We all know that Hollywood has problems with sexism. What you might not have known is now there’s a way to quantify it.
Maarten Sap, a PHD student at UW, created a power and agency analysis website for one of his projects on natural language processing. In his website, you can select any Hollywood movie of your choice from the drop-down chart, and see how well power and agency between male and female characters are balanced in narration and in dialogue. It is an important tool to see how gender roles in film affect the portrayed authority and characteristics among characters.
We have selected two well-known Hollywood movies to do an in-depth case study on the media portrayal of gender.
1. True Grit: This movie is centered around the journey of a strong-willed 14 year-old girl named Mattie Ross, who seeks revenge and justice for her father’s murderer on the wild west frontier. This movie was Hailee Steinfeld’s first Hollywood film debut, and her portrayal of our feisty young heroine Mattie won her an Oscar nomination for Best Female Supporting Role at just 14 years old. Let’s look at how well True Grit fares in our power and agency analysis.
What does this mean? In the Power in Narration graph, we see that men has more higher power than women (although women is not so far off). Higher power indicates that men are more aggressive in taking action, having more control and authority during interactions. Interestingly, when we look at the Power in Dialogue, we see that men and women have the same power. What is also intriguing is the fact that men have more submissiveness than women. Submissiveness indicates how many times a character is put in a subordinate position ( when the character apologizes to another person, for example). A movie can have both higher power and higher submissiveness in the same gender; it simply means that the particular gender is involved in more action throughout the whole movie.
Below is the presence statistics, comparing how many words that are spoken by or written about females and males. Since Mattie is the only main female character in the movie, Hailee’s speaking time is largely dominated by her male co-stars. What is heartening from comparing all the numbers is that, even though women’s statistics are squashed by the male presence, the director and filmmakers still tried to give Mattie/Hailee a strong voice and authority over the course of the movie.
What is the Bechdel Test?
By definition, the Bechdel Test shows that a movie must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man. True Grit barely passes the Bechdel test—the only scene that appeared is when our heroine Mattie asks the landlady of the boarding house (Mrs. Floyd) if she could rent out a room to stay, and then later complaining about Grandma Turner’s snoring. It is a little tricky to determine because Mrs. Floyd is such a minor character in the film. The fact that our protagonist in this movie is a female, but still largely dominated by male presence is, in fact, disappointing. Although the power and agency analysis produce rather positive results in female’s authority, there is still a lack of strong female representation and interaction when we look at the Bechdel test.
2. Black Swan
The movie Black Swan depicts the struggles of an aspiring female ballet dancer named Nina. Since the majority of the cast in the movie are female ballet dancers, the presence statistics show that female characters speak more both in narration and dialogue. However, although female characters have done more speaking than male characters, male characters actually obtain higher powers both in narration and dialogue from the power and agency analysis. Moreover, the submissiveness in female characters are way higher in dialogue, meaning that female characters in this movie listen and obey more subordinately compared to male characters.It is surprising that, while women speak most in the movie, men had more power and control. One explanation to this occurrence might be because the main male character here is an authoritative figure of the ballet group, therefore the main character Nina was extremely obedient to him.
More positive agency means that characters are driving the plot of the story forward, having more decisiveness and control in the dramatic action of the events happening. They are more likely the causes of the incidents, rather than experiencing them passively. We see here that females surpasses the men in positive agency in dialogue, whereas in narration it is the other way around.
Black Swan is extremely interesting because that it passes the Bechdel test—there are several conversations between the main character Nina and her mother about ballet, which is not about a man—but men still have higher power in narration and dialogue as opposed to females (supported by the power and agency analysis above). Therefore, we can see that Black Swan is an example of a complicated movie that passes the Bechdel test, but has the lack of female power and authority.
These movies are great examples to show that characters are not one-sided, but are extremely complicated, multidimensional, and multifaceted. We have the Black Swan, who has a majority of female presence in narration and dialogue, but women are still required to succumb to the pressure of men. We get to look at True Grit, which has a strong feisty female protagonist that shows strength in female’s power and agency analysis, but barely passes the Bechdel test due to lack of female interaction and speech deliverance. These are all unique movie character patterns that this power and agency analysis website has provided for us.
I encourage you to analyze and think about some of your memorable movies critically as well, because we need to keep the conversation going and be aware of these nuances. These decisions happen in the writing room, with mostly male writers wielding the pen and dominating the space with male representation. It is time to get some female writers on board to turn the tables.