Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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own demise. Within the story the victim, typically female, seems to be more
transfixed on the reflective surface above the lens than the weapon or the killer.
While watching the footage from the perpetrator-camera, the victim appears to be
looking into the lens, because the proximity between the mirror and the lens is so
close, and to the victim, the mirror acts as a lens of sorts, showing her an event in
which she is immediately participating, but from the perspective of the other. We
can assume that the victim is also aware of the artifice of the contraption, but the
image itself becomes a stronger focal point of involvement than the mirror itself. In
effect, the viewer is witnessing perpetrator-camera footage that feels like eye/camera
footage of a subject who is witnessing the same event as the viewer and from the
same perspective through similar sensations of artifice awareness. Essentially, the
viewer and the participants of the action all see the same images, locking the viewer
into a structural equivalent of electronic feedback. In this way, through Peeping
Tom, Michael Powell has drawn the audience into a more inclusive and participatory
position than any other film to date.
Raymond Lefevre argues that Peeping Tom is a film solely about seeing.
Near the beginning of the essay “From Voyeurism to Infinity,” Lefevre says that
“All of this revolves around a singular concept: the eye.” Lefevre continues, “The
details of set decoration, staging, and casting, lines of dialogue, color, plot line,
editing, all come together to express a world captured by a gaze.” (87)
While audience identification with film characters, as Robin Wood
maintains, is a difficult and complex relationship to understand and analyse, it is
important to understand the overall creation of perspective and point of view, and
horror proves to be a genre with a tremendous density of perspective. The
eye/camera as a device takes large steps towards defining the perspective a film