The Bechdel Test - I'D BUY IT FOR A DOLLAR

If you really want to get depressed about representation in movies, play the "person of color" variation of this test:

1. Are there two named non-white characters in the movie?
2. Do they have a conversation with each other?
3. Is the conversation about something other than a white person?

Actually I think you'd ask if the conversation was about something other than their race. Often times you'll have black characters in a story simply to act as stand ins for a certain political view. How many non white characters have something that defines them other than their lack of whiteness?

But that's the same problem. Perhaps it's not clear by simply "translating" the Bechdel rules. If black characters simply act as stand ins for a certain political view, it means the black characters are only there to reinforce/counterpoint/validate/whatever-word-you-may-like the white character's story, which is the point, when applied to women, of the Bechdel Test itself. Most female characters are reduced to wife, girlfriend, mother, love interest in away that, by omission, assumes those are the only uses they have and, the few times stories give female characters a different role, its still "the female role". They are still mostly there to support the story of the main guy.

That's why I felt best to translate that part of the Bechdel rules that way, so as to help it show how rare it is for a couple of non-white characters to exist in a way that shows their only role in the world isn't to serve the main white narrative. Perhaps it could've been better translated, though.

Ah, ok, I see what you did. I won't pretend to argue that women are not woefully under represented in cinema (either as full human beings or in terms of simply being cast at all). I hope that will change in hte future, and from what I've seen in my own life, is changing to some degree (outside of the TRANSFORMERS franchise at least). I can take some solace though in the fact that I have no problem watching men on screen so thankfully I can still enjoy a movie even if there are not many female characters in it.

Some of my favorite movies that pass the Bechdel Test:

Goodfellas [ETA: DISPROVEN!]
Do The Right Thing (pretty sure Mother Sister and the girl whose hair she's doing talk about more than Da Mayor, but I could be mistaken)
Jackie Brown [ETA: DISPROVEN!]
Hustle & Flow
Hannah and Her Sisters
Alien
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Nashville

That list, though, took way too long to think of.

I find it funny that Alien III is used as an example, when it's part of the setting that Ripley's on a planet of only men.

Of course, Aliens and Alien Resurrection both pass as well as Alien, as Patrick mentioned.

It's an interesting point/test, though it seems like she's trying to make a point that the industry is about making films that cater towards men, as opposed to making films that make as much money as possible. Which, it turns out, is apparently easier when you target young males.

Edit: Ironically, a movie could pass but in passing be sexist. The conversation between Landy and Nicki in Bourne Supremacy fails because they're talking about Bourne, I guess. It'd pass if they were talking about shoes though. Cause the chicks love shoes.

Well, Suspiria certainly passes with flying colors, and so does Dog Day Afternoon

Doesn't pass:
Dawn of the Dead (there are only 4 named characters in the whole movie though...)
Brazil
Rushmore
Seven Samurai
The Third Man
Most Pixar movies
Any of the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings movies
Re-Animator

Not surprisingly none of Sergio Leone's movies, or Peckinpah's movies, or any Spaghetti Western I can think of pass.

Query: Can anyone think of a Hitchcock flick that passes? Or a Spielberg movie other than The Color Purple?

And Patrick, I'm thinking Do the Right Thing counts, but juuuuuuusssst barely.

Jackie Brown technically does not pass. Melanie's and Jackie's conversation is largely about Ordell.

You know what's funny, and kind of ironic considering the genre's standing in the feminist community? Most slasher movies pass. I just realized its part of the formula to have female victims chatting about idle crap before as a way to set up their characters.

Also, the video's slideshow (which I just finally watched) is actually wrong about the first two X-Men films. The female characters do talk about more than the male characters. It's not much more, but it's more, especially in X-Men 2.

Psycho passes. Janet Leigh has a conversation between her fellow secretary about headaches in the begining. The Birds might too, Suzanne and Tippi have a scene together. Man I need to rewatch both of these.

Does the other secretary have a name? And the Birds women have a conversation about the male lead, don't they?

