Min WU

Binary of Sadism and Masochism

Binary of Sadism and Masochism

The relation between Spectatorship and Gender Identification in Peeping Tom

With various layers and masks, Peeping Tom, directed by Michael Powell,

encompasses a significant relation between spectatorship and gender identification. During

different phases of the films, various meanings of the male gazes entail the recalibration of

spectatorships which subsequently cause the alteration of gender identifications. Through the

changing psychological identities, the binary of sadism and masochism emerges, influencing

the spectatorship reversely. It becomes perpetual in the later reflexivity, exposes the

preexisting pains and fears of all the participants, and enables Peeping Tom to become a

psychological horror film in a real sense.

Three distinctive male gazes are noticeable in Peeping Tom. Mark, behind his camera,

gazes at the female spectator as a voyeur. Also, Mark, in front of the projecting screen, is

gazed at by himself as a spectator. Lastly, audiences, behind Mark and the authentic screen,

gaze at Mark and themselves both as voyeurs and spectators.

In the first stage of the assaultive gazei, when Mark is filming the documentary as a

cinematographer, he is an active voyeur and self-identified as the masculine controller. The

great disparity between the male voyeur and the female spectator engenders the phallicism

and the symbolic sexual coitus, which eventually results in sadism.

The dichotomy of the powers between two genders is conspicuous in the assaultive

gaze. Representative by the first-person camera, Mark is somewhat predatory assaultive as an

active male voyeur. He possesses the absolute gender advantages both physically and

psychologically, maintain a safe distance from the female preys in voyeurism. Antithetically,

the woman in Peeping Tom, though beautiful and sexually luring, remains solely as an

exhibitionist under this assaultive gaze. Exposed to the camera, the woman remains as a

spectator who is unconscious of the surrounding threatens and violenceii. These highly

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abstracted symbols are fragile, susceptible to be hurt and assaulted. In the unbalanced relation

between two genders, audiences are forced to look at women in the way men do since they

are adapting to the first-person position of the camera, which is occupied by Mark, a male

character. The cinematic apparatus is characterized by the fixation of the female body as the

quintessential and deeply problematic object of sightiii.

In the assaultive gaze, the different genitals lead to the fetishistic scopophilia of Mark

who worships the penis and the masculinity concomitant with it. In a word, the lens is the

penis. The morbid urge of filming the prostitutes and actresses symbolizes the coitus with

them using a fake penis – the camera. Thus, due to the phallicism, the assaultive gaze

partially remains as a phallic gaze. Also, the transition of the camera from Mark’s father to

Mark represents the similar phallic transition. The morbid addiction of cruel documentary

connotes the sexual function, which is not inherent to Mark but is inherited from his father.

Just like punishing power and masculinity that the father possesses is short in Mark. Without

inheritance of masculinity through assaultive gaze, Mark would be impotent of the murders,

the metaphoric intercourses, not biologically but psychologically.

With male power amplified in assaultive gaze, symbolic sexual intercourse

progressively becomes phallic cruelty and turns into the sadism eventually. The sadistic

voyeurism, predatory, murderous and penetrating, stems from the fear that the penis might be

castrated along with the deprived manhood. Its sole purpose, seemingly, is to is to seek for

the punishing power through brutalizing females, which contributes to the later murders. To

retain the masculinity as an adult, Mark terrifies and stabs the much weaker females to death.

He builds his own psychiatric research solely on sadistic inquiry with undoubted violence.

The cinematography becomes flamboyant depredation and sexual hunting. For Mark, the

voyeurism explicitly demonstrates the masculine power and aggression. “To photograph

people is to violate them…to photograph is a sublimated murder.” iv

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In the second stage of the reactive gazev, when Mark reviews the footages in the

projecting room, his identity is reversed through the reflexivity of stimulus and response.

Failing to be an active voyeur, Mark is now a passive spectator and self-identified with

vulnerable female properties.

