“The gaze,” and the many forms it takes, is a long examined phenomena in film and film theory. Starting broadly with Freud’s theories on ‘scopophilia,’ to Laura Mulvey’s seminal writings on the “male gaze,” to bell hooks and her arguments for “oppositional gazes,” examinations of the ideological implications of what it means to view and consume such a uniquely visual media have worked to deeply inform film theory and criticism. This is not the only level at which gazes operate in relation to cinema, as many of these theorists themselves noted. Numerous films have attempted to explore what it means to have characters who look, who control a gaze and use it to examine, objectify, or consume others—secretly or otherwise. This multilayered utilization of gazes—audience and film subject—works to provide a space to begin to analyze more deeply what it means to use gazes as a controlling practice, especially when employed in a systematic sense. What this paper seeks to analyze is that way that Drew Goddard uses what I have termed the “surveillance gaze” in his two feature films, The Cabin in the Woods and Bad Times at the El Royale, as a means of examining how voyeuristic consumption can be a regulatory practice—one that intersects with notions of morality and social hierarchical structure, and one that is layered on top of and compounded by our own ritual practice of objectifying, visual consumption of film and other visual medias themselves.
About the presenterDaniel Gilmore
Daniel is an adjunct assistant professor at St. John’s University, NYU, and CUNY in the areas of Communications and Media Studies. He has a PhD in Communication, Culture, & Media from Drexel University, with a dissertation that focused on the visual organization of surfaces in the context of modern protest movements. His research interests center around ways that people make themselves visible—culturally, socially, and politically—and how that process is often a result of contention.