I wouldn't say "the genre's standing in the feminist community" is as monochrome as it'd need to be in order to make that statement. The relationship between feminism and slasher films (and exploitation films in general) is filled with all sorts of re-evaluations (as well as criticisms, old and new) in often contradictory fashion.

I suppose assuming we're talking about feminist that have an intellectual interest in film history this is true, but most average people that label themselves feminists will probably tell you slasher films are base-level, woman-hating exploitation. I'm pretty sure even Roger Ebert still sticks to his original readings of the genre overall.

It doesn't help that the most widely read feminists are also the most batshit crazy.

I guess I'd like to believe the kind of person discussing the Bechdel Test would have an intellectual interest in film/film history and I'd rather, in a discussion about it, give the benefit of that doubt. I mean, I'm pretty sure "most average people that label themselves moviegoers" will probably tell you [insert here any opinion people like us, at a site like this, would probably dismiss outright].

Then again, I'm sure nobody here would even blink if I were to claim De Palma, or Cronenberg, or Carpenter have been amongst the most important/innovative directors and did so while working in horror films, and I'm pretty sure "most average people that label themselves film fans" still rather dismiss horror. So, yeah.

Even if most of his films don't pass the test, you'd have to be pretty blind to not call Cronenberg a feminist filmmaker, but of Carpenter's good films only Halloween passes, and I recall my aunt telling me De Palma was a misogynist the last time we discussed movies.

Edit: Prince of Darkness isn't exactly 'good', but I think that one passes too.

It's uncanny timing that this topic should appear because I was just planning to start a thread about it myself. There's a whole site devoted to seeing which movies make the grade: http://bechdeltest.com/

The test isn't watertight. Women are a central presence in Inglourious Basterds but it doesn't pass the test because I'm pretty sure they never talk to each other. And for the most part the horror tendency to focus on female characters likely has more to do with exploiting their perceived vulnerability than any progressive desire to say something about the female experience.

One interesting thing I discovered through that site is that, while Miyazaki is very femme-friendly in general, Kiki's Delivery Service actually fails the reverse test: male characters never talk to each other except to talk about the female characters.

By the way, Alison Bechdel's comic book memoir Fun Home is fantastically good.

Seems to me that Bagdad Café is a pitch perfect Bechdel approved movie, no?

Also surprised this hasn't come up yet, but: Death Proof and Kill Bill pass the test too.

A lot of my favourite genres - war films of course, but then also to a lesser extent westerns, samurai movies, gangster flicks - are so explicitly homosocial that you're unlikely to even get past prerequiste #1, to be honest.

Jesus, man, she hurt you bad, didn't she?

I'm going to be thinking about movies that pass/don't pass this test all day.

I think the Bechdel Test is a wonderful tool, not necessarily because it's watertight, but because it does make us stop and think about the fact that you have to stop and think about this. The exclusion of women and women's stories is pervasive in film. Or, as the narrator in the video posted above says, "When I call it a systematic problem what I mean by this is that it's not just a few people here and there who don't like women or don't want women's stories told but that rather the entire industry is built upon creating films and movies that cater to and that are about men."

And, Cuchulain, you need to sit your ass down and think through some stuff. Seriously.

FACES passes.

Jane Austen never wrote a scene with men alone in a room talking because she didn't know how men talked without any women present.

Or maybe, maybe she was telling stories about women in a society where life was very sexually segregated?

Exactly. It's not a way of detecting whether a movie is sexist or not.

As for slasher movies, I highly reccomend the book "Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film" by Carol J. Clover. It's a really interesting and balanced take on the actual way women are portrayed in most slasher movies and how often (though obviously not always) those movies ARE feminist in their own right. What makes me appreciate it is that Clover deals in specific details about specific movies, not in generalizations as many other similar essays about slasher movies tend to. She also covers the revenge genre.

...though it can help.

I was just addressing the people pointing out all the movies that fall through the cracks in this thread, like Inglourious Basterds.

I gotcha. No worries.

One of the more enlightening ways to apply this test is not to popular movies-at-large, but to movies in which women do figure prominently as main characters. I'd wager that the majority of big films with multiple female leads are romantic comedies or dramas and lean heavily on dialogue about men.

