One of the things I often find myself wondering as I watch a movie is whether or not it passes the Bechdel test. To pass the Bechdel test (it is named after Alison Bechdel, who described the test in her comic strip, Dykes To Watch Out For) the movie must contain at least two female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man. It’s a simple test, and it is only when you realise how many movies fail it that you begin to see why it is so effective.
This week I watched three films that I had been looking forward to for a long time. The first was Coraline, the animated movie
adaptation of a children's book by Neil Gaiman. Both book and film are magnificent, and both are utterly terrifying. By any standards, Coraline would pass the Bechdel test. The main characters are a young girl (Coraline) and her enemy, a woman who looks like her mother, but is not; and most of their interactions are focused on Coraline’s survival. Even the addition in the movie of a new male character does not detract from the fact that the hero is definitely a girl.
The other two movies were Star Trek and Wolverine. Now, Wolverine is a favourite comic book character, and I was pleased that a movie about him had been made, but he does have terrible luck with women. The movie therefore has only two significant female figures: his mother and a girlfriend (who later dies).
Star Trek actually does have one interesting female — Uhura, a linguist on the crew of the USS Enterprise, and a character from the original Star Trek TV series. But while there are other women in the background (presumably doing important jobs aboard the ship) none of them are named or talk very much.
The movie contains one scene between two women that isn’t (at first) about men, but this would have been more effective if both women had not been in their
underwear, and if one of them had not been hiding a man under her bed at the time. After Uhura, the woman who most affects the plot of Star Trek is the mother of one of the major male characters. She does this by dying.
The ‘Women in Refrigerators’ syndrome describes a tendency (originally noted in the comic book industry) to kill or maim female characters as a plot device so that the main, male character’s role can be taken forward.
In both Star Trek and Wolverine, the deaths of minor female characters are used to spark personal tragedies for male protagonists, who can then go on and angst over the deaths of their loved ones.
Which is not to suggest that this factor alone ruined these movies for me. Wolverine has a number of flaws, but it was a fun movie to watch, and I absolutely loved Star Trek.
But it is a pity if, in the 21st century, we still cannot imagine female characters as anything other than plot devices or eye-candy, so that a movie that passes the Bechdel test still comes to us as a pleasant surprise.
— The writer is a student of
English literature and a compulsive book buyer. She blogs at
http://bluelullaby.blogspot.com
bluelullaby@gmail.com