The Bechdel Test (& feminist film theory type bobbins)

Because I think I would actually rather talk about this than slash, really...

http://bechdeltest.com/

The movie test:
1. It has to have at least two women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man

(Yes, another spin-off from the 13 going on 30 thread, to talk about how the film industry at the moment handles females and their roles.)

p.s. I know nothing about film theory so bear with me

Partly because I just watched Contact and that just made me think "wow, this film really passes the Bechdel test with flying colours, and wow what a kick-ass character Dr Arroway is" etc.

But I'm too tired to talk about it properly, we can pick this up later. Or Plaxico and Horseshoe can talk about these themes sensibly while I sleep.

Yeah it is sad how few films pass the test...and as "Bechdel Test" site notes, the ones that pass are defs not nec. progressive about gender.

The original comic about it:

http://indianhomemaker.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/the-rule34585797_d7fd14edfb_b.jpg?w=459&h=618

I can't believe that site tried to claim that Inception passed. It SOOOOOO didn't, on all three levels.

I'd also like to add a sub-thread where we try to list really intelligent and good works of speculative fiction that pass the test and/or have kick-ass female protagonists because Contact felt like a rarity and I can't think of another one that isn't Alien.

Help me, please coz I'd really like some more.

do books count? I can think of a lot of books that do

but there just aren't that many good sci-fi films made, tbh

The Bechdel Test is really only for film. But actually, my memory is, yeah, there's quite a bit of fantasy fic that has strong female protagonists.

Did Contact lose buckets of money or something? Because (even though Elvis Telecom was saying on twitter that it was part of radio telescope porn genre) I don't recall seeing anything like it.

eXistenZ is an obvious answer tho

hmm wait no JJL is the only major female character in it

Yeah, i think the contemporary equivalent of Alien is the Resident Evil movies

haha what about that Aeon Flux movie

I think part of the problem here is most films that have more than one protagonist are either male/male or male/female. the lady duo model is pretty much nonexistent (it's hard to argue that that's even the case with Alien)

Hrmm, wondering how Contact got around that - actually obviously Jody Foster was the lead, but there was a strong ensemble cast around her, and one of the most important/pivotal characters in the government was female, hence the dynamic.

fincher fails egregiously except for panic room which presumably passes summa cum laude

mizoguchi prob does pretty well among the old timers

iirc that film was billed as Jodie Foster + Matthew McConaheyhey

in the most non-convincing lesbian+closeted gay guy romance ever imho

jodie foster must screen all scripts w/ a bechdel algorithm

I don't understand why that romance was tacked on. They should have just made him a full on Roman Catholic priest and had done with it.

it was really stupid and unnecessary - but gotta have a romance! it's Hollywood/Chinatown...

This test has ruined all film and television for me (or more accurately it has exposed to me how ruined film/TV is). I can't help running everything I see through the Bechdel machine and usually I just get angry.

I do think it's interesting that so many films fail, even ones that shouldn't be overly gendered. However, the test doesn't really say that much to me aside from this negative status - as Abbott and others have pointed out, the ones that pass are often just as terrible in their gendered viewpoints.

On the other hand, I can look over at my DVD collection and see a bunch of films that pass straight away:

Suspiria, Footprints on the Moon, Threads, Daisies (although these are young women/girls - I'm assuming girls count?), The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, etc etc...

Also, although I haven't seen it, with regards to newer film, Whip It has to be one, right? Although going back to the 'not necessarily progressive about gender' thing, I bet Sex and the City has at least one conversation that's not about a man, and that's just... ugh.

And right now on Film 4 is 28 Days Later, which has women talking about zombies.

I think part of the problem here is most films that have more than one protagonist are either male/male or male/female. the lady duo model is pretty much nonexistent.

part of the problem, definitely, but this shouldn't necessarily be a HUGE impediment -- all it'd take to pass the test is to have the female protagonist have even ONE substantive conversation with another woman about something other than the male protagonist

(the "about something other than a man" part of the test is the most fun part, especially since it nicely explains why romantic comedies don't count)

Yeah looking over my shelf the only ones I see right away that pass are Pleasantville, Human Highway, and...Silence of the Lambs.

(okay well TECHNICALLY, in romantic comedies, before the meet-cute, there might be some minor conversation between a woman and her quirky friend about her clothes or how she hates her job or something, but her need for a man will probably slip in there on some level)

(also in confessions of a shopaholic there MAY be one conversation about debt that does not immediately segue into a conversation about the dude)

It bums me out how little American animation passes. (IDK much about any other country's animation.)

http://bechdeltest.com/view/213/harold_and_kumar_go_to_white_castle/

I think horror is probably going to have a lot of films that pass, partly because horror films often have ensemble casts, and partly because there are monsters to talk about, so any romantic storyline tends to take place as part of fighting side-by-side, rather than agonising about it. Although I would be interested if anyone wanted to propose that horror was actually progressive gender-wise? It's so often painted as being one of the most conservative: women in constant peril etc. But it is possible that the trope was so well-known early on that it became more fun to subvert it earlier in film history than in less genred narratives. Or I could be talking shit in this here musing.