The Andrea Dworkins and Gloria Steinems of the world are the voices that are represented in textbooks and in popular culture in general. I honestly do not see how a person can have a solid understanding of what sanity consists in and still identify somebody like Andrea Dworkin as sane. Even people who defend the extremists in the movement distance themselves from her batshit crazy ass.

For the record: Two of the three Star Wars prequels pass. Sith would've passed had they kept Bai Ling's scenes.

The entire OT fails.

Two out of 3 Matrices pass.

Also, to springboard off Paul C's post, despite the lack of emotional maturity, most anime passes this. Somewhere in there is a discussion about how this factors into the large female fanbase for the stuff.

We're having a conversation about women and film, something that doesn't happen nearly enough on CHUD. If you want to talk about the relationship of various controversial theorists to feminism, there's a feminism thread. If you want to work through your drama, you know full well where the various relationship threads are.

It was originally a comment on commentary on film, which pertains to the thread. Also, don't tell me what to do. Mostly, I just ignore you, but inserting yourself into my exchanges here is starting to get really, really fucking grating. ETA: I seriously don't get the entitlement issues that people from bumfuck nowhere seem to have.

It's funny, because that book feels like old news to me sometimes, but I'm consistently reminded that it's not public knowledge. I've been trying to get my mom to read it for years. She does NOT approve of my DVD collection. My round about point is that it is, indeed, required reading for film enthusiasts. The original Chainsaw, Last House on the Left, Halloween, Black Christmas and Friday the 13th all pass the test, for the right reasons.

I actually couldn't sleep last night because I was thinking about this so much. Most of Tarantino's films pass, but all his post-Pulp films have been incredibly female-centric. I also thought hard about the Star Wars prequels, and I'm not sure they pass, because I don't think Padme's handmaidens are given onscreen names, and I think she and Shmi always talk about Anakin.

Another film I think has already been overlooked by just about everyone is Hostel II, which is incredibly female friendly.

If there was a reverse Bechdel Test Suspiria would not pass.

Jesus, Cuch. You're talking to one of the most well-read feminists on the boards, which negates your argument. Also, I like you, I think you're a good guy, but you painting everyone between the coasts with this huge brush o' bigotry is tiresome. /christian bale derail

Movie that totally fails this test: Jerry Maguire. I'm sure there's a scene that makes the movie pass in there somewhere, but Bonnie Hunt's Round Table Of Divorced Women (read: man-haters) should nullify that scene.

This ties back into something I was thinking about as it relates to Wolcott's point about minorities in film. For the most part, if you have a film with a majority Black, or Asian, or Hispanic cast, you're going to probably get a few "haha white people are dumb" jokes, but you're also going to hear a lot of talk that isn't about white people. If you apply that same standard to movie whose cast is made up primarily of women, yes, the odds are pretty good that the movie will be about men. (Which is one of the places where Sex & The City: The Movie fails when compared to the original series.*) I'm trying to think of a movie that has a cast that is more than 50% women that would qualify.

Here's another question, possibly dumb: Does #3 have to apply to men, or is it relationships in general? For example, if you have a lesbian couple in a movie that talks to each other/other women about their relationship, does that mean the movie passes or fails the test?

Related to that: If you have a mother-daughter relationship in a movie where the mother and daughter don't talk about a guy, does that mean the movie passes the test, or does it have to be two women of the same age?

Not really related to that (but see below): If a conversation between two women starts out being about a man, but moves on to other things, does the movie pass? What if the 'man' is used as a way to discuss broader issues?

I'm not trying to play the semantics game, but those are just some things I thought about. What's interesting to me about the test/this discussion is how it's not necessarily a marker of quality -- a film can fail the test, but still be a masterpiece, just like a film can pass and not be very good. Woody Allen's name has come up a couple of times in this, but who are some other writers/filmmakers that consistently pass this test? (The name that first springs to mind is Joss Whedon, oddly, but maybe that's because I've been rewatching Buffy. In fact, I know it is.)

