<I>En el fondo te gusta</I>: Titillation, desire, and the spectator's gaze in Alejandro Amenbar's <I>Tesis</I>

Abstract

Director Alejandro Amenábar's film Tesis (1996) interrogates the popular fascination with macabre spectacle in contemporary Spain. Tesis uses the voyeurism inherent in the act of watching film to problematise the spectator's gaze. While the protagonists in Tesis maintain a façade of analytical distance towards violent images, their gazes betray their obsessions, which eventually transform their roles from spectators into perpetrators of violence. To show this transformation, Tesis itself projects a sensationalised violence that titillates its own audience, such that the viewing public becomes a consumer of violent spectacle. As such spectators are forced to confront their contradictory impulses, of being titillated by violence yet shameful of their enjoyment. Thus by structuring the gaze as a confrontation with its own audience, Tesis casts broad critiques of contemporary Spain and questions the distinction between spectator and perpetrator.3 SHC 4 (1) 3-17