Dita and The Darkness: Desperately Seeking Gaze
Theorist Laura Mulvey is notorious for her claims about the nature of cinematic enjoyment. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", she concludes that a spectator experiences two main pleasures in viewing conventional Hollywood films: (1) a voyeuristic pleasure, constituted from considering a female figure in an objectified, sexual way, and (2) a narcissistic pleasure, arising from identification with a male protagonist and his ‘gaze’. (Mulvey 62) Central to her argument is Mulvey’s emphasis on the voyeuristic quality of the viewer’s ‘gaze’: it is an erotic look of power and of objectification, held from a distance, based on the fetishization of the female body. The view of the camera, and thus of the male protagonist and the spectator also, is that of the intended male ‘gaze’.
