The only named female character is a badass babe named Mako Mori, a rookie pilot tasked with fighting off the Kaijus, huge monsters who have attacked Hong Kong. So when Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim came out, Internet feminists who had high hopes for the film were dismayed by the lack of representation of women – it fails the Bechdel test on the first point. (I’m not even going to go into manic pixie dream girls right now.) Movies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s pass, but only on technicalities though Holly Golightly is a sweet society girl, her narrative arc relies on men – Paul Varjack, Sally Tomato, José da Silva Pereira – to come to resolution. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo features possibly the biggest badass of the new millennium, but Lisbeth Salander is the film’s only named female character, and so the movie fails. Zero Dark Thirty, which was both directed by an Oscar-winning woman and starred a woman as the HBIC in a male-dominated workplace, barely passes the Bechdel test, and fails it after the first half of the film. The Bechdel test, created by comics artist Alison Bechdel in 1985 for her strip D ykes to Watch Out For, is a quick and dirty meter of a film’s female-friendliness, but doesn’t encompass the full scope or complexity of what it takes for something to be pro-women. (To test if a film is people-of-color-friendly, replace “female” with “non-white” and “man” with “white person.”)) (For those of you who don’t know, the Bechdel test is a three-step process to determine whether or not a film is women-friendly: a film passes if it has 1) two named female characters 2) who talk to each other 3) about something other than a man. The Bechdel test made it especially easy for us to enumerate these weaknesses. For feminist film lovers, it’s really, really hard to casually see a movie without being brutally aware of its shortcomings: specifically, it’s really hard not to notice when a film features fewer women than, say, your workplace does.
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