The Bechdel Test

[The Almighty Aardvark]

As other people have said, the test isn't supposed to be a judgment of how how well an individual movie represents women. Really, a lot of movies that pass it probably do by dumb luck. Overall it shows just how male-centric hollywood is. You can't play the "there's a smaller female audience" excuse because practically everyone watches movies. There's the same sized audience, and for some reason the female representation in movies is still far below men's.

This page does a good job of outlining it http://bechdeltest.com/statistics/

So does that make me misogynistic?

Of course not, not passing the bechdel test doesn't make a movie misogynisic. Even if it did, you can like movies despite problems they may have without somehow harboring mysoginistic views

 

[lacktheknack]

Lemme apply it to my favorite games...

Mirror's Edge: Faith and Kate have a conversation about why Kate has been framed. PASS.

Tomb Raider III: Lara Croft and Sofia Leigh have a conversation about potential career choices (man, that reads weirdly) that results in an artifact vs pistol fight. PASS

Geneforge: If the player character is a female, there's dozens of conversations to be had with important women in the game. PASS-ISH.

Rayman 2: Uhhhhhhh... Ly the fairy and Uglette exist, but do not converse. FAIL.

Myst series: There's never more than one woman onscreen at any time. FAIL.

That went better than I thought it would.

 

[electric_warrior]

It's a crap test. It's entirely possible for a film to have a strong, realistic female protagonist, who might be a president or military commander or something, who never has any meaningful interaction with another female character about anything other than a man. Yet, a silly chick flick where everyone just wants to get married to a nice handsome man could have a brief conversation about tampons between two women and pass the test.

There is no way to quantitatively measure something as qualitative as the role someone plays in a film.

 

[Images]

Like the guy says in the last 30 seconds or so.

The guy is Mark Kermode, pretty much the UK's top reviewer. His weekly podcast is ace. Got to see him live last week with a full orchestra performing his favourite movie themes and an on-stage interview with Jeremy Irons.

I think the rule should only really apply as a guideline to a film that does have multiple female characters. I think criteria one, that you need more than one female is kind of silly to stick to. If I'm setting my drama entirely in a ditch in the middle of no man's land in World War 1, I doubt many female characters will turn up naturally. However I think the rule draws a point that female characters should have their own ideas beyond the adulation of the male characters. This doesn't mean (as silly Sarkeesian thinks) that every female has to have their own action and carry out a mission themselves to flesh it out, but that female characters (to be made 3 dimensional) should be given human WANTS and THOUGHTS beyond just men.

 

[Images]

Lemme apply it to my favorite games...

Mirror's Edge: Faith and Kate have a conversation about why Kate has been framed. PASS.

Tomb Raider III: Lara Croft and Sofia Leigh have a conversation about potential career choices (man, that reads weirdly) that results in an artifact vs pistol fight. PASS

Geneforge: If the player character is a female, there's dozens of conversations to be had with important women in the game. PASS-ISH.

Rayman 2: Uhhhhhhh... Ly the fairy and Uglette exist, but do not converse. FAIL.

Myst series: There's never more than one woman onscreen at any time. FAIL.

That went better than I thought it would.

Not sure if it works with games. Games are USUALLY driven solely by one character, only seeing things from their perspective. If they're male and don't drop in on a conversation between two other female characters, it won't happen.

 

[Olas]

What about movies that are set in time periods where women weren't supposed to speak up? Would you blame them for not having vocal female characters even though it's simply a reality of that period?

What about war movies? The US military used to be men only.

 

[Thaluikhain]

It's a crap test. It's entirely possible for a film to have a strong, realistic female protagonist, who might be a president or military commander or something, who never has any meaningful interaction with another female character about anything other than a man. Yet, a silly chick flick where everyone just wants to get married to a nice handsome man could have a brief conversation about tampons between two women and pass the test.

There is no way to quantitatively measure something as qualitative as the role someone plays in a film.

Probably why the test has nothing to do with it, as explained in that clip and several times already in this thread. Again, it is not about whether a movie is good and bad in of itself, it is about noticing a trend in movies as a whole.

Similarly:

I think the rule should only really apply as a guideline to a film that does have multiple female characters. I think criteria one, that you need more than one female is kind of silly to stick to. If I'm setting my drama entirely in a ditch in the middle of no man's land in World War 1, I doubt many female characters will turn up naturally.

What about movies that are set in time periods where women weren't supposed to speak up? Would you blame them for not having vocal female characters even though it's simply a reality of that period?

What about war movies? The US military used to be men only.

Missing the point. It's not about individual movies, it's about trends.

Yes, a particular historical movie set in a time and place where there wouldn't be women shouldn't have women. That has nothing to do with how movies overall tend to portray women,

 

[Images]

What about movies that are set in time periods where women weren't supposed to speak up? Would you blame them for not having vocal female characters even though it's simply a reality of that period?

What about war movies? The US military used to be men only.

All good points why it doesn't work. Didn't want to add a poll in the end since I thought it takes away from discussion.

 

[Souplex]

Men In Black (The greatest movie ever made) fails. The reason it fails though is because for the most part, people's genders are irrelevant.

