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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.
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.
