Peeping Tom (1960)

I’ve always thought it’s a little disingenuous when today’s critics say that they can’t imagine why Michael Powell’s 1960 film Peeping Tom caused such an uproar when it was first released. Granted, the critical reaction was excessive (Powell’s career was basically destroyed by it) but it’s anything but incomprehensible. In the first place, this was easily the most explicit film (in terms of both sex and violence) to have received mainstream distribution in Great Britain up to that point, and this aspect of the film is intensified by the fact that it shows its audience a glimpse of the seamy underbelly of London that exists cheek by jowl with the ordinary city (the studio where pornographic photos are taken is both right above and supported by the local newsagent’s shop, after all). But then there are all the other aspects of the film that make it both so powerful and so difficult to forget. For example, Powell goes out of his way to make his protagonist, Mark Lewis, a sympathetic figure, despite his horrific crimes. He has clearly been traumatized and victimized by his sadistic scientist father, and the film reminds us of this fact repeatedly (rather than just mentioning it quickly as a backstory), right up until the film’s closing words. In this respect, casting Carl Boehm as Lewis, although he wasn’t Powell’s first choice, turned out to be a brilliant decision. Not only does Boehm give an amazing performance, but his accent subtly sets him apart from the other characters, heightening our impression of how isolated this character is from everyone else around him. And then there’s the aspect of the film that personally I find most challenging, interesting, and (not incidentally) still relevant, namely, all the ways in which the film makes the viewer self-conscious about the act of viewing. In other words, what we unavoidably share with Mark Lewis is the compulsive desire to watch, a voyeuristic desire to be entertained by the pain and suffering of others. Hitchcock touches on this same theme in his portrayal of Norman Bates in Psycho (also released in 1960) of course, but Powell’s exploration of this subject is infinitely more complex and daring. It’s this aspect of Peeping Tom that contemporaneous reviewers could not forgive Powell for; no one who watches this film, even today, can remain untouched by the experience of being placed firmly, even relentlessly, in Mark’s position. But we can still learn as much from this experience today as the film’s original viewers over 50 years ago.

The Time Machine (1960)

To mark the passing of one of my favorite actors, Rod Taylor, on January 7^th, I went back and watched one of my favorite films when I was a kid, The Time Machine (dir. George Pal, 1960). When I watched it for the first time many years ago, three scenes in particular seized my imagination. The first comes at the beginning of the film, when George’s friends are waiting for him to show up for dinner at his house and then the door bursts open and in he staggers, wounded and exhausted. Watching that scene again now, I think what appealed to me was the collision of two worlds and almost of two different film genres: the adventure film and the domestic Victorian drama. The second scene was when we first see the Morlocks. It’s easy for me to make fun of them now, especially bearing in mind that they resemble aggressive Smurfs who have let themselves go, but they scared the crap out of me when I was a kid, and perhaps my mocking them now is a way of diasvowing any residual discomfort I feel when I see them! The third and final scene comes right at the end of the film when Filby breaks down the door and we realize that George has dragged the time machine back to its original position and gone back to the future. Again, speaking as a cynical adult, it’s easy to mock the sentimentality of the ending, but when I was a kid I loved the romanticism of going back to help the Eloi build their civilization and I still love speculating about what three books George took back to help them on their way. In closing, I have to note how much I hate the 2002 film version of The Time Machine (directed, funnily enough, by Wells’ great-grandson). The special effects in the 1960 version are awful but the film is redeemed by excellent acting, even in the minor roles, such as the actors who play George’s friends. Exactly the opposite is true of the 2002 version: no amount of nifty special effects can compensate for the awful acting—Jeremy Irons as the ‘uber-Morlock’ is particularly cringeworthy.

Joseph Wambaugh, The Onion Field (1973/2007)

