Peeping Tom and Japan

What makes someone want to watch other people in private? Michael Powell's 1960 film, Peeping Tom, sheds some light on this problem but it presents such a unique case, one may wonder has useful it could be in analysing the phenomenon as a whole. However, watching it again a few nights ago, for the first time in at least a decade, I was astonished by the seemingly fresh insight it yielded. It almost felt like I was seeing it for the first time. Perhaps it's because I've lived in Japan for almost five years now and Japan, along with other east Asian countries, has a fundamentally different perspective on voyeurism.

I remember once a junior high school student told me that her friend wasn't allowed to masturbate until she passed an upcoming test. Her mother forbade her. I was so astonished both by the student's frankness and by what she had told me that I thought I'd misheard her. I asked her to tell me again but the student became shy and changed the subject. I was deeply disturbed that a parent would violate her 14 year old child's privacy so much as even to regulate a deeply personal act and use it as a tool of manipulation. But the concept of privacy is more or less a western concept. In a collectivist culture like Japan's, the idea that someone has an existence outside of society is considered perverse. Mind you, I live in a very conservative part of the country and from what I gather, ideas of privacy, among others, are closer to western values in Tokyo and Osaka. Is it even right for me to judge, though, coming from such a cultural perspective? Maybe not, but every time I spot a neighbour looking through my window, or hear some other insinuation that my privacy has been compromised by someone who doesn't even believe in the concept, I certainly find it irritating to be on the receiving end of such ethnocentrism.

Morality here seems almost entirely external. So long as the subject remains unaware of what is done to him, anything is permitted. Nothing becomes real unless it's seen and digested by society. And then, even if the subject is evidently aware, community rhetoric will repress awareness of that awareness if the subject's awareness is too inconvenient.

I then think of Mark (Karlheinz Böhm), the main character of Peeping Tom, and what growing up under constant surveillance and manipulation by his father did to him. There's something sweet and innocent about him that coincides with a fundamental disregard for the humanity of others. He fervently watches footage of the latest girl he's killed but in all his conversations with his victims and others, he's always polite, soft spoken, and gentle. The real world exists for him in the camera, his father made sure of that, and he'll use whatever tactics necessary to enable him to film, to quietly disappear and become pure observer.

And yet, Mark's existence as object of observation is a constant parallel reality. When other children were learning how to interact with other people normally, Mark's whole personality was built on being something that is watched. Despite being a serial killer, he takes amazingly little care to prevent detection. He has no locks on his doors, he hides the body of a victim in a prop trunk on set of the movie on which he works as a camera operator. He kills coworkers, making no effort to find victims that can't be traced back to him. It's commonly said that Mark wants to be caught but I don't think that's exactly true. I think it's more like he sees his arrest as an inevitable stitch in the fabric of his reality. He is, of course, continuing his father's study of him as an exhibition of fear, though with no intelligent direction. There's no sense that his "documentary" is to be edited to provide insight in narrative form to any student of psychology. There's an exultation in the control he's able to assert over women who exist in a more liberated realm than he can ever broach and yet that very assertion of dominance and control is part of a pattern inflicted on himself by his own internal observer. Sadism is a device for managing reality he inherited from his father but he has adopted it with less volition than his father presumably had.

Now how much stronger would this continual observation and manipulation be if it were carried on down generations?

Peeping Tom is available on The Criterion Channel.