The Bechdel Test

Imagine yourself sitting in a theatre in the 1980s, watching a newly released movie. It's your weekly or monthly escape, you need movies to clear your head from the shackles of the oppressive reality that you call life. But after watching films back to back, you start to see a pattern. There are not that many female characters, and if there are, they don't have names. Then, you find a female character that has a name, but she barely has lines. Fast forward, you found 2 female characters. Do they have names? Do they talk? To each other? What do they talk about? Are they important in the movie or are they one-dimensional that lacks depth and clearly written to be an accessory to men?

These were questions cartoonist Alison Bechdel asked in 1985. She was publishing her weekly comic, but a certain joke has changed the cultural discussions of women in film. She included a test that would later be named after her in the comic, highlighting the prevalence of male-dominated narratives and the need for greater diversity and representation of women in storytelling. 

The Bechdel test includes three rules:

1) The movie should have at least two female characters.

2) These two female characters have a conversation with each other.

3) This conversation should be about ANYTHING other than a man.

To name a few, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars trilogy, most Tarantino movies, most Christopher Nolan movies, and even animations from Pixar fail to pass the test due to their focus on male characters and male-dominated narratives. The rules are too easy, but even half of the movies that were nominated for Academy Awards for 89 years can not pass the test. How sad is that?

It is also important to highlight that the test doesn't measure quality, nor does it show how feminist a film is. It's an observation, a simple question that most people are too blind to ask and even realize. It is a call to show gender inequality in fiction. You can not test if two men in a movie talk to each other because they simply don't shut up. You can not test if two men talk about something other than women because they do. They shapeshift, they become police officers, teachers, superheroes, and office workers while women are mostly welcomed for the roles of their mothers, lovers, and daughters, they are dependent on other characters, over-emotional, and confined to low-status jobs when compared to enterprising and ambitious male characters. Women suffer at the expense of these misrepresentations.

The test's inspiration "A Room of One's Own.'' explains this world-view in a better way.

Virginia Woolf writes: ‘’But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. 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...’’

Women are forced from a young age to be male-centered, it is seen as a natural thing for women to think about men, talk about men, and live their lives according to the taste of men. You're always somebody's something, you're a woman whereas men are humans, and whenever you behave as a human, you're imitating the male. You're a mother. You're a daughter. You're a wife. It is a patriarchial idea that that's all a woman can be.

One concept that greatly contributes to both the misconceptions and overall portrayal of women in fiction is the male gaze. Coined by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, the male gaze refers to the way women are visually presented in cinema, predominantly through a heterosexual male lens. This gaze objectifies women, reducing them to their physical appearance or sexuality to satisfy male viewers' desires and to further appease and empower men. Women are shown as objects to be looked at, possessions to be saved. Anything that happens to a woman is presented in the male character's reaction to that event.

To have more movies that pass the test, we need more female directors as they play a pivotal role in reshaping the portrayal of women on screen. When women are behind the camera, they bring diverse perspectives that challenge stereotypes and often provide more authentic, and multifaceted portrayals of female characters. As a viewer, it is also up to us to actively support content that portrays women in realistic ways which can help challenge the film and television industry.

''By encouraging and praising positive female portrayals in film, the standards of the film and television industries will gradually evolve and listen to their viewers, and women will finally have characters that they can genuinely identify with. As the stereotypes of women collapse, the true fluidity of femininity will prevail. Thus, creating media that portrays the truth.'' (Rachael Garland)