The Bechdel Test, 30 Years On - Moving Towards Equality
We’re 30 years on from the first appearance in Alison Bechdel's “Dykes to Watch Out For” of what became known as The Bechdel Test. It’s become something of a millstone even to feminists in the film industry being that in its original form it is more of an ironic aside to highlight just how marginalised and prop-like women were in 80’s movies. It was closer to a barbed spear in the heart of gender bias absurdity than a standard for gender equality, but stands as a starting point for a movement towards change, and it's this that underlies the basic idea.
Are films supposed to carry some kind of feminist or gender equal currency if they in fact do feature two women talking to each other about something other than a man? Of course not. Most would say we’re a long way past that now, with Bechdel Test parameters having been set so low to properly reflect the feminist-hating, "Backlash" era, conservative revolution 80’s. Well it’s absolutely true we should be past that, but as pointed out recently, the sad fact is 36% of supposedly mainstream Hollywood films (2010-2014, https://women-in-film.silk.co/) still fail to have two women talk to each other about something other than a man. 36% of mainstream films, the ones EVERYBODY sees all over the world, don’t even pass the deliberately laughable standard for female involvement of The Bechdel Test.
There are many reasons for this failure, or more to the point - obstruction : the predominance of male executives and producers, male directors and writers, male script readers and screenwriting gurus. As revealed in Logan Hill's truly extraordinary Cosmopolitan article on the Hollywood shutout of female directors, the leading men who can greenlight films must take their share of responsibility in the lack of females in front of and behind the camera. The idea that a tight and dramatic script means plot-driven, and megabucks, and only men can be trusted to carry things of such importance still prevails. The backlash voices insist it's just political correctness to stick a woman in among the group of men we’ve come to expect. Having two women with fully-rounded characters would be absurd!
Films have always learnt from and grown out of other films. They don’t come from all the divergence, tangents, and unusualness of life. They come from the formulas and plot points and themes of other films - the screenwriting science - by Hollywood committee, protected zealously by the male gurus of successful film writing and making. It’s very hard to break down that wall with anything new or anything real. If the Bechdel Test’s parameters are set low, then Hollywood’s are set narrow – and the true reality of women’s lives coming into that would seem radical on screen. But it does seem that this revolutionary genderquake of the film industry is about to happen, and Hollywood's complacent rehash, remake, and resuscitation of mens' stories in recent years has literally engendered the willingness to see anything different on screen.. even when it means bracing ourselves for all-female remakes of the same stories!
It’s not just the reality of women that has to fight for its place in mainstream film culture. There is a growing backlash against the new breed of female heroes too - Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, Rey from the newly awakened Star Wars franchise - because they exhibit all the traits that are apparently only acceptable when bestowed on a male hero: impossibly brave in the jaws of death, wise beyond their years and blessed with the ability of always finding a way, and with plenty of time to be both emotionally engaged and acerbically witty on a blow by blow basis. In other words, a fully faceted human being – exhibiting strength of character, intelligence, empathy, and wit – a place where female characters in our movie history have so rarely got to go.
The embarrassing film trope of the panicky, screaming, squeamish, weak, one-dimensional female is so ubiquitous that generations of young male film school screenwriters and directors can barely distinguish the fact that it has no basis in reality and the women around them every day. To “find the new” for that career-making script, all you really need is to write from the reality and not the trope. It’s not the reality of the executive, only concerned with the bottom line of what’s been before, or the experts, the gurus and their slavish acolytes who only learn from films that have been before. It’s a forward looking progressive leap of faith, or to film reference it : a bit like Indiana Jones at the end of The Last Crusade.
So if a new day is coming where women can be created (in movies) equally, where do we go now from The Bechdel Test? The statistics point out it has a very real use in showing us just how much movie-making is still predominantly the male gaze with billions of dollars behind it to reinforce its normalcy and inescapability. In the bigger picture of everyone, in terms of gender and race being treated equally, we can never rely on a film passing a test or a quota no matter how pointed a measurement such things are to inequality. Only a full realisation - in pain, anger, humour, sexuality, blood, sweat, and tears - of female characters on screen as an expectation and not a pleasant surprise can satisfy the need behind the idea of The Bechdel Test.
I grew up watching the same male-dominant films as the rest of my generation, and enjoyed them. The ten men to one woman model of late 80’s, early 90’s films like Goodfellas was prevalent, and despite their quality, there was also the reality for me of male emotional abuse in life that I’d experienced. It bothered me when watching films in which a group of egomaniacal guys play out their aggressions without much call to look at themselves for their actions. When one female character gets thrown into the lion cage among that group purely to react to the situations they create, it becomes way too easy just to see her as a troublemaker for a guy’s world – the female love interest who relieves the plot tension, but then upsets the men’s world with her feminine sensitivities. It was everywhere, and I was sick of it by the time I started writing films myself.
It wasn’t just the behaviour of movie men that I had a problem with. It was the entitlement and unpunishable misbehaviour of men in the real world too. Such things influence each other and happen for various reasons, the main one being that they’re not called on it by people who know better, so it’s a learned behaviour they continually get away with. When something goes unchallenged, it has free reign – just like the routine misogyny and ignorance in all those scripts down the decades that got passed through male hands only in the development process.
And you wonder why so many actresses got a reputation as "difficult" or "a diva", when they were being presented with scripted roles that bore no resemblance to actual women or a truthful, honest portrayal. Things have changed slowly with our positive actions, and more recognition of the absurdity in what had been pushed as the norm. Protest and complaint is useless without spending as much time as we can filmmaking and developing projects that reflect a progressive way of thinking, because the old male dinosaurs of the film industry (not a reference to the pathetic sexism on display throughout "Jurassic World", an appropriate title if ever there was one) can never be an inspired force for change no matter how loud we call for it.
When I started to write, I only wanted to write female characters, and for a female audience. This isn’t balanced and equal, or a reality based approach to reflecting life on film either. It’s a reaction. A reaction to 95% of what I was seeing being the other way – male characters for a male audience.
The emergence of organisations like the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media with a stated mission “to engage, educate, and influence content creators to dramatically improve gender balance, reduce stereotyping, and create diverse female characters in entertainment", is a huge step in the right direction as female voices are finally getting traction in the corridors of power. It's not surprising now to see female-dominated production companies like the one just launched by Jessica Chastain, or predominantly female film crews to tackle projects that don't normally see the light of day. The long wished for emergence of females on screen that better reflect the fully realised unusualness of life is nothing to flinch away from. It’s a reaction too. A good and necessary one, for all being equal.
As what's normal to see on screen develops, so will our tests of what makes the grade for female involvement - the end point being that we don't need the tests anymore.