Finally, I don't want to make this all about me, but in my scripts, I've always gotten a lot of positive feedback about the way I write women (and that's something I'm proud of, for the most part), but in thinking about how the Bechdel test applies to my own work, I realize that I fail, big time. The film I directed was all about relationships, and even though there were a lot of scenes between women, the majority of them dealt with a man at least in part. (One of the characters was dealing with the death of her long-term boyfriend, and even though he was never seen on camera, he came up a lot.) The script I'm writing now has a large number of female characters with names and speaking parts, but there only scene that would pass this test is going to come at the end, and even then, it talks about men.

*Which I recently watched from beginning to end over a period of several months, and I was surprised how enjoyable -- and how not about 'get a man, keep a man' -- that show winds up being in the end.

The Thing! Epic fail!

I was just made aware of it a little bit ago, when Carly gave it to me as a gift. It's really good though.

Well, three of them do. Death Proof, Kill Bill Vol. 1, and Kill Bill Vol. 2. I thought Jackie Brown did but Cuch pointed out why it didn't.

I would really like to see a well-written feminist review on this movie from someone who's knowledgeable about horror films. I remember when it came out people were decrying it because it featured women being tortured in all of the awful ways that men were in the previous film. And that scene where *SPOILER* Heather Matarazzo is eviscerated strikes me as particularly perverse and troublesome for a feminist reading. I'm on the fence about it, but then again I'm not too well-read in the realm of feminist theory.

There's an old Creative Screenwriting podcast (that's the MP3 link) for Hostel II where Eli Roth goes into decent detail about his reading of the film, and why he considers it a feminist film. He also rages about the name 'torture porn' but still, he's a smart dude. I came away from that interview with a lot of respect for him.

Also, Patrick, where is the scene/s in Goodfellas where two women don't talk about a man? I'm wracking my brain for it, and I can't think of the scene/s.

And Altman, for all his faults, was great with women, both as characters and as actors.

Kind of funny how, according to that site, both Tomb Raider movies are absolute fails despite being some of the rare genre films that have female protagonists. Apparently Lara Croft is the only named female character in both.

Eli Roth's definitely a smart guy and not the knuckle-head frat boy that a lot of people peg him as, but when it comes to feminist readings of films, I'd rather hear it from an objective party.

Actually, now that I think about it, I HAVE heard that podcast, but the only part I remember is Quentin Tarantino telling him to write out his first drafts in long form. I believe the quote was "This pen is your antenna to God! You can't make art on a fucking computer!"

ETA: As for Goodfellas, the collection of wives talk about other wives, not just men. But now that I think about it, those characters aren't really named. So that one goes out the window too.

That's it. You are officially the left's equivalent of Glenn Beck. Welcome to the ignore you list, you ignorant fuck.

Yeah, I'm sure they're out there, but it was the first thing that came to mind, and I thought his take on it was close enough to what you were looking for to mention. And his interpretation is worth considering in the context of "well, does the film succeed at what he's trying to say wrt feminism?"

Good point. I think I'll have to track down that podcast again.

It's linked in my post!

My trek shall be a short one.

Interesting side note: Roth's dad is apparently a pretty famous psychiatrist.

Hostel II features only 2 on-screen female deaths I can recall, and both are perpetuated by other women. That doesn't make it automatically feminist friendly, but it's interesting to note. The male on female violence is either played for ironic laughs, or to build up to a decimation of the male character's machismo. I think the non-horror scenes are more interesting from a feminist perspective, because there is a beautiful femininity to the scenes, which even the archetype characters doesn't ruin.

Also, I forgot that Jackie Brown doesn't actually pass, but Tarantino has to get some major credit for the Jackie Brown character, and the female leads in IB, right?

Lynch films:

Eraserhead fails.
Elephant Man fails.
Dune passes (I think).
Blue Velvet fails.
Wild at Heart fails.
Fire Walk With Me passes.
Lost Highway fails.
Straight Story fails.
Mulholland Drive passes.
Inland Empire passes.

Except for True Lies (two women, both named, but the conversation's about Harry), every James Cameron film passes.

Who has a conversation in Avatar that isn't about Jake?

Helen never talks to Dana?