The recent film, The Secret of Marrowbone (Sergio Sánchez, 2017) exemplifies a trope that has become an active model within the gothic and horror film since the mid twentieth century: the lone male figure enclosed within the spaces of the domestic realm, observing the women and children in his absence from afar, on the periphery of society and haunting the spaces of the family home. Hidden in attics, basements and crawlspaces, the domestically sutured male at once supports the male gaze but is at the same time disenfranchised from and on the borders of the society that supposedly promotes that same gaze. From Norman Bates’ scopophilic peephole view of Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960) to the image of Bryan Cranston observing the consequences of his self-imposed exile in Wakefield (2016), 20th and 21st-century film has given birth to a new societal orphan.
Posted on August 15, 2018