Two possible causes are responsible for the inverted identifications. Firstly, the safe

distance necessary for voyeurism is spoiled. Seated in the projection room as Mark is, he

virtually narrows the gap with the spectator by entering into the footages emotionally.

Physically, as an audience, he is more distant from the previous spectators, who are the

murdered females. However, he is even closer to the victims under the clandestine empathies

which he may despise even he is aware of. There is a detail in the film that Mark interposes

himself between the screen and the projector which makes the images projected on the screen

formerly now be projected directly on his body.

Secondly, reflexivity of the preexisting traumas is simultaneously revealed through

the projection. In retrospective, it traces back to the miserable childhood of Mark, who stands

at the psychotic product of a sick family, a paradigm shared by typical horror filmsvi. There,

he is haunted by his father, a scientist of physiology and psychology, who studies Mark in an

extreme excruciating way. Morbidly, his father recorded a complete record of growing up

children in almost every detail, even including the footage that Mark played with his

mother’s corpse. It is not only a deprival of privacy but also pitiless vivisection, undermining

the dignity of individuality.

Together, the superimposition and relocation of the images insinuate the

transformation of identity. Hierarchy between the male voyeur and the female spectator, the

subject and the object, is reversed. Mark is now as susceptible as his previous female

spectators. The active cinematographer as a villain turns into a passive spectator as a victim.

Vulnerability shown on Mark’s face when he reviews himself through projection discloses

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the traumatic memories, in which he is metaphorically castrated. A man without the penis,

who is “bereft of sexuality, helpless and incapable”vii. The extreme close-up of emotions

reveals the truth that he himself was, is, and will be a victim of his cruel psychiatric research

eternally, trapped in the nightmare forever. Once the safe line is passed, and the distance with

the self-spectatorship is enclosed, the transformation of voyeur’s identity is inevitable. The

resistance of being identified with the spectator must be failed, and the protagonist has to

make a gesture of contemplation.

In reactive gaze, the inner core of the reversal of identifications also lies in the

inheritance of fears. Fears manifest in the dread for the weakness, the absence of masculinity

and the potential castration conducted by his father’s ghost. Induced by the previous tortures

of his father, fears now inflict on him. Extended to other innocents, such as the prostitutes

and actresses, Mark’s more profound anxiety is partly pacified by the oblation chosen by

himself. Nevertheless, neither could it be eliminated, fears could not even be downplayed but

could merely be carried on in Mark’s own life. By cause of the fact that paradox of

phallocentric is exactly the fuel of the fear, man depends on the image of the castrated

woman to give reason to his worldviii. The inextirpable fear foreshadows the eternal suffering

of Mark who follows the track of an overthrown chariot. In the end, the whole process solely

ends up with Mark’s own suicidal, the sacrifice of blood and flesh in the reactive gaze.

The effeminate transformation of identification through reactive gaze is self-

perpetuating, pointing to masochism. The former sadism towards female figure is ultimately

backfired as the eventual masochism of male. Unlike the woman who could never be really

mutilated for she does not have a penis, man’s castration is authentic because he does have

one. How desperately that Mark is trying to master his pains through hurting the woman, how

susceptible he could end up with. Moreover, a malicious circle exists in the perpetuating

masochism. The pleasure lies in pain and needs to be repeated to gain more. The satisfaction

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of the voyeurism behind the camera could only be gained when Mark becomes a painful

spectator in front of the projecting screen. This inverse annotation implies the inevitable

destiny that whoever attempts to penetrate others for redemptions would end up being

penetrated. A child once abused in the past now becomes an abuser.

In the last stage of the binary gaze, the two gazes – assaultive gaze and reactive gaze

– are combined, becoming the united gaze of audience. Overall, the binary of the two

different gazes, interdependence and separation of sadism and masochism, leads to the

audience’s ultimate identification with Mark and the film.

It first lies within the interdependence of sadism and masochism. As a question of two

perspectives, sadism and masochism are the two identifications working for the same purpose

– the token of masculinity and the symbolic compensation for the preexisting fears and pains.

