How often do you watch a movie and find that the female character roles simply exist to glorify or just support the male actor’s character? How frequently do you walk out of a theatre and think maybe it would have been better if the actress and other female actors were given a little more importance and their characters had more essence? Or do you not think about it at all and just appreciate the movie as it is?
Either way, make no mistake but what we can’t deny is the gender inequality and the underrepresentation of women in the fictitious world and sadly in most of the movies we love.
So, what is the Bechdel test, and how does it even matter?
The Bechdel test was named after the American cartoonist Allison Bechdel and it first appeared in the 1985 comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For”. Although it was named after Allison, it is important to note that she gave the credit to her friend Liz Wallace and the writings of Virginia Woolf.
How to check if a movie has passed the Bechdel Test?
- The movie should have at least two named women in it,
- who talk to each other at some point,
- about something other than a man.
That’s it, it is so simple really, and yet 40 percent of the movies still fail the test, hitting us hard with the words of Virginia Woolf.
“All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that…”
Virginia Woolf
Here the question arises as to why we are making it all a big deal and why we seem to bother so much about how some test says that women characters do not have as much importance as men. The thing is, even when these movies are still works of fiction, they always played a part in shaping society in some way or the other. It’s a shame that to date most of them can’t show us a single scene where women talk about anything besides a man, that is if they even can show any two named women in the first place.
The Avengers, The Social Network, The Lord of The Rings Trilogy, The Avatar; now these are a few popular movies that failed the Bechdel test, some of them don’t even meet at least 2 of the 3 criteria.
But that being said, the Bechdel test is not the only factor to consider because many films that have great women characters have failed it and so many that had sexist plots passed it. ‘Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind’ being an example of the former, and ‘Weird Science’ being an example of the latter. It is also interesting to note that the movies that generally pass the test receive better reviews and ROIs compared to the ones that don’t.
The point here is not that the movies which pass the Bechdel test are the only ones that deserve to be watched because it does not aim to make it a “social issue”. It just asks us to start adding more essence to the female characters by acknowledging this underrepresentation. The Bechdel test is a way to understand and bring more light to the female roles which will indeed end up adding more meaningful texture to the complete film.