Reading Joseph Wambaugh’s 1973 book The Onion Field in the era of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter is a strange experience, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. First off, though, let’s situate this book within the context of the true crime genre. Like any book published after the groundbreaking In Cold Blood, Wambaugh’s book inevitably shows signs of Truman Capote’s influence, especially in the opening section, where Wambaugh begins by exploring the background of each of the book’s main characters while cross-cutting between the detectives and the robbers until the moment of their fateful and deadly meeting. The differences between Wambaugh and Capote, however, are what make The Onion Field such a significant book. Even though In Cold Blood devotes a lot of attention to the police, it is clear that the murderers are not only Capote’s main protagonists but also the figures with whom he identifies most closely. This is not the case with Wambaugh. As a veteran of the LAPD, Wambaugh’s sympathies are squarely with the police and this book marks an important shift in true crime’s tendency to portray members of law enforcement as the main protagonists, and even as victims (this is a tendency that will developed even further by Ann Rule). Let me be quite clear here: I am not claiming that Wambaugh misinterprets the facts of the case by turning the police into victims; after all, one of the detectives is murdered and the survivor has to endure horrific PTSD for years. My point is that this focus represents a significant development in the genre, especially as Wambaugh’s book was originally published a few years after the turbulent 1960’s, when the police were often seen as victimizers rather than as victims. What makes The Onion Field even more significant and more nuanced than some might expect, however, is that Wambaugh’s sympathetic portrayal of humanized and victimized police officers is accompanied by a stinging critique of the insensitivity, even cruelty, of the LAPD as an institution. In other words, both criminals and the LAPD brass are victimizers according to Wambaugh, albeit of different kinds and degrees. This is where, strangely enough, the context of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter comes into play. For obvious reasons (and despite the recent murder of police officers in New York City), many would have difficulty in thinking of the police as victims today. Instead, they are more often seen as aggressors. This is why it’s so interesting that part of the LAPD’s response to the events depicted in the book was to change police policy so that officers would never surrender their weapons but instead aggressively engage criminals whenever necessary. As an excerpt from Patrol Bureau Memorandum Number 11 (written by Inspector John Powers just five days after the detective’s murder) puts it: “Just as the armed forces protect the nation from external enemies, local police departments protect their communities from internal criminals every bit as vicious as our enemies from without. The police are engaged in a hot war. There are no truces, and there is no hope of an armistice. The enemy abides by no rules of civilized warfare” (quoted on pages 236-237 of the Kindle edition of The Onion Field). It is impossible to read those words today and not be reminded of the ongoing debates about the militarization of the American police. Contemporary events, in other words, have given The Onion Field a new but perhaps not entirely unexpected significance.

Fuminori Nakamura, 'Last Winter, We Parted' (2013)

Let me begin with an admittedly bizarre comparison: the crime novels of Fuminori Nakamura are the Goldilocks and the Three Bears of the genre. The Thief (2009, Trans. 2012) is written in a beautifully lean style that I personally love but that for many readers will leave too much undeveloped and too many questions unanswered. Evil and the Mask (2010, Trans. 2013), by contrast, I find to be badly overwritten almost to the point of feeling bloated; it’s filled with characters pontificating about their nihilistic philosophy of the world and the dead weight of this speechifying drags the book down. But Last Winter, We Parted (2013, Trans. 2014) is just right. It’s the perfect balance of the leanness of the first novel and the complexity of the second. It manages to be the most complex as well as the most compelling of the three. It begins by seeming to channel The Silence of the Lambs: a writer is visiting a notorious murderer in prison because he is writing a book about him. The murderer refuses to cooperate until the journalist reveals some things about his own life. After this relatively straightforward and even familiar beginning, the plot rapidly grows increasingly complex. By the time we reach the end of the novel we can be forgiven for not being completely sure about who did what to whom and why. In most crime novels, these would be unforgivable omissions, but Nakamura gets away with it partly because one of his themes is the universality of guilt and partly because he explores so many other interesting issues along the way: the gap between imitation and reality, the representational power of photography (this would be a fascinating novel to read alongside a viewing of Michael Powell’s notorious 1960 film Peeping Tom), the nature of human desire, and the relation between crime and revenge, just to name a few. Add to this a fascinating formal construction that multiplies narrative voices by reproducing various pieces of evidence under the heading of ‘Archives,’ and Last Winter becomes one of the most challenging crime novels you’ll read in a long time. One final note: the other thing one notices when looking at Nakamura’s crime novels in a group is that the lag time between their original publication in Japanese and their translation into English is getting shorter. This is evidence not only of Nakamura’s increasingly impressive reputation, but also of the growing popularity of international crime fiction in general. Both are good news for fans of the genre.

