How to Use the Bechdel Test

The Bechdel test (for those of you who aren’t aware of it) is a simple test to judge the presence of female characters in film. Simply put, a film passes the Bechdel test if it matches these three criteria:

1. The film has two or more named female characters.

2. The two (or more) female characters talk to each other…

3. …about something besides a man.

The Bechdel test was named after Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. In one strip, two characters talked about a movie they just saw, and one of the women mentioned her three criteria for seeing movies.

Personally, I don’t use the Bechdel test to determine which movies I want to see.

1. A movie that passes the Bechdel test is not necessarily a feminist movie. Bad Teacher is a recent movie that passes the Bechdel test, but I would never call it a feminist movie (though I did enjoy it as a guilty pleasure). Jackie Brown does not pass the Bechdel test, as the lead character interacts with mostly men, and only interacts with other women while men are either present or watching the conversation. It’s also one of the most feminist movies I’ve ever seen.

2. A movie that passes the Bechdel test is not necessarily a good movie. I can think of many personal favorite movies that don’t pass the Bechdel test – The Producers (1968), Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Pulp Fiction, When Harry Met Sally…, Beauty and the Beast, Punch-Drunk Love, The Lord of the Rings – and those are only a few. Meanwhile, the film adaptation of Beverly Cleary’s Beezus and Ramona supposedly passes the Bechdel test, but you couldn’t pay me to see that movie, as the trailer indicated a feel-good movie with the sanitized message of “sisters fight but they really love each other!” when the message of the book is actually that Beezus doesn’t always love Ramona, and that’s okay. (I also don’t want a film version of Ramona Quimby in my head because Ramona Quimby is quite possibly my favorite character of all time in any medium, ever, but that’s getting a little off-topic.)

3. A movie might pass the test, but so what? Zombieland technically passes the Bechdel test because Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin’s characters have a conversation about their trip to an amusement park, but the conversation takes up maybe ten seconds of screen time. We Need to Talk About Kevin passes the test because Eva has a job interview with a female employer about getting a job, but the female employer is not an important character in her own right. Sure, she has a name, but she’s not a person, really – she’s there to set up a minor plot point, and that’s it. Every single scene in the movie is either about, or affected by, Eva’s relationship with her son Kevin. Yet this little scene makes the movie pass the Bechdel test.

In short, I don’t use the Bechdel test to determine whether a movie is artistically good, or even whether a movie is feminist. As far as I’m concerned, the Bechdel test isn’t really useful when talking about individual films. Where the Bechdel test becomes important is when talking about the film industry as a whole.

Feminist Frequency has a good breakdown of the Bechdel test and gives a list of examples of films that fail said test:

The question, as you can see, is not whether any individual film passes the Bechdel test. The question is why so many films don’t.

To put it another way – try to come up with a list of movies that pass the reverse Bechdel test: a movie that has two named male characters, who talk to each other, about something besides women.

You’re going to come up with a handful of films that fail the reverse Bechdel test (Terms of Endearment and Black Swan immediately come to mind), but I imagine that the list of movies that pass the test will be much, much longer.