As a humourless lesbian feminist, I strongly support seeing more women represented in movies. I talk about it constantly to friends, family, colleagues, strangers on the Internet, strangers at bus stops, and intelligent-looking dogs. I want nothing more than to live in a world where I can visit the cinema at any time and see a wide array of interesting and diverse and well-rounded women’s stories, rather than movies where women are a side character or an afterthought. One of the predominant tools that people have used in attempting to combat the overload of movies with a male protagonist, or at least to make people aware of the status quo, has historically been the Bechdel Test.
The test, pulled from a 1985 comic strip by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, asks the audience to note if a movie has: (1) two female named characters that (2) talk to each other (3) about something other than a man. If it does, it passes the Bechdel test. If not, it fails as badly as my attempt to get a straight answer from intelligent-looking dogs. During this year’s Adelaide Film Festival, organisers decided to place emphasis on the Bechdel Test before screenings of films.
The Bechdel Test serves as a decent conversation starter and perspective changer. There is absolutely a systemic issue when it comes to representation of women in cinema, both in front and behind the camera. The Bechdel Test is a great tool to make people start thinking about what they are watching, and why they unthinkingly accept the existing state of affairs. There are still too many movies that fail, and applying the test across cinema generally to show how uneven it is can help clearly exhibit that there is a problem.
We shouldn’t want to move on from mostly seeing movies about straight white men just to have a few of them replaced with movies about straight white women.
The test falls down when you use it at a place like before movies at a film festival. Where it becomes practically useless is when you begin to apply it to individual films with a focus that doesn’t allow for a wider scope. It genuinely tells you nothing about a movie except that women exist in some form in it (which is always preferable). Applying the test to individual movies and making a judgement on the movie based on the outcome can neutralise a lot of the power the test actually holds. A movie can be about many women and still be a misogynist pile of garbage committed to film. But, it meets the criteria of the Bechdel and can get a pass. People who make movies need to only make tiny adjustments to make their movie pass the test, without actually featuring women in a more positive way, or addressing the core issue of why so many movies are still driven by (and made) by white men.
Centering the conversation about film on the test reduces a larger discussion of inequality to numbers, and allows the dialogue to remain superficial without taking on any of the deeper or more complex issues. It allows a box to be checked or crossed against a film title, and for everyone to move on. The test also doesn’t take into account the representation of queer women, trans women, or women of colour, which are important issues that need to be a big part of the conversation in 2015. We shouldn’t want to move on from mostly seeing movies about straight white men just to have a few of them replaced with movies about straight white women.
At the end of the day, there has to be a better and more productive way to have these discussions about film and representation than relying on the Bechdel Test. It has served as an easy way to open a dialogue, but now it’s time for the sequel.
