It’s also a literal joke meant to point out how movies can’t meet a ridiculously low bar, the fact that the joke remains a prescient commentary on culture 40 year later is pretty sad.
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Tolkien’s work is only 30 years older than the original comic the test comes from, they’re both old.
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I was racking my brain, trying to think if there was a scene where Arwen and Galadrial spoke together, and couldn’t remember it, so I honestly expected it to go from Title sequence direct to credits. That the scene meets Bechdel Test requirements (?*) was a double surprise. Man, I am really overwhelmed by underwhelming expectations today! (This is rather depressing…)
*Do both characters actually have to have dialog to technically pass the test? (Does “shhh” count as dialog?) I know the test is meant as an absurdly low floor rather than any sort of actual goal, but still, this is pushing things a bit.
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That “shhh” wasn’t actually in the script; it was just one extra warning another that women weren’t permitted to talk on set.
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That build up and then end title sealed the deal! Laughing as I’m typing!!!
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There are NUMEROUS differences between what Tolkien wrote and what the films’ writers and producers decided to portray. Therefore, to me the video is not about Tolkien’s leanings, but about said writers and producers.
Did someone say, low-hanging fruit?
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Well, Galadriel is Arwen’s grandmother, so it’s to be assumed they’ve spoken together a lot.
Probably mostly about lembas recipes, though.
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Women talk about more than cookery, this isn’t the Bechamel test.
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I deserve some hearts for setting up these punchlines!
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Funny, but I was expecting the scene where the mother sends her daughter off with her son to Edoras on the horse. It’s still not much but it’s a couple lines. There’s also a tiny bit when they are reunited at Helm’s Deep but I’m not sure if that’s just the extended cut. They give Eowin some tiny interactions with women in the caves too.
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Wow. Is this really the origin of the rule?
Have you not read Alison Bechdel’s comics before? If not, you should. She’s awesome.
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Yeh, this is the strip that first layed out the rules for what comes to be known as the “Bechdel Test”. Alison Bechdel gives credit for the idea to her friend Liz Wallace and Liz Wallace has said that she was paraphrasing the ideas of Virginia Woolf:
“I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. … They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that.”
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