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January 22, 2005
Gazing at Peeping Tom
Though we had a rich and lively discussion of Michael Powell's (1960) film "Peeping Tom, " I wanted to contunue in my ponderings. I want to come back to why Mark only attacked women, when his anguish as a child was brought on by a male figure, his father. As was brought up in the discussion, many psychoanalytic themes are brought up in this movie and one of them is displacement. Displacement is the psychological operation in which the affects felt towards the original object are transferred to another object that is less threatening. Mark formed a reaction formation around his father that idealized him and repressed his rage. His father, as the renowned, published psychologist, was beyond reproach. Mark protected his introjected father from his rage because, as in so many cycles of abuse, the father would show affection and warmth to the son after torturing him with the experiments in fear. This form of reinforcement is very powerful. Mark's rage then gets displaced on to the secondary object which is the vampy intruder that took Mark's mother's place six weeks after her death. He focused his vengeance on representatives of the secondary object and, by filming them like his father, performs the Oedipal feat of identification with the father (and with the aggressor) thereby incorporating his power.
Posted by lyceum at January 22, 2005 09:21 AM
Comments
Yeah, and you get the sense that the filmmakers had this sort of theory in mind all along (tho' I'm not sure they did, just as Sophocles couldn't have had Freud's theory of the "Oedipus Complex" in mind when writing *Oedipus Rex*).
This leads me to a basic question: I wonder what 20th century films, esp. those focused on themes of sexuality or psychology, would have been like if there had been no psychoanalytic movement? - Drew
Posted by: Drew at January 23, 2005 08:47 PM
There's the line that "We don't need a Freudian interpretation of Shakespeare, we need a Shakepspearean interpretation of Freud." Or Sophocles.
Freud took profound insights that had long been in great literature and codified them as something passing for science and medicine. Having it out as a system made it easier for others to apply.
Themes of sex and human behaviour and motivation would have still been there in art and film even without Freud. Perhaps the work of Freud and company actually created a kind of orthodoxy that influenced both creation and interpretation.
I am glad to see we are in a time increasingly of asking "What did Freud get wrong and why?"
Posted by: Annie at January 24, 2005 01:44 PM