I can always appreciate a good movie with a strong female lead. However, sometimes it seems that Hollywood doesn’t know how to write female characters. Either their characters are the butt of every joke, or they are too weak to help progress the plot. Other times the women only worry about arbitrary issues, or only focus on getting the attention of the male characters. It can be painfully obvious in some movies how the female characters are only used as a love interest to the main male characters. Their only purpose to the plot is to be ‘guy-obsessed.’ This trope is so in your face obvious and commonplace that the Bechdel Test was created in response. The Bechdel Test is a test that is meant to prove there is a lack of representation for women in a work of fiction. A work fails if there are not at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.
This sounds insanely easy to pass, but you’d probably be surprised at how many major movies fail this test- and you may not have even realized this! Any Marvel fans out there? Personally I love Marvel movies, but unfortunately not many of their movies pass the Bechdel Test. The Avengers from 2013 fails the Bechdel Test. While Natasha or ‘Black Widow’ is a strong character, she doesn’t ever talk to other women about something other than a man in this movie. I do feel that Marvel has progressed especially with Black Widow that has Natasha talking to other women about her past and addressing other plot issues. Avatar is another well known movie that fails the Bechdel Test. While there are female characters, only two of them speak to each other and this conversation was – you guessed it – about a man. One of the worst examples of a movie failing the Bechdel Test is Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back. In the movie the only woman that is even named is Princess Leia. There are other women, but in the entire two hour film they are not named and do not talk. Another movie that fails the Bechdel Test is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II. No women actually have a conversation in this entire movie. There are instances where a woman will say a word or so to another woman, but there will be no response, hence it isn’t an actual conversation.
This test is interesting because it really calls into question what we will count as feminist represenation in film. All the movies that I mentioned I enjoy, and I do believe that the women in these movies are strong characters, but is that enough? Should we be settling for one token, strong character while literally no other women speak in the entire film? Shouldn’t it be so much easier to do better? I mean how hard would it have been to have Princess Leia speak to another woman, or simply name another woman?
I have conflicting opinions on this test because there are strong female characters in all these movies, but they are few and far between. I enjoyed the way a lot of these movies portrayed women like Neytiri in Avatar or Hermione in Harry Potter, but I just wish there were more of these strong women represented well.