It is flipping me out that I have so many sketch comedy DVDs that are all men famous for dressing up as women & hardly any women to be found (Kids in the Hall & Monty Python, as you probably guessed)...OTOH I kind of feel like KITH had really real things to say about the female experience from time to time! Like Cathy & Kathy are very loving portraits of women that feel really true (to me). Do Kathy & Cathy pass the test even though they're played by men?

http://www.brucio.com/images/photos/P7_A.jpg

xpost -- there's a noted book about that, with horror films, though I can't remember the name -- as I understand it, it winds up suggesting that the women-in-peril thing actually led to the whole idea of the Last Girl, always the last survivor who successfully finishes off the monster/killer/whatever. so in that sense horror movies wind up doing well in terms of female protagonists with ultimate agency and victory and such.

ah, it's carol j. clover's men, women, and chainsaws -- she termed it the "final girl"

and is also the mother of music critic who I'm pretty sure used to post to ILX

-all- they talked about was guys! maybe that's just an inescapable part of the female experience
(xxp)

How about the haunting of hill house? Two women and they rarely talk about guys.

If i r rong, sorry, staying up way too late and brane melt

whoah, I wonder what the two women talked to one another about in Human Centipede

Yeah, I think the Clover position may be the case. Similarly, I remember the trope of 'the black guy' being killed first being referenced and subverted in horror from the '70s, which I'd consider much earlier than 'mainstream' film attempting to address its own prejudices.

Horror discussion reminds me: The Beyond passes the test.

Also, hahaha:
http://bechdeltest.com/view/978/the_human_centipede_%28first_sequence%29/

xpost, dammit!

Did Contact lose buckets of money or something? Because (even though Elvis Telecom was saying on twitter that it was part of radio telescope porn genre) I don't recall seeing anything like it.

Contact was a troubled production for a long time: industry troublemaker Peter Guber was backing the movie for awhile, then director George Miller was fired in the middle of pre-production, Coppola sued Sagan a couple days after Sagan's death, etc. and that black cloud seemed to follow it around. McConaughey + Foster was criticized, no one liked the use of Clinton's speech and the use of CNN's branding, conservatives (who already hated Sagan for being anti-nuke in the 80s) didn't like the Rob Lowe character, progressives/libertarians (who are a big part of SF fandom) didn't like the religion, and everyone had their own pre-conceived ideas of what Carl Sagan stood for without really understanding anything he said.

Ultimately I think that audiences just wanted to see Forrest Gump (Zemeckis' previous movie) over again. Sigh.

http://bechdeltest.com/view/829/birdemic/

Horror discussion reminds me: The Beyond passes the test.

So does The Descent

http://bechdeltest.com/view/379/the_descent/

This test has ruined all film and television for me

can sympathize with this! it was a nagging thought throughout There Will Be Blood. iirc no woman even gets a line in that movie. To a degree, I think that might be one of the points of the film, but still.

IDK much about any other country's animation

Hayao Miyazaki passes with aplomb. I haven't seen the animated version of Persepolis, but it should too. Pixar doesn't do as well with this as I wish they would.

Ha, yes, Miyazaki is great! He's forever got my heart for this & thousands of other reasons.

I can't remember if it literally passes the test, but Satoshi Kon's "Millennium Actress" is also great.

pretty sure persepolis does pass, although i haven't seen it since it was in theaters.

Persepolis definitely passes!

the runaways totally doesn't talk about "men," unless the girls are talking about how they despise fowley.

I know Kate doesn't like me posting to feminism threads because she's irrationally unforgiving towards naivety but I gotta say thinking about it in this way is blowing my mind slightly - so fucking many films I like almost certainly fail this test (although that great paean to veneral disease and heterosexuality, La Ronde, doesn't really have any men speaking to each other either)

love that the site totally misses the point of the test and like every thread devolves into "The presidents wife and that running-away lady said hello to each other"

xp
Ha, for Persepolis the movie not to pass would be an insane violation of the original book!

alcoleuthic, you might want to avoid the word "irrational" in the context of discussions about feminism (see also: hysterical, emotional, sentimental), there's a history there I don't think you mean to be evoking. But yeah, the Test is a great shortcut to seeing what it's like to just be erased by the dominant culture.

alcoleuthic, you might want to avoid the word "irrational" in the context of discussions about feminism

Somewhere on ILX (possibly the girl thread) recentlyish we discussed kids' fiction where you don't find out that the protagonist is female until near the end.

