Women in Film and the Bechdel Test

The title of this blog, “Cycle of Omission”, comes from a quote by Judy Chicago regarding her famous work “The Dinner Party”. Chicago said that the work’s purpose was to "end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record." Now, I am not going to discuss history so much here, but I am going to address how women are left out of various types of media. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Originally I intended to talk only about women in films and television, but I think that may be biting off more than I can chew (though I am still going to discuss it). I’m going to use this space to reflect on my own teaching methods, discuss artists who have inspired me, and maybe reflect further on some of the class readings.

I thought I was being very clever by trying to write all of my posts ahead of time and then just posting them during the last few weeks of class, but of course that didn’t work out quite the way I thought it would. So I’m just going to go for it, starting with my original idea of discussing film and television.

So, I'm a pretty big junkie of movies, TV shows, etc. I don't spend every day watching this stuff, but over the years, I've amassed quite a knowledge base of pop culture. I like it. I like movies, I like TV, I like animated movies, comic books, and novels. Now, please don't mistake this for me being interested in celebrity gossip or "reality" TV or anything like that. My love is purely for the art forms and the stories they tell.

Anyway, you may be wondering why any of this is important, or why it matters.

Good question! I thought for quite some time about how to articulate what I want to say. The way I look at it is, these films are everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. As are TV shows. They're in our faces all the time, and it's difficult not to be affected by them. We grow up in a world that bombards us with advertising, bombards us with imagery, and tells us what to think. These movies do the same thing. And even animated films are guilty. I'm not going to try and pretend that they're perfect, though I will defend them to death. So, think about it: As children we see Disney movies, or Pixar, or whatever, and those images are burned into our psyches. Then we grow up to be adults who still believe in some of that nonsense, and allow ourselves to believe in dumb romantic comedies, believe in negative stereotypes of women and minorities, and especially minority women.

Filmmakers have a wonderful opportunity to do something positive with their art. Many of them do, or at least try. However, many, many more are only in it to make money, which results in terrible movies that are aggressively marketed towards women, as though that's what we want. I don't know about you all, but I never asked for anything like, say, "27 Dresses" or, goodness, any of those "romantic" comedies Katherine Heigl has been in.

There is something out there called the Bechdel test, named for Allison Bechdel, a comic artist who coined the term in her comic Dykes to Watch Out For, written in 1985.

The rules for the test are simple. In order to pass, a movie must include:

1.) Two women

2.)Who talk to each other

3.) About something other than a man.

It is astonishing how many movies don't pass this test.

Of course, this is not necessarily a measure of the movie’s quality. Many movies I enjoy greatly fail this test (the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars, pretty much any sci-fi/fantasy movie). That doesn’t mean that they’re bad movies, just as all movies that pass the Bechdel test are not inherently good movies because of it. A work can pass and still be misogynistic, and a work can fail that is feminist. The conversations can be shallow and discussing “typically” female things like shopping or domestic work, etc. The point of the test is to point out the pattern in movie-making of relegating women to the sidelines and is an example of how little mainstream culture values women. Their stories do not need to be told. They do not need to share equal screen time with males.

For example, consider this quote from a recent Huffington Post article:

“A study released by USC's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism took a survey of the 4,342 speaking characters in the top 100 grossing films of 2009 and compared it to results from the top 100 films of 2007 and 2008. For women, nothing much has changed -- in these top films, 32.8 percent of actors are female and 67.2 are male -- 2.05 males to every one female. This means that less than 17 percent of films are gender balanced, even though females make up half of the ticket-buying population.”

Women are half of the ticket-buying population! How can their stories continue to be so blatantly omitted from films? Studios want our money, but don’t see us as worth depicting or giving a voice to.