“Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to be looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into a spectacle itself”. Laura Mulvey’s paper does an incredible job of making clear the ways in which the audience perceives women in film, that is, either through direct scopophilic contact, where the spectator and the character in the film look at the woman in the same way, as “isolated, glamorous, on display”, or through means of identification, that is, as the audience participates in the power of the male star, the audience can "indirectly possess her too".

I was really taken by the analysis of Rear Window, where the protagonist's interest in his girlfriend Lisa slowly wanes, until, that is, the moment that she “crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite”. Not until their relationship had been reduced to one analogous to a spectator and a woman in a film, did his interest rekindle. “His enforced inactivity, binding him to his seat as a spectator, puts him squarely in the fantasy position of the cinema audience.”

In Battlestar Galactica, the character of Sharon “Boomer” Valerii, is worth exploring as an example of the way cinema creates this spectacle. One of the most powerful scenes is when she is the victim of attempted rape by Lt. Thorne. She was rescued by Chief Petty Officer Tyrol and Leiutenant Agathon, both of whom were romantically involved with Boomer at some point.

This seems rather similar to Douchet’s girlfriend Lisa. Only when Lisa was seen by Douchet as “a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening her with punishment” was Douchet moved enough to save her. In the same way, at this point, as Boomer is being treated as a guilty intruder by the crew of the Pegasus, do we see a rekindling of the relationship between the two men and her, as they attempt to save her.

In the two examples above, we see the power of the concepts of voyeurism, and the passive female, with the “determining male gaze” projecting its fantasy on it. Film has always depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms, and, it seems, the “[image of women will] continually [be] stolen and used for this end”.