According to Freudian psychoanalysis, the truth that female lacks the penis, seen from the

perspective of a male, might turn into a mirrored image of a castrated man. Fearing the

castration and the succeeding deprival of masculinity, man ceases his previous Oedipus

complex, the emotional attachment to female, and starts to despise woman.

The abomination and contempt for female become the reflexivity of antipathy towards

self-ineptness after the possible castration. Out of the insidious fear of potential mutilation,

Mark addicts to sadism, entrapping and murdering females to ensure the existence of the

punishing power, which denotes the masculinity of being a proper man. However, since the

female is the clandestine reflection of the castrated male figure, the process of brutalizing

females eventually develops into the procedure of self-mutilation of the male. Susceptible

and vulnerable, the sadism grows into a morbid addiction of masochism.

On the other hand, sadism and masochism are separable. It is distinguishable between

the two identities connoted in two different gazes that Mark as a sadistic cinematographer

and as a masochistic spectator. As mentioned above, the camera and the blade could be seen

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as the penis, the patriarchal power that Mark is afraid to lose and desperate to reclaim. By

inserting the blade into the females’ bodies, and also by filming the whole process with a

camera, he formally intercourse with the females. However, only through the instinct when

the footages are projected on screen meanwhile traumatized memories are recollected, can he

truly reach the orgasm. The satisfaction of sex and reclamation of masculinity considerably

result in the participation compared to voyeurism. In short, the compensation of kill and fuck,

made possible by the separation of sadism and masochism, mostly stems from the

masochistic spectator rather than the sadistic voyeur.

Together, the interdependence and separation of sadism and masochism contribute to

the audience’s identification with the film, aligning the common plight. Hitchcock once said

about Psycho that “The slashing. An impression of a knife slashing, as if tearing at the very

screen, ripping the film”ix. Instead of solely ripping the camera, the projecting screen, the

murdered females, and Mark, also tears the audiences apart. The “hurt”, stemming from the

identification with the protagonist, is real and palpable. The foul impulses are contagious and

could be rather appealing to the audiences outside the story but inside the settings.

In conclusion, the binary of sadism and masochism results from the juxtaposition of

the assaultive gaze of a male voyeur, and the reactive gaze of a female spectator. In all, they

contribute to the identification with Mark, the film and individual emotions. There is no such

thing as pure sadism or masochistic feeling which usually intertwine with each other. The job

of the horror film, nevertheless, is to give the viewer as pure a dose as possible. Seemingly,

audiences are on the safe side in the virtual world, detached from the emotions that take place

in the cinematic fantasies.

However, under the façade of Peeping Tom is the acknowledgement, even indulgence,

of the transformation of gender identifications in different spectatorships. To create the mood

of real psychological horror, Peeping Tom exploits the private feelings through individual

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reflexivity. Though no one is responsible for the “hurt” in Peeping Tom, in the end, everyone,

from the director to the audiences, brandishes the spike and construct the mirror of

preexisting fears and pains.

i Carol Clover, “The Eye of Horror,” in Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (BFI,
1992), 165-205 (excerpt)
ii Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in Barry Keith Grant, The Dread of Difference: Gender and the
Horror Film (U of Texas Press, 2015), 17-36
iii Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminisms, 1991, pp. 432–442., doi:10.1007/978-1-
349-22098-4_25.
iv Halber Jacques, and Susan Sontag. “On Photography.” Leonardo, vol. 12, no. 4, 1979, p. 344.,
doi:10.2307/1573934.
v Carol Clover, “The Eye of Horror,” in Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
(BFI, 1992), 165-205 (excerpt)
vi Isabelle McNeill, “Peeping Tom”, Fifty Key British Films.
vii Susan Lurie, “Pornography and the dread of women: the male sexual dilemma”
viii Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminisms, 1991, pp. 432–442., doi:10.1007/978-
1-349-22098-4_25.
ix Linda Williams, "The Eye of Horror”, Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, vol. 32, no. 09, Jan. 1995, p.
201., doi:10.5860/choice.32-4980.