"There is a much stronger sexual fantasy in Michael Powell's extraordinary movie Peeping Tom (1960), which is not about a Peeping Tom but about a psychopath who kills women with a weapon concealed in his camera, while photographic them. Not once does he touch his subjects. He doesn't desire their bodies; he wants their presence in the form of filmed images—those showing them experiencing their own death—which he screens at home for his solitary pleasure. The move assumes connections between impotence and aggression, professionalized looking and cruelty, which point to the central fantasy connected with the camera. The camera as phallus is, at most, a flimsy variant of the inescapable metaphor that everyone unselfconsciously employs. However hazy our awareness of this fantasy, it is named without subtlety whenever we talk about 'loading' and 'aiming' a camera, about 'shooting' a film.
"The old-fashioned camera was clumsier...