one doesn’t get to know people. It’s only by night that other people live with me.”
…
“Want coffee?” he looks down at a tiny gas ring. “Well, to bed then,” he says with more interest.
“To bed” (Hyatt: 38)
In her brilliant cooking and advice book Cooking in a Bedsitter (first published 1963), Katharine Whitehorn has a section in the chapter “Cooking to Impress” entitled “The Third Paw”:
“Every dog has four thoughts, one for each paw: food, food, sex, and food. Most of this book is naturally concerned with preoccupations 1, 2, and 4; but the other thought also has its own special problems in a bedsitter. The chief trouble, for man or girl, is that everything in a bedsitter is so visible. Unless you work it all out with the greatest care, your visitor can see at a glance just exactly what you expect or hope for or hope to avoid.” (Whitehorn: 169)
She has tips for how to avoid the dead give-away aka Leaving the heating on? In this economy? (applicable then and now) and making it look effortless aka Good lord, will you look at that? An unopened tin of foie gras. Contained within that phrase “man or girl” lies everything—an acknowledgement that anyone who lives in a bedsitter might want to have sex for one reason or another. At the beginning of Peeping Tom, the Soho sex worker takes a client back to a bedsitter, and one of the first things she does is switch on the fire. Helen’s mother has a fire in her larger and more generous room, with a separate kitchen, while Helen has the smaller bedsitter across the hall. In her introduction, Whitehorn acerbically remarks “it is a common fallacy amongst the better class of landladies that one can exist entirely on tea, biscuits and good books, without the need for food, beer, the wireless or the companionship of the opposite sex.” (4) We know that the bedsitting rooms in Peeping Tom are not the province of those landladies.
Scopophilia, voyeurism, or as memorably described by the on-set psychiatrist: “the morbid urge to gaze.” In Peeping Tom that urge, much like in Rear Window, is an urge that belongs to more than one person. Mark isn’t the only one with a morbid urge to gaze—Helen and her mother listen to his footsteps, and wonder about the size of his lodgings. Mark’s cheesecake photography sideline and his focus-puller day job all mean that he spends his time looking at other people and they gaze into his camera lens. Yet Mark himself has been the subject of his father’s intrusive experiments, the object of an unrelenting gaze, and he sees this as his founding fault—he knows what he is. Yet, both Helen and her mother enter Mark’s apartment when he’s not there and have a good snoop around—they are intently curious about what he’s got up there. When Helen goes into Mark’s empty apartment, she switches on the projector. I don’t know what she imagines she’s going to see, because to me this feels distinctly like going through your lover’s phone, search history, or underwear drawer. When Helen’s mother (perhaps the most sinister person in the film, smelling of whiskey and sublimated rage?) says to Mark, “take me to your cinema” there is some whiff of transgression, as if she too is bored, frustrated, and she knows there is some kind of limit experience waiting for her. Weirdly, this reminded me of a moment in Alex Garland’s Men.
One of the most unsettling figures we encounter in Men is The Priest (Rory Kinnear), who makes a show of compassion at first, before revealing himself as someone invested in “truth.” When he enters the red-walled bathroom of Harper’s (Jessie Buckley) rented house, he pushes himself into a luxurious sanctuary, proclaiming his belief that Harper is an “expert in carnality,” and when he declares it is her power to have planted images of her naked, eroticised body in his mind, she holds the point of a beautiful kitchen knife to his throat. The Priest speaks of “the tip of blade” but I feel he’s not being literal here. The tip of the blade is what sticks out of the slit, the (sharp) slippery rocks on which anyone can wreck themselves to reach the sirens; the tip of the blade is how desire can undo you. The Priest believes his desire is Harper’s fault when it can only be his own. In Peeping Tom, Mark ascribes his compulsive desires to his childhood trauma, and Helen’s pursuit is constantly ruptured by the fact that Mark would much rather watch other people. When Helen kisses him and rushes away, Mark kisses the lens of his camera. For Mark, the tip of the blade is his camera, not just the knife on the end of the tripod, but the lens itself, its ability to record, the tool through which he experiences all sensation, all desire. Helen wants to be told what she sees on screen isn’t real, that Mark is not what he says he is. Helen’s mother perceives Mark right away, senses when he is at the window, touches his face to read his expression. She must also, surely, be attuned to how he smells, the heavy wool of his duffle coat, the pomade on his hair, the way his body gives away his secrets.
Gorgeously wonderful as always 💕