Chels

The Bechdel test has become a bit of a buzzword online, especially in recent months. But, as with a lot of terms that get passed through Tiktok in a game of academic telephone, I think some things might have been lost in translation.

The Bechdel test originally applied to films, and, in fact, it wasn’t even an official test. It began as an almost joke concept, in a comic by Alison Bechdel called Dykes to Watch Out For. Of course, the joke had serious underpinnings, but it was meant in a tongue-in-cheek way, to point out the frustrations of female cinemagoers. The comic strip lays out three key criteria that became the basis of the Bechdel test:

• The film must have two women
• The women must have at least one conversation with each other
• The conversation must not be about men

Obviously, this seems a bit bare minimum, but it’s surprising how often this doesn’t happen in films.

I was lucky enough to study film through a feminist lens, through Laura Mulvey’s key work Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. This was actually the work that introduced the term ‘male gaze’, originally a term for cinematography and film viewership, and now a behemoth term in both film criticism and popular culture at large. Prior to Mulvey’s work, most if not all film criticism was extremely male centric, and it really wasn’t until the 70s and the rise of feminist film theory that theorists even remembered that women were part of the audience. It was all male viewership, hence Mulvey’s critical male gaze, and there was less consideration that male and female viewers may watch or respond to films differently. Of course, even this notion has been criticised. Does that mean that women couldn’t enjoy cinema until the 70s? Of course not. Films were made for women, as it were, with the popularity of melodramas intended for predominantly female audiences, it’s just that female perspectives weren’t often considered.

Anyway, it’s a very long winded way of saying that filmmaking and film studies were, at large, boys clubs, until not so long ago. Bechdel’s comic may have begun as an observational joke about the lack of female characters with real depth, but it became a real test of films. There’s even a website where you can check if your favourite films pass or fail the test.

I want to be clear that while I think whether a film passes the Bechdel test or not is interesting to know, I don’t think it’s a deciding factor on whether a film is good or worthwhile. I personally prefer films with women front and centre. I imagine myself and Bechdel have similar taste, and similar reasoning. For example, I lovedOcean’s 8, I’d have loved to have seen a sequel, but I can’t bring myself to sit through countless hours of the original. To me, there are plenty of heist films to choose from, but very few focused solely on women. That doesn’t mean that I only value films fronted by women, and I think it’s unwise to take that stance.

Tiktok is a really great place for education in a lot of ways. New concepts can be taught in easily digestible short form content, and it’s much more accessible than reading countless academic articles on a topic that seem to ramble on forever. However, it’s a double edged sword. The short, snappy videos don’t lend themselves well to nuance, and as information is shared, reposted, stitched, or replied to, we lose even more nuance. What begins as ‘Isn’t it interesting that there’s a test to see if films have developed female characters’ becomes ‘any film that doesn’t pass the Bechdel test is anti feminist’ or ‘feminists should boycott the new film in x franchise because it doesn’t pass the Bechdel test’. Of course, that’s not a majority opinion, but it does exist. I think this all or nothing mindset can be really unhelpful, because, yes, there are a disproportionate number of films, especially in certain genres, that exclude or sideline women, but that’s not to say that every film must be explicitly feminist, or must prioritise female characters. 

Oppenheimer doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, but that’s for a clear reason. The scientists behind the Manhattan project were men, so of course the story is about men. Does that then mean that Oppenheimer isn’t a worthwhile story? Or one that is interesting to audiences, both male and female?

It’s hard to criticise the widespread misuse of academic terms without sounding exclusionary or pompous, but I think that a real problem is developing through the Tiktok-ification of buzzwords. We saw it with therapy speak (it’s not enough to not like someone, or to call them a bad person, now, they have to be a narcissist, or a gaslighter), and we continue to see it with theoretical terms like the male and female gaze, and the Bechdel test. While on the one hand, it’s great to see people having access to concepts that they may not have come across without Tiktok, it’s also frustrating to see them misunderstood, and to see misinformation spread, because of the lack of nuance on Tiktok. Not everything has to be so black and white.