Simple in its premise, soul-crushing in its practice, the Bechdel Test (also known as the Bechdel-Wallace Test) is one of those things that once you notice it, you’ll never not. The infamous test is named after Alison Bechdel, whose 1985 comic strip The Rule (part of the Dykes to Watch Out For series) sparked a new flame on the old debate of female representation in film.
In the comic, two women walk hands-in-pockets side-by-side down the street. As they pass a cinema, one of them suggests they see a film, to which the other replies that she’ll only see a film if it passes three seemingly simple rules. One: the movie must have at least two women in it who, two: talk to each other, three: about something other than a man. Easy, right? This ten-frame, black and white, unassuming comic strip, intended by its author as little more than a satirical joke, prompted a lot of people, those both that make movies and those that like watching them, to take a good hard look at an industry that claims to be all about representation. Because what’s a story without a reality in which to reflect it?
Reality, however, is far from being truly represented when it comes to the looking glass that is our cinema screens. When women make up almost half of the global population (according to Our World in Data it was 49.6% as of 2017) and 50% of moviegoers, having two women talk on screen about something other than a man shouldn’t be the ground-breaking sort of feminism we’re aspiring to. The simplicity of the Bechdel Test makes it all the more painful when films don’t pass it. The bar is so low, and movies are still being made like women aren’t the ones paying to see them.
As March rolls around and the red carpets are rolled out in Hollywood, there’s no better time than award season to put the Bechdel Test to the ultimate test. The Academy Awards, with their long history of sexism and racism (older white men have long been the winners at the Oscars, but things are slowly changing), are not exactly known for their progression. With Green Book (2018) – a thinly veiled white-saviour narrative that was more racist than it was progressive – winning the Best Picture award only three years ago, and directors Greta Gerwig, Lulu Wang and Lorene Scafaria all snubbed of nominations for Best Director awards in 2020 despite making top-rated films, the biggest award show of the industry really has some work to do.
After a tremendously disappointing show in 2021, watched by the “smallest audience an award show has ever received” according to CNBC, the Oscars are flailing to save their prestigious wank-fest. Cutting categories to shorten run time will do little to help this geriatric boys’ club, as will holding a major in-person event in the middle of a global pandemic. But girl, will the Oscars try.
So how do the nominations for the Oscars fair up? Forget the fight for Best Picture; do the movie-making machines pass the most important test of all?
Considered the most prestigious award of the show, out of the ten nominees for Best Picture at this year’s 94th Academy Awards, only half of the films would be considered by Alison Bechdel’s comic characters as films worth seeing. The results, perhaps surprisingly, are not what they might seem. There are the films that don’t pass the Bechdel Test, the ones you wouldn’t hold high expectations to given that they’re male-lead films in which the protagonist features in most scenes:Drive my Car (2021, Ryusuke Hamaguchi), Nightmare Alley (2021, Guillermo del Toro) andBelfast (2021, Kenneth Branagh).
There are the ensemble-cast films, the ones in which not just one character but a symphony of varied people lead the story, that unsurprisingly pass: CODA (2021, Sian Heder), Don’t Look Up (2021, Adam McKay), West Side Story (2021, Steven Spielberg) andDune (2021, Denis Villeneuve). There’s the one you’d expect might not pass, but thankfully does:King Richard(2021, Reinaldo Marcus Green); and then there are the ones you’d expect would pass, with strong female characters in – perhaps not the lead, but nonetheless – lead roles, but fall disappointingly short of the Bechdel Test: The Power of the Dog (2021, Jane Campion) andLicorice Pizza (2021, Paul Thomas Anderson).
I could go through every single title nominated for every single Oscar this year and apply the Bechdel Test. But neither time nor patience would allow me to do so; neither time nor patience are doing much for women in our hopes of representation.Social reckonings have come and gone, the world has changed and then changed some more, and filmmakers still aren’t bothered to consider the importance of two women talking to each other in their films.
There’s a myriad of reasons to explain the lack of female-identifying characters on screen. (Out of the ten Best Picture nominees, only two were directed by women and only three were written or co-written by women). But with tools like the Bechdel Test at their disposal, what excuse do the multi-million-dollar gate-keeping Hollywood studios really have to not simply include two women having a yarn?
Excuses are running thin and time is running low; the Academy is almost out of chances. Their desperate hopes to save their precious award show may be, finally, falling baseless. If 2022’s Academy Awards ceremony doesn’t pick up the slack with ratings, the future of the Oscars could be in doubt.
But an erasure of what was once one of the biggest TV events of the year may do nothing for actual progression for the feminist cause. The Academy Awards isn’t the crux of the problem of the lack of female representation in (and making) film, it just condones it. As much as I hate the Oscars, I – like many people – also bloody love them. This wank fest of celebrity brilliance and fancy dresses is beyond silly; it should be meaningless, but the fact of the matter is, it’s not.
Sometimes silly things matter, sometimes silly things even have the opportunity for progression and evolution. My hope isn’t to see the Oscars go kaput; my hope is to see them change. My hope is that one day the silliest award show of the season can show Alison Bechdel, and the other 50% of movie goers that identify as female, that the stories they celebrate are their stories too.
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