The Bechdel Test

The Bechdel Test now has its own website.

The Bechdel Test, of course, is about how movies treat women. Does a movie have (a) more than one named woman; (b) do they talk to each other; (c) do they talk to each other about something other than a man?

Lisa and I were going through our Zip.ca rental history. Not too many movies pass the test. We just watched HOT TUB TIME MACHINE, which is one of the best bad movies we've seen in a while. None of the many women talk to each other at all.

It's not surprising. In most mainstream movies, almost all the conversations are between the protagonist and one or two other people. So if the main character is a guy, that doesn't leave a lot of room for conversations between two women. If the main character is a woman, your odds improve, unless it's a romance, in which case she's probably talking about a guy. I bet you SALT passes the test.

In TV, there are lots of female protagonists in non-romances. Going through my rental history again, Sarah Connor in THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES talks to, e.g. Cameron about, e.g., whether she is a good robot or a bad one. Buffy and Willow talk about magic. Echo talks with DeWitt about missions. GILMORE GIRLS is about a relationship between two women, and they talk about everything, endlessly, at high speed, so you don't even have to be in spec fiction.

(TV has female protagonists because women watch TV. Movies have male protagonists because girls will go see guy movies but guys won't see chick movies. Or is it the other way around? Women watch TV because it has female protagonists, and guys won't see chick movies because all the women do in them is talk about men?)

I think the Bechdel Test is interesting. But I think it mostly relates to who the protagonist is. If your movie is about Queen Elizabeth I, there's going to be some conversations with Mary, Queen of Scots, about whether Lizzie's going to cut off her head. If your movie is about Henry VIII, there are not going to be a lot of conversations without Harry in the room, so there won't be many conversations between two women.

But, to carry this a little further, it's not a bad idea, if you're writing a Henry VIII script, to see if there's something to be made of a scene between Catherine of Aragon and that Boleyn girl. It may not fit in the story. But if you have lots of scenes between Henry's male courtiers, maybe we should be listening to the women, too.