Your Favorite Movie Fails These Feminist Movie Tests
The fact that white dudes named Judd and Quentin have a cultural hold on film explains so much
Hello friends and happy Wednesday! If you’re anything like me, your Instagram feed was flooded on Sunday night and Monday with Oscar content. Even though award shows are deeply problematic and trash, I think everyone who grew up during the 90s and 2000s has a soft spot in their heart for watching the red carpet as we grew up mainlining People magazine for the #outfitcontent. This week we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled programming to talk about feminist movie tests. I’m willing to bet your favorite movies fail at least one of these tests. As usual, white men are the ones to blame. For the four white men who read this newsletter, can you bring this up at the next group meeting?
The Bechdel Test & The Castellini Test & The Sexy Lamp Test
The Bechdel Test is the test you’re probably most familiar with as it gained a lot of popularity on Tumblr back in the day. Ahhh, Tumblr. Those were the days. Anyway, the test was created by comic book writer and cartoonist Alison Bechdel (she also won the MacArthur Genius grant + her memoir was adapted into a Tony-winning musical).
The test is pretty simple. A movie has to meet these three criteria:
(1) the movie has to have two women in it,
(2) who talk to each other,
(3) about something other than a man.
I really think this test should be renamed “the bar is on the fucking floor” test. Here are a few (of the many) movies that fail the Bechdel test. The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (no two female characters speak to each other… ever), Lion King (the Disney one), and Casablanca (as a die-hard Casablanca fan, this one hurts). But even movies with feminist themes like His Girl Friday, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (this movie was my personality my senior year of high school), and 500 Days of Summer fail.
Years later, a woman named Bri Castellini rightfully pointed out the Bechdel Test set an incredibly low bar for movies and measuring feminism while also potentially leading to more harm than good. She created her own three criteria test with the following factors for a movie: (1) at least two named female characters with at least 5 lines of dialogue each, (2) must have a conversation not about their relationship/their partner, (3) and at least one woman has to be integral to the plot. This solves a lot of the problems with the Bechdel Test and puts even more movies to shame.
There’s also a sexy lamp test. I swear to God that’s the name. I wish law school had fun test names like that. Imagine writing about the sexy jurisdiction test for a judge. Anyway, the test goes something like this… if you can replace a female character with a sexy lamp and the story still works, you’ve failed the test. The test was created by Kelly Sue DeConnick, one of the lead writers at Marvel. I think she made it up as a joke, but then realized how many movies fail the test and the joke was on all women everywhere. I’d love a reverse sexy lamp test to see if you could replace a man with a sexy lamp and the movie carried on just fine. Someone with more free time than me, get on that!
The DuVernay Test
While the Bechdel Test and its spinoff tests for female representation are all well and good, they don’t account for racial or ethnic diversity among women characters or the richness of those characters’ lives and plotlines. A movie of all-white characters could easily pass the Bechdel test. In response to the many movies at Sundance that feature more than white men having an existential crisis, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis coined the term the DuVernay Test. The test is named after the award-winning Black female director Ava DuVernay. In theory, the test is simple. It requires Black characters and other characters of color to have fully realized lives rather than be scenery for white stories. In reality, many mainstream movies completely fail this test. I don’t even think I need to list examples as you could probably wipe out almost every movie on the AFI Top 100 with this test. Also, almost every Disney movie or mainstream series (Hunger Games, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc.) fails.
FiveThirtyEight Challenge
In response to the #OscarsSoWhite campaign a few years ago, FiveThirtyEight asked female directors, producers, writers, and actresses to submit their very own Bechdel and DuVernay tests to judge gender imbalance in film. There’s a full breakdown of the tests here. They range from the Uphold Test (is 50% of the film crew women) to the Waithe Test (the film has a Black female character in a position of power and she’s in a healthy relationship) to the Villalobos Test (the film has a Latina lead and she or another Latina character is college educated or professional, not sexualized, speaks in unaccented English).
If you could create your own movie test, what would it be? Send it to me! I’ll post the results next week.
That’s all for this week! See ya next Wednesday!
Citations
“10 Famous Films That Surprisingly Fail the Bechdel Test” Film School Rejects
“5 Disney Movies That Pass The Bechdel Test and 5 That Don’t” Screenrant
“25 Feminist Movies That Fail The Bechdel Test But Are Still Worth Watching” Bustle
“The Bechdel Test, The DuVernay Test & More” Refinery29
“Films That Totally Fail the Sexy Lamp Test” Huffington Post
“Stop Using the Bechdel Test to Measure Feminism” Brisownworld
“Kelly Sue DeConnick Talks Captain Marvel, Pretty Deadly, and the Sexy Lamp Test” IGN
“Ava DuVernay backs ‘DuVernay Test’ to monitor racial diversity in Hollywood” The Guardian
“Want to Measure a Film’s Diversity? Try the DuVernay Test” Vox
Feminism is cancer, as this article makes crystal clear.