Masquerade and Bad Faith in Peeping Toms

This essay argues that Uri Zohar's Peeping Toms (1972) presents an economy of voyeurism and fetishism that unveils the tragic nihilistic existence of the Israeli male in the post-Zionist world. In doing so it describes the sexual and existential misfortunes experienced by the Israeli male protagonist, who uses the phallus—a signifier much appraised by Zionism—to veil not only castration but also the void left by the dissolution of the Zionistic collective ideology. This dissolution created a state of alienation, rendering the individual totally unable to examine (or re-examine) his values. The compulsive attribution of personal responsibility to a higher power, consolidated by the collective ideology based on a heterosexual masculine model, generated a deterministic and fixed male state of mind. Peeping Toms displays a high awareness of this problem through various cinematic devices, while emphasizing the inability of the post-Zionist generation to contend with it.