Martín Solares, The Black Minutes (2006)

In a 2012 interview, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the dean of Mexican crime fiction, explains why he has not written a novel featuring his famous private eye, Hector Belascoarán Shayne, since the current drug war began in Mexico: "The narco war has changed everything in relations between society, crime, insecurity, law and order…These deep changes in society make you as a writer to rethink the whole thing." This is an interesting comment to keep in mind when trying to make sense of Martín Solares’ complex and fascinating 2006 novel, The Black Minutes, which in some ways can be read as charting a path for the Mexican crime novel in the era of the narco cartel. The first thing to note in this regard is that there is no equivalent to a private eye figure in Solares’ work; instead, the closest we come to having a protagonist is a police officer who is less corrupt than his colleagues (which is not saying much). Even with someone as gifted as Taibo, the effectiveness of a principled individual like Shayne is one of the more speculative, fanciful, some would say unrealistic, aspects of his work, and Solares seems to have abandoned this aspect of the genre all together. Instead, Solares focuses on the multiple and contradictory roles that crime plays in the neoliberal state: at once the focus of moral panics that apparently drive both policy and action, it is simultaneously a way for local, state, and national functionaries to enrich themselves and their associates. Given this context, it should come as no surprise that although the murders that focus The Black Minutes are technically solved, justice is nowhere to be found. One of Taibo’s Shayne novels is titled No Happy Ending, and this title would be perfectly appropriate for Solares’ novel, too. But in another sense, concentrating on the incomplete resolution of this novel severely undersells its richness. Combining familiar noir elements with dashes of magical realism, frequent references to a wide range of literary texts, and even a cameo appearance by Alfred Hitchcock, this is not an easy novel to classify. And, of course, both it and crime fiction as a whole are all the better for this fact.

The House of the Devil (2009)

Ti West is a very dependable and knowledgeable maker of horror films and The House of the Devil (2009) suggests why. If the opening credits themselves were not enough of a clue, the early appearance of famous horror actress Dee Wallace indicates that House is something of an homage to the classic era of 1970s/1980s slasher and haunted house movies. It contains a very effective combination of enough of the formulaic elements of the genre (heightened by the film’s early 80s setting) to satisfy the most discerning horror buff along with enough variations to ring the changes. For example, there’s a lovely moment when Samantha, House’s ‘final girl,’ opens the door to the basement and almost snorts in derision at the thought that she would go down there (she does not hesitate, however, to explore the rest of the house!). But perhaps the most distinctive feature of West’s work (we can also see it in The Innkeepers and The Sacrament) is that he’s a master of the ‘slow burn’ horror film: the pacing of the film, its editing, and the development of the plot are all developed deliberately and slowly, so much so that many viewers might find themselves bored. Those who stick around, though, will find The House of the Devil one of the most loving and effective reworkings of (one of) horror’s golden age(s) in recent years.

The Man Who Loved His Wife (1966/2013)

Now that Patricia Highsmith has at last received the recognition she always deserved, it occurs to me that the next female thriller writer whose greatness needs to be acknowledged is Vera Caspary. Thanks to the Feminist Press’ indispensable Femmes Fatales series, that process is well underway. After having brought both Laura and Bedelia back into print, in 2013 they published Caspary’s lesser-known 1966 novel, The Man Who Loved His Wife (1966) and it’s an absolute gem. The title is both deeply ironic and neutrally descriptive. Fletcher Strode is married to the beautiful Elaine, who is nineteen years younger than him. At first blissfully happy together, after Fletcher has a laryngectomy and loses his voice, his sense of masculinity becomes so compromised psychologically that his relationship with Elaine deteriorates and he becomes morbidly suspicious of her. He starts to keep a diary detailing his suspicions and inevitably, when he dies under mysterious circumstances, that diary becomes the focus of the police’s own suspicions about Elaine. Caspary shows a wonderful ability to understand Fletcher’s psychological torment so that he is both pitiful and aggravating to the reader. Courageously, after investing so much time and attention in her lead character, Caspary kills him off in order to devote the final part of the book to her other characters. This allows us to better understand Elaine’s situation (Caspary is scrupulous about examining this relationship from both their perspectives) and to sharpen our dislike of Fletcher’s despicable daughter and son-in-law, who both have their own reasons for wanting to see Elaine convicted of murder, and who may even be guilty of the crime themselves. The fact that so much is left unresolved at the novel’s conclusion shows that Caspary’s interest is not in guilt and innocence as defined by the legal process by rather in the everyday cruelties ordinary people can inflict on each other out of a tangled combination of all-too-understandable motives.