Friday, December 22, 2017
Creating The Next Bechdel Test
FiveThirtyEight: The Bechdel-Wallace Test — more commonly abbreviated to the Bechdel Test — asks two simple questions of a movie: Does it have at least two named female characters?1 And do those characters have at least one conversation that is not about a man? A surprising number of films fail the test. Although the test is punchy and has become pervasive, it doesn’t address the core inequalities in Hollywood films.
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This article is much needed right now while Hollywood is on its kick where it's willing to uplift diverse people because they are worried those people will stop watching their films. The way that the article was formatted and broken up into the separate tests which were then broken up into movies, represented by circles, that passed and didn't pass was extremely clear, simple, and sleek.
I think it says quite a lot that none of the tests were passed by every movie. Admittedly the new tests that were being created were "harder" to achieve than the original test that Alison Bechdel made. However, a third of the movies failed a test as simple ad the Bechdel test, which just requires them to have two female characters who are named and have some personality outside of the male characters.
I think what I would like to see as a rather diverse person is more inclusion of people who are not men or women in film and I feel that that was left out of this conversation. Though I think that it is very important that women are more uplifted and well treated in Hollywood, I think that only way that marginalized groups can rise to the top and tell our stories is if we all band together and overturn the oppressive powers at hand. In a way, I think that's what the combination of all these tests tries to demonstrate.
This article is entirely correct: there cannot be one Bechdel test to validate films as representing women honestly and fairly. For one thing, the standard Bechdel test fails to recognize that most of the women in movies are white, straight, and cis, therefore leaving women of color and of the LGBTQ+ community out of Hollywood’s equation for representing all women. Secondly, as the article states, the standard test does not look at who is behind the scenes in these movies, which is just as important as who is on camera. You cannot represent an entire group of people on camera with authenticity when you have someone not of that group in an administrative position behind the camera directing it. The world needs to update their “Bechdel tests” to recognize Hollywood’s lack of diversity in ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and so many other things. Hollywood does not even represent female body types as they are reflected in the world’s female population. There seems to be this small box for which women are allowed to succeed in film, and it needs to grow to represent all, not just some, of us.
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