ABSTRACT
In a “Family Circus” cartoon of the early 1990s the little girl, Dolly, seated with her parents in the multiplex auditorium as the credits roll at the beginning of the feature, turns and asks her father, “Daddy, where’s the FBI warning?” A generation of viewers now exists for whom consumption of movies at home on video has always been the norm. What does this shift signal for the spectatorial paradigm governed by notions of the apparatus based solely on theatrical projection? Are the questions of gender that have preoccupied theory about spectatorship different for the person who watches films on home video? And how has Hollywood gone about interpolating such reconfigured spectators into its narratives?
