Peeping Tom and Lacan

In class we talked a lot about the effeminization of Mark and the significance of the Oedipal trap in his story. It didn't really come up so I didn't get a chance to talk about it, but I think there was also a very Lacanian element to the film with regard to the Real and the Symbolic.

It essentially boils down to this: Mark's studio, the dark room, is representative of the Real. It's where all of the horror lurks. When Helen watches the videos of Mark as a child, she freaks out and wants to leave, she wants to get out of the room, as if by escaping the room she could escape the fear and terror. The room stores all the film of the murders, all the films of Mark's childhood. Helen's mother says she that she feels at home there and that she visits every night. Is it because of her blindness? That she has already had a brush with the Real when the surgery destroyed her vision? Or does the darkness protect her from seeing the Real, from seeing this sort of "Medusa's face" of the films?

The only times we see the reels of Mark's snuff films is in that room. And Mark's obsession with the room, with the darkness, with his films, with the need to capture that perfect image of fear just before death, could also indicate his obsession of trying to capture the Real, that impossible task of trying to grasp the intangible, to rid himself of his own fear and anxiety by looking Medusa in the face. But of course, to do such a thing, one must die, it's the only way. And so Mark dies, and the scene of his death is in his studio, in the dark room where he spent so much time chasing after what can never be grasped without personal experience, in accepting the Real he succumbed to it.