I am nursing a sudden urge to make young boys read those books, if only to see if they think the protagonist is cool for 190 of 200 pages and then suddenly decide she's like totally lame, what did you make me read this GURL book for, etc

this sometimes happened with Metroid iirc , though I was never good enough at nintendo to get to the reveal. I also read the babysitters club books...when I was 14. my mom asked me to read the first one to screen them as garbage/okay for my little sister and i got hooked

Somewhere on ILX (possibly the girl thread) recentlyish we discussed kids' fiction where you don't find out that the protagonist is female until near the end.

There's a pretty cool Finnish fantasy book in which the protagonist's gender is never defined (Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns, so it's possible to write a third person narrative this way). Based on the social roles s/he adopts in the story, at first you might think the protagonist is male, but later on s/he feels more like a female, and then at some point you realize the books takes place on some distant planet where gender doesn't work at all like it does on ours.

plz to explain finnish pronouns

i'm familiar with people inventing sets of gender-neutral pronouns but i didn't realise that there were languages where they already existed. on the other hand i probably shouldn't be surprised by that.

this sometimes happened with Metroid iirc , though I was never good enough at nintendo to get to the reveal.

Yeah, it was the big plot twist at the end of the first Metroid, because everyone assumed that Samus, the action hero with the robot suit and big gun, was male. Though they somewhat messed up the subversive nature of this reveal, because it isn't enough that in the end Samus takes off her helmet and shows her long hair and obviously feminine face, she actually strips down to her underwear so you can see her boobs and all...

oh damn, I had no memory of that!

thomp, you might want to look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutrality_in_languages_with_grammatical_gender

plz to explain finnish pronouns

It's very simple: Finnish has just one third person singular pronoun, which is gender neutral.

This actually sometimes causes unintentional gender confusion with Finnish translations of foreign books, because in languages like English the writers often rely on the pronouns to tell the reader whether a character is male or female... But in Finnish editions, the translator can either choose to inject some gendered nouns to make things clear (like translating "she said" to "the woman said"), or just use the third person pronoun as it is and assume the reader will deduce the gender from other clues (usually from the character's name).

I remember reading several translated books where at first I had no idea what gender a character was, whereas someone reading the English edition would have known it right from the start. I guess it shows how gendered our world is that usually this kind of ambiguity sticks out, and makes the reader want to deduce a character's gender instead of just enjoying the confusion.

"he actually strips down to her underwear so you can see her boobs and all..."

i'm with rob. did this actually happen? all i remember is wondering who justin bailey was.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/Samus_at_the_end_of_Metroid.png

Here's a better screengrab:

http://chrisdlugosz.net/x/metroid_ending.png

failure of internet to cough up an animated gif exposes the failure of the entire project, imo

Despite her standard attire, a full-body armored suit, there is a scantily-clad Samus at the end of each game, almost as a reward for the player.

http://wiimedia.ign.com/wii/image/article/111/1112861/samus-through-the-ages-20100816023611860.jpg

http://wiimedia.ign.com/wii/image/article/111/1112861/samus-through-the-ages-20100816023628079.jpg

So yeah, a nice idea in general, but kinda undermined by the cheesecake.

isn't her hair purple? something's fishy about this. maybe these are hacked copies like the gay sim helicopter hack?

gay sim helicopter hack?

IIRC the bikini pic only appeared once you beat the game twice. When you beat the game for the first time, you get image on the left here:

http://metroid-database.com/features/2d_endings.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter#Controversy

I actually had to get a gay hack for Jade Empire. While it is possible for both a male and a female character to pursue a homosexual romance, which plays out almost the same as a straight one, the crucial scene where the two characters admit their love to each other fades to black just before they kiss, whereas a straight couple is shown kissing. The gay kiss was actually coded to the game but censored at some point later on, so the hack allows you to see it.

so this is where feminist film theory has led us

Well, gay kissing is fair enough because there's a certain symmetry if the game begins and ends with slash.

But you've all gone a bit Daily Mail in here with the "isn't it terrible that this game presents a 'strong' 'female' 'character' as a main role, then strips her down to cheesecake in an unreasonable bikini" - while taking this opportunity to display about half a dozen pics of said bikini.

Well, gay kissing is fair enough because there's a certain symmetry if the game begins and ends with slash.

Don't get what this refers to...?

But you've all gone a bit Daily Mail in here with the "isn't it terrible that this game presents a 'strong' 'female' 'character' as a main role, then strips her down to cheesecake in an unreasonable bikini" - while taking this opportunity to display about half a dozen pics of said bikini.

