There’s a Venn diagram, but it isnt very clear.
Kidding, it’s a circle.
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I dunno. Came up in an image search. I didn’t feel inclined to dig into the maker’s site, identity, etc.
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is there more than one female character?
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Just like the Thing, certain films inherently can’t pass, simply because they don’t meet the immediate criteria of having at least two named female characters in the first place. There are obviously none in Carpenter’s film and I can only remember one minor female character in …Red October.
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Adding that third dashed line style would do both though, wouldn’t it? It’d clearly show how many convos passed, and in relation to the all the convos that happen in that movie (ex. 2 lines out of 34). You then could also clearly see across films/diagrams which movies have just 1 or 2 and which have 5 or 8 or 17. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding. Either way ‘yay interesting visualizations!’
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There are three, two of whom are named, and both of whom speak only to Jack Ryan.
I’m actually surprised there are so many.
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I could only remember one.
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There are obviously some stories out there that don’t lend themselves to much female representation on screen (for example, a historical drama following an all-male platoon of soldiers or a movie that centers almost exclusively on one character like Cast Away) so the Bechdel test is more useful as an aggregate tool for assessing the state of the film industry as a whole than for judging the quality of any one film in isolation.
It’s still bananas that there were six consecutive Star Wars movies that failed the Bechdel test though. I can’t even remember a single named female character who wasn’t a relative of Luke Skywalker. (Mon Mothma doesn’t count because her name was never mentioned on screen and she had less than 30 seconds of screen time anyway.)
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Yep. So it’s also useful for assessing the state of the Star Wars movies as a whole.
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And on the other end of the spectrum, there are certain films that would have to go incredibly far out of their way not to pass, because the entire cast is female, like the Descent.
It’s not a particularly good horror movie, IMO and it certainly didn’t have any kind of happy ending, but the women in it did have many conversations with one another that had nothing to do with dudes…
ETA: Since I mentioned John Carpenter’s the Thing, its only fair to acknowledge that the poorly received 2011 prequel does pass the Bechdel: The main character Kate and another woman Juliette discuss the immense impact of finding proof of alien life.
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I’m guessing nothing by Jane Austen makes the grade.
Not that that’s a surprise I suppose.
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IIRC, the women in those novels hardly ever talked about anything else but men…
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And that’s all they wanted to do!!
Yay… SMDH
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My personal perspective on such classic literature:
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COB says to Jonsey “I seen me a mermaid once.” I feel like that should count as one.
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Fortunately in these more enlightened times we have moved on to Bridget Jones.
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I was kinda underwhelmed by that one as well, but it is progress…
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ISWYDT.
. . . I think
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