Exceptions that get away with it are still exceptions

[major_clanger]

The Daily Dot asks whether a movie can fail the Bechdel Test but still be respectful of female characters, and suggests that Pacific Rim is evidence that it can.

It's an interesting argument, and I think there is a good case to be made that Pacific Rim does very well as a film with effective female characters except for the Bechdel Test. It certainly manages a lot of non-tokenistic diversity, but in hindsight it does seem unfortunate that Mako is the only female character given any substantial screen time. (There is the female pilot of the Russian jaeger, but she has hardly any dialogue with any of the main characters.)

Looking at the cast, we have three main characters:

Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) - male, white, American
Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) - male, black, British
Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) - female, asian, Japanese

and six supporting characters:

Herc Hansen (Max Martini) - male, white, Australian
Chuck Hansen (Robert Kazinsky) - male, white, Australian
Tendo Choi (Clifton Collins) - male, Asian, Chinese
Dr Newton Gieszler (Charlie Day) - male, white, American
Dr Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) - male, white, Anglo-German
Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman) - male, white, God alone knows

That's a reasonable amount of ethnic diversity, rather less cultural diversity (Gottlieb, despite his name, is depicted as being as British as they come) and no gender diversity. Pacific Rim fails the Bechdel Test because the writers created a well-developed female character and then forget to give her any other women to talk to. (She does, as that article notes, get a lot of time talking to another non-white character about matters that have nothing to do with sex or race.)

I think the lesson to be drawn from this is that the Bechdel Test may allow for the odd exception, but that it is still a good litmus test, and that if a film is respectful to its female characters in all other respects then it will look even odder if it doesn't show two of them holding a conversation that's not about men.

Comments

[mishalak]

A movie could fail the Bechdel Test and still be a great movie in all sorts of other ways. However, to say that a movie can fail the Bechdel Test and still be respectful of women is mostly nonsense. For cripes sake The Wolverine passed the Bechdel Test. It is not like this is a hard bar to get under. This is the limbo bar set at 5'9". Pacific Rim had a lot of characters and Mako interacted with many of them, if almost any of the supporting characters had been female it probably would have passed since they mostly talked about monsters.

Also I totally disagree with the estimation of the respectfulness towards women on the part of Pacific Rim. Mako was a young, cute, petite Japanese woman who fought. So, she is just the same as any number of anime characters. It was about as daring as putting in a stock bad girl in a film noir. The boys get a full range of beauty and age. The only other girl in the movie is a total background character and part of a husband and wife team. The movie deleted half of humanity and they call this respectful of women? Nonsense.

[legionseagle]

I think the Daily Dot article is a better article than you give it credit for, in that I went in somewhat fearful of what was meant by "respect for female characters"* and came away with this

In the film, Mako struggles to asserts her independence despite the protectiveness of her stern father figure, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba). She is strong, smart, and perhaps most remarkably, her goal of fulfilling her dream of being a Jaeger pilot is a major part of Pacific Rim's storyline.

Which is a perfectly serviceable way of describing one way of being a "strong woman character" (to the extent that term retains any credibility after the New Statesman demolition of it)

Although that summary also, on one analysis, looks like a stripped down genderflipped Campbellian "Hero's Journey"narrative. I actually think (and I've been trying to find discussions in various places) that the emphasis on the Hero's Journey as the One True Way of plotting is a major contributory factor to erasure of women on screen except as love interest or otherwise promoter of a man's agenda.

But otherwise I'm inclined to see the Bechdel Test as a very low baseline which most movies don't pass but which is not especially predictive one way or the other about how those female characters who are shown are treated by the narrative. I mean, so far as I can recall both Star Trek into Darkness and Avengers Assemble & Don't Forget the Allen Key This Time are Bechdel fails, but I'd rate AA as a "respect for female characters" Pass (including the "mewling quim" scene) and STiD is a resounding FAIL on the respect front.



*As a woman, and a lawyer, I've got over a quarter of a century's professional experience of the kind of "respect" for women in high-pressure environments which comes down to a) don't swear in front of them DO swear in front of them, and ostentatiously apologise because "forgot there were ladies present"; b) cause difficulties about female participation in high profile/status aspects of the matter because of exaggerated safety or comfort concerns not actually expressed (or, often, feared) by the woman in question; and c)overblown chivalry as put-down generally

[aella_irene]

I am trying to remember where I saw the post introducing the Sexy Lamp test-- if the main female character can be replaced by a sexually attractive lamp, without effect on the storyline, you have a problem.

Pacific Rim does not have this problem.

[legionseagle]

If they'd replaced the entire female cast of STiD with the contents of the soft furnishings department at John Lewis, Cheadle Royal, it would have struck a major blow for feminism.

[major_clanger]

If they'd done that we would have had a film which featured John Lewis soft furnishings and Benedict Cumberbatch, and I'd still be trying to extract attimes_bracing from the cinema.

[legionseagle]

I doubt she'd have been alone.

[legionseagle]

I had some more thoughts about this overnight.

First, obviously, it can't be stressed too much what a low bar Bechdel is and that far too many films fail completely avoidably just by only selecting women for when they have to do something gendered. Incidentally, it's worth citing Sherlock as a counter-example; there are a vast number of characters who could be either sex but who are often female; two out of the four victims in ASiP, Soo Lin's boss in TBB, Soo Lin's brother's boss in TBB; the astronomy professor, the security guard's flatmate and the gallery owner in TGG for examples from series one.

And then a film can be a technical pass but still not do anything feminist, like The World's End where Rosamond Pike's character may have a conversation with two of her female schoolmates, but actually still exists to be an object of chivalry to her brother and an object of rivalry to two of his school friends.

But one of the things I've noticed watching book-to-film or book-to-TV adaptations is that the Bechdel passing bits are incredibly often the bits that get cut, probably because the focus groups or people commissioning the works just don't see how conversations between women can progress any plot except a romantic one.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

I've never really thought that the Bechdel Test was supposed to be an absolute indicator of gender fail, but rather a commentary on the way Hollywood traditionally employs female characters. Alien 3 fails the Bechdel Test by virtue of only having a single female character. While I wouldn't claim it's a shining beacon of feminism or even a good movie, I certainly don't think of it as being anti-woman, and I would definitely regard Ripley as the kind of multi-dimensional complex woman that the test is designed to emphasise the dearth of.

[davidwake.livejournal.com]

That was always my take on it. Sometimes with the litmus you want acid and sometimes alkali.

As we all think, I think, it's a test to apply to all films of, say, a particular year almost as a statistical test of how well Hollywood is doing. Still badly I suspect.

[ms-cataclysm.livejournal.com]

Yes this.

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

The easy fix for this was to make one of the two scientists female. Making the non-Burn Gorman scientist female would have been interesting, I think.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I would have made Choi (the Jaeger ops controller) female - the two scientists mainly interact with each other and it seemed to me that part of the dynamic between them was being opposite poles of male geek.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

I think that for me the Bechdel test distinguishes in otherwise good films between a world view in which the world is made up of male people and female people, split roughly 50/50 and a worldview in which femaleness, like non-WASPnews, is a bizarre quirk which a few people possess. In many bad films of course, women are not abnormal people, they are plot devices, mcguffins seen only in terms of sexual interaction.

That's why I think that Alien3's fail really doesn't matter, because they go out of their way to specifically say "Oh, look, it's a huge bunch of men without any women! That's a bit strange" whereas Pacific Rim's fail does matter, because although they do clearly see the female character as a person, she's placed in a world in which people are assumed male unless proved otherwise.