Hah, I posted them because some people didn't seem to believe the underwear thing, but I guess you're right. I'm not sure anyone today actually finds that kind of 2D sprite cheesecake titillating, though, but I guess they did in the 80s/early 90s? (When I played the first Metroid I was too young to care about such things, so I don't remember the reveal causing any other reaction than "Omigod, it's a girl!")

Duh, for "game" read "thread."

Note to self: do not post to ILX before finishing tea.

Here's another girls v boys thing that happens: boys are expected to read fiction less than girls, so in order to get them reading *at all*, publishers and educators are encouraged to cater to them with very easy reading level books about sports with only male characters (pretty much) in them, or non-fiction books of Facts About Things, like baseball, or how buildings are built, or famous inventions...this kind of thing.

I don't know if I think that's good or bad, or both--I mean books about inventions are p cool. But there's a strong belief that those are the kind of books boys will read more than anything else, lest other things prove to be secretly "girly."

― drawn to them like a moth toward a spanakopita (Laurel), Wednesday, February 22, 2012 3:16 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

http://i.imgur.com/o4wKM.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/icwls.jpg

I read so many matt christopher books as a kid, because I liked baseball. they were shitty books, I knew they were shitty at the time, but they were about baseball!

I don't think I read a book that wasn't about football (unless made to by school) until I was 18 tbh

Was the subtext of that last book "That kid sucks at the communal experience of Team-based sports that have an element of personal achievement"?

Or would it be "hray, he plays for our side!"

But who is the mysterious Mr. Baroth?

Will we ever know?

I think I read all the Matt Christopher books.

Those and the Boxcar Children series.

Can you tell us who the mysterious Mr Baroth is, then?

I'd read them myself, but, y'know, I'm a gurl.

Does the Boxcar Children series really code as male or female? I certainly read that one.

I think I read some of the baseball books because I was a tomboy who loved baseball. Then I realized reading about baseball was very boring to me.

But the kid could only hit homers!!! Exciting!

It seemed like most kids baseballs books went that way? The boy is a new kid or unpopular in some way, but then everyone finds out that he has Natural-like baseball abilities and then he's beloved and popular.

loool Matt Christopher, the man with two first names.

hmm, whereas in real life they find he has these natural abilities and they all go off him for being too good 4 the likes of them, etc.

For a brief period in middle school I was really into baseball-themed mystery novels, like

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51mA3AaswEL._SL500_AA300_.jpghttp://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515grZJyDdL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

I think the first one was only available at the library in Large Print format, which in retrospect makes sense given the likely demographic for baseball-themed mysteries.

http://i.imgur.com/o4wKM.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/38/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%90%E1%BB%A9c_self-immolation.jpg

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/07/sweden_introduces_a_gender_rating_system_for_films/

It turns out that passing this test is good for business

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-dollar-and-cents-case-against-hollywoods-exclusion-of-women/

http://www.vulture.com/2014/12/cheryl-strayed-wild-movie.html

Witherspoon kept those promises. As the star of Wild, she is grubby, unglamorous, and convincing. As a producer, she delivers a film that passes the famous Bechdel Test: At least two women talk to each other about something other than a man. In fact, it also passes a kind of Advanced Bechdel Test: A non-crazy woman talks to herself about something other than a man. Watching it, I realized that the closest analogue to Wild might be Gravity, the 2013 Alfonso Cuarón film. In it, Sandra Bullock plays Ryan Stone, a scientist on a NASA space shuttle who must find her way back to Earth after a debris strike destroys the shuttle and kills her colleagues. Gravity is fiction while Wild is a memoir, but both offer the experience — extraordinarily rare in popular culture — of watching a woman teach herself how to get from A to B under very difficult circumstances and entirely alone.

Wild is very direct about its feminism, which is nice. As a movie, though, it's strictly passable.

My wife and I were recently watching the new Star Wars cartoon show, Rebels, and I explained the Bechdel Test to her because, amazingly, the show passes it.

Just watched Sarah Jacobson's I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993) and thought it was incredible. Unapologetically hate-filled, feminist underground cinema, made when she was 21 and clearly with zero budget. It's technically a short, but at 27 minutes it's more like the best television pilot ever made. The punk soundtrack is great too.

Incidentally it does not pass the Bechdel Test, but then it doesn't so much need to.

Are there any good essays/discussions on how the male gaze (as a specific thing, not just general patriarchy/sexism) impacts on movies about gay women?

Female-led films outperform at box office for 2014-2017

Films that passed the Bechdel test - where two female characters have a conversation about something other than a man - made more revenue at the box office at every budget level than films that failed the test.

Neckbeards across the internet are currently at full-bristle.

A fact is a fact, fellas. Put enough of them in one place and you start to see an outline of reality.