Along with her memoir Fun Home, cartoonist Alison Bechdel is probably best known for the Bechdel test from her strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Where it’s not offered up as a test, just a tossed off line. Two women going to a movie agree they don’t want to see a film unless it has more than one woman in it, the women talk to each other and they talk about something other than a man (that’s not saying they can’t talk about men, only that they need other subject matter too)
Bechdel has said she wasn’t offering this up as a quality test — i.e., a movie is no good if it doesn’t meet that standard — or as a test at all, rather than the reaction of two of her characters. Still, it hits home because it’s so true: lots of movies do fail the test. By contrast, as Celeste Davis says, if you reverse the test most movies pass easily — that is there’s more than one man in the film, the men talk and they talk about something other than women.
I was thinking about the Bechdel test recently after reading an interview in Comics Creator with Don McGregor, writer of the Black Panther’s first series. Writing the afterword for the collected edition, the late Dwayne McDuffie says the series was a game-changer for him as a kid. With only one white character (Kill-Monger’s ally Venomm), it was a world where everyone — king, criminal, security chief, assassin, farmer, scientist — was black. Suddenly McDuffie’s world seemed bigger.
As McDuffie said elsewhere, when you only have one or two African-American characters, they wind up representing all real-world African-American