 

[Helmholtz Watson]

Like the guy says in the last 30 seconds or so. It's not about whether the movie is good or not, it's about pointing out the limited female roles.

As someone else has mentioned above, though, try a gender swapped version of that test, and almost no major movies would fail.

A movie with nothing but male characters is just a movie, a movie with nothing but female characters is pretentious feminist waffle.

Hardly, Hanna was a great movie [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voPBcugOZPU] and the cast was overwhelmingly female and the male characters are morally gray at best. Nobody in their right wind would accuse this movie of being "pretentious feminist waffle".

 

[Thaluikhain]

Nobody in their right wind

But what about everyone else?

(Alright, might be being overly flippant here)

 

[Uhura]

As others have already mentioned the test is mainly useful when analyzing general trends in filmmaking. I wish more people* understood how the test actually works.

*(=more people in general, most people in this thread seem to understand how the test works)

 

[Harrowdown]

The test isn't intended to be the final say on a film's representation of women.Yes, it doesn't apply to war films, etc. Yes, a film can technically pass whilst still failing to accurately represent women. Not the point. The point is to address a broad failure on the part of the movie industry to successfully and consistently represent women as three-dimensional human beings. Far too many films fail the test because the people writing them aren't able to conceive of a female character with motivations beyond romance, or because so many films include only a token female amongst an entirely male cast.

 

[direkiller]

Now, we're all on the same page, what do you think about the Bechdel test and film? Can you think of a better test for the same purpose?

I think it was good for a joke, but a serious test it is not.
Any test Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS can pass but Star wars can't should not be considered a benchmark for judging if a film is sexist.


"Can you think of a better test?"

I can try:

Is there a reason this charter is a woman?
If the answer is something along the lines of boobs then the movie fails.
If you genuinely can't answer the movie gets a pass with a gold star

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

Conversation is the best way to characterize anyone in any form of storytelling. What the conversation is about doesn't freaking matter. How the conversation is handled should be how the test should go.

Is the conversation in general only there as a way to progress the romance plot? It should be an indication that the women play little role, make your opinions.

Does the conversation happen to be about the romance, but it also has a lot of good lines and ways to identify the personalities of the women? Then good on the movie, make your opinions anyway, because the movie still could blow when it comes in the women department.

And please don't talk sexism here, I'm getting annoyed.

 

[faefrost]

It's hardly a catch-all rule, but it's useful enough in illustrating broad problems with representations of women.

If you're trying to use it as a criteria for in-depth analysis though, you're probably gonna have a bad time. I'm pretty sure Black Widow wouldn't pass it in The Avengers, but there's nothing wrong with her characterisation. (The poster is a different matter, admittedly.)

and yet weirdly the Thor movie passes the test. Go figure?

 

[Woodsey]

It's hardly a catch-all rule, but it's useful enough in illustrating broad problems with representations of women.

If you're trying to use it as a criteria for in-depth analysis though, you're probably gonna have a bad time. I'm pretty sure Black Widow wouldn't pass it in The Avengers, but there's nothing wrong with her characterisation. (The poster is a different matter, admittedly.)

and yet weirdly the Thor movie passes the test. Go figure?

Thor was able to have a somewhat peculiar plot-structure (not quite in medias res, but close), as far as I remember - The Avengers didn't really have time for that. Once Thor lands I'm pretty sure that that's that for Natalie Portman and Kat Dennings. Still nothing wrong with their characterisations, though.

 

[Helmholtz Watson]

Nobody in their right wind

But what about everyone else?

(Alright, might be being overly flippant here)

Come on now, even you have to admit that they did a decent job with that movie and at no point were any of the female characters stereotypically "weak". The only female character that people might not like is the little British girl, but even that's just being really picky.

 

[RariShyZealot]

As far as I'm able to figure out, the Bechdel test was supposed to show how many movies don't do the thing in the test...
All I had to add.

Well... besides this:
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/1459/bechdels-law
Felt it was appropriate.

 

[electric_warrior]

It's a crap test. It's entirely possible for a film to have a strong, realistic female protagonist, who might be a president or military commander or something, who never has any meaningful interaction with another female character about anything other than a man. Yet, a silly chick flick where everyone just wants to get married to a nice handsome man could have a brief conversation about tampons between two women and pass the test.

There is no way to quantitatively measure something as qualitative as the role someone plays in a film.

Probably why the test has nothing to do with it, as explained in that clip and several times already in this thread. Again, it is not about whether a movie is good and bad in of itself, it is about noticing a trend in movies as a whole.

But if it cannot say anything about the merits of the film itself, what can it say about movies as a whole? If you want to judge the portrayal of women in films in terms of raw numbers, then the Bechdel test is a good test, but if you actually want to look at the way they are portrayed and the way they act, then it isn't at all good. So yeah, it illustrates trends, but very vague trends that aren't all that useful.

Again, a series of serious dramas and films with strong female protagonists could fail the test while a series of fluffy romcoms could pass despite being distinctively more patronising and lacking in positive role models. The bechdel test can tell us how many women were talking to other women, but not the heft of their role or how important they were to the plot. As such, any conclusions you can draw from it are pretty hollow.