What We’re Saying About the Bechdel Test

UPDATE: Ed Howard points out I’m wrong about The Women. Or he says he thinks I’m probably wrong, and I have to say I agree. Norma Shearer talked with her kid about the pony or something.


Now the original post:

I talked about the rule and posted the cartoon here. A few people commented, so here I’m recapping what I think they said and explaining myself where I need explaining.


To start out, maybe we can all agree that “rule” is not the correct word here. A rule tells you what you can’t do (as in, don’t see that film). A test is different. It’s a perception clarifier, a way of flushing out objective reality; what you do about that reality is then up to you.  And it’s as a test, not a rule, that all of us here use the Bechdel principle, to the extent we do use it. Bechdel’s cartoon was called “The Test,” but it was about (and for) women who wanted to get as far away from male society as they could.

Ok, in Comments:

Aaron White points us to a post where he applies the test to some favorite movies. He gives L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) as a Bechdel winner: “Women discuss playing the stock market, living in Africa, ‘What shall we do tonight?'” I haven’t seen it, but that sounds like the idea.

Noah gives examples of sexist films that would pass the rule and of nonsexist films that wouldn’t. 


The commenters all agree that the movie audience is not overwhelmingly male. 

Miriam says: it is startling, once you know the rule, to realize how many movies fail it. & how virtually no movies would fail the test if it were about men.”  I’d say that hits it on the head. The test isn’t so much a way of finding sexist or nonsexist movies. It’s a reality check for telling us where we stand, which is in front of a cineplex in a male-dominated society.

As for male movie audiences … I think the subject was accidentally brought into play by a phrase in my post.  I said Sunset Boulevard was made by men and aimed at an audience “at least as male as not.” The phrase means that the audience for Sunset Boulevard would not be majority female, which I think is a fair guess (though only a guess) for that movie. And the sentence doesn’t say the audience’s gender mix is what lies behind the problem. I list a few factors: writer, director, audience mix. But maybe it struck people as saying audience mix was the trump card, the key factor.

Miriam offers this:

i think any given movie is “a male product” only insofar as we live in a “male” (ie sexist, where men are the norm & women are a special case) culture. but maybe that is what you were saying.


I think I disagree. All movies are part of the same society, and the society is male dominated, but not all movies are equally male dominated. I’d say the relevant factors can balance out differently for one film or another, with the obvious examples being romantic comedies vs. buddy action films. But the most powerful factors all point the same way, so the balancing out tends to favor men. 

0 thoughts on “What We’re Saying About the Bechdel Test

  1. Thanks for pointing this out. I’ve posted my own initial thoughts on the cartoon here. If nothing else, it’s a provocative way of making us all think about the treatment of gender in films.

  2. You really should consider material history here: Sunset Boulevard was made in the studio system, for a general audience, by a writer/director (Wilder) who generally wrote great roles for women, and films suffered less competition from other media such as television then. (I’ve read somewhere that nowadays, TV is aimed at women (which makes sense, since it’s basically an advertising vehicle and women statistically tend to control household purchases) and movies are aimed more at men.) Something like Serendipity was probably aimed at a narrow, market-tested demographic.

    Also, there’s also the question of subject position and whom one actually identifies with in these films. Feminist scholars such as Laura Mulvey, Teresa De Lauretis and Carol Clover have argued against a simplistic males identify with males/females identify with females paradigm.

    Personally, I watch romantic comedies as if they were horror films (like Serendipity — I scream and cover my eyes with that one. I find it pretty offensive) and horror films as if they were romantic comedies(like Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Doppelganger). If you’re into the idea of fablua (plot) and sujet (the way the story is told), romantic comedies and horror films often have the same plot, the stories are just told differently.

  3. Kristy, you know an awful lot about film. I recall some sharp things you had to say about Yasuzo Masamura somewhere. His films, like
    Mizoguchi’s, really complicate the question of subject position you raise here. Esp. Manji.

    I’d just ad this curio: a new Scottish study used Seredipity along with Eraserhead to prove that rom-cons ruin relationships. (& I view kung-fu and musicals as basically the same, too.)

  4. Thanks, Bill, but honestly I just had a really great professor in college, Earl Jackson Jr., who taught this stuff. (There are actually at least a couple of other Jacksonites in comics, such as Brian Heater and Anne Ishii.) Noah would love his book “Strategies of Deviance” I bet (if he could get over his prose style, which is pretty daunting, even for someone who took five classes with him).

    I read that article last night too! How funny.

  5. Masumura is great. His films definitely do complicate the question of subject/identification, and the result is a profound ambiguity. This is especially true of Manji and Blind Beast, which use the conventions of pulp and melodrama but tell their outrageous, lurid stories in a relatively distanced, objective way. Masumura intentionally obscures what “the point” of these films might be, because he wants audiences to question and think about that for themselves. They are films that seem to demand a thematic interpretation, especially with regard to gender, but Masumura is too slippery to inscribe these interpretations in the films themselves.

  6. “You really should consider material history here: Sunset Boulevard was made in the studio system, for a general audience,” etc.

    Wait, how wasn’t I considering material history? The thing is, you can take a Sunset Blvd and a Serendipity — as you point out, the products of very different eras — and the same finding applies to both: they don’t have two women talking to each other about something besides a man. (Unless I misremember Serendipity, which is certainly possible. Eugene Levy was in it, I know that.)

    Anyway, with general audience or narrow casting, this same trait keeps cropping up.