Movies: The Bechdel Test

I’d wager that Disney has done pretty well with this… Mary Poppins, Sound of Music, Little Mermaid, Princess Diaries, Cinderella, the Incredibles…

Woody Allen movies would pass very well.

Little Mermaid? Off the top of my head, when? Unless you count Ariel and Ursula’s meeting to be about their bargain and not about Eric. (Which it both is and isn’t.)

And Brave, come to think of it.

Here’s a list of the movies that pass.

I check most of those named here and they all pass except Jerry McGuire and Coal Miner’s Daughter, though I quibble with that one. I didn’t check all Woody Allen movies but Annie Hall is on there.

But, as Zsofia (and most of you) points out, it’s not about evaluating individual movies, it’s about becoming aware of how women are portrayed overall.

And Frozen, certainly. Most of the movie deals with the relationship between two sisters.

I wonder how long until some body makes a movie where the only conversation two women have is about the test. :wink:

Also, I don’t think talking to female children should count.

I generally roll my eyes at the Bechdel test, mainly because it’s not unusual for movies targeted to women to have poorly drawn male characters, either.

However, I was watching The Cave on cable the other day (mainly because Piper Perabo and Lena Heady are in it, and it made me nostalgic for Imagine Me & You) and this movie was almost comically awful in terms of the Bechdel test. It could be held up as exhibit A in how casual and ingrained it is to have poorly drawn female characters.

Yeah, and why aren’t war movies full of platoons of women, and why aren’t mafia movies about groups of women, and…

Well, it depends on the war, of course. Certainly in superhero or sci-fi movies set in imaginary cultures, there’s no a priori reason why there couldn’t be lots of female soldiers and/or action heroes.

I think the practical reason from the filmmakers’ point of view is that male viewers just are less comfortable or less ready to identify with female main characters in action movies. There can be a female sidekick or two, as long as they’re hot-looking, but the action has to center on male characters.

There’s also the fact that in terms of any society, it’s smarter to send your males to war instead of your females because males are more expendable.

Someone added a corollary to the test. The female conservation must be at least 60 seconds. Not sure if it that’s included in lists of which movies pass and which don’t

Why (in your view) are men more expendable than women?

A woman has to survive for a couple of years to guarantee a viable child (pregnancy plus breastfeeding). A man has to survive only about 7 minutes.

What does that have to do with expendability?

Well you’ll note that most war movies are anti-war films (at least, these days) yet they’re almost all about soldiers. The best anti-war movie I know is Grave of the Fireflies, which is about the victims of war. Making an anti-war film about soldiers makes as much sense as making an anti-genocide movie about the train engineers who were transporting people around. But, presumably, there’s viewed as being a big market for male viewers, so everything has to have lots of explosions, fighting, badassery, and brotherly spirit despite how little sense it makes.

And you could probably make a decent movie that’s just as hard-hitting and ruthless as mafia films if you made a movie about a brothel and the lead madame coking her girls up, poisoning the competition, etc. You might not get as many gunshots, but more nudity, so not a bad trade-off.

Whaaaaaaaat the fuuuuuuuuuuck?

I’d be willing to bet that Dredd passes. Neither of the females in the movie were girly wallflowers, and I seriously doubt any conversation between the murderous Ma-Ma or the psychic rookie cop involved talking about boys.

Here’s one problem with tokenism, whether it’s women, minorities, whatever: that token has to be all things for all people. If the lone female character is too bossy, bitchy, smart, dumb, whatever, someone will complain that the show thinks all women are X. Writers often react by making them bland and inoffensive, which is no fun. If you have two of that token they’ll often play up opposite character types. Better, but still not quite there.

But in a show where there’s a lot of X you’re free to introduce tons of gradations.

Bateman’s principle.

100 men + 1 woman = 1 baby
100 women + 1 man = 100 babies

Women are the bottleneck.

Doesn’t matter much nowadays, but certainly in the not too distant past throwing women away was societal suicide. Let the men die in the wars and mines or hunting or whatever.

But yeah, doesn’t really stop you from having an Amazon army in fantasy fiction or a bunch of female pilots or whatever, aside the audience not buying it.

Oh, yes… I fully appreciate the biology of human reproduction. I just question people who bring it up to justify the expendability of one gender over another in the time frame that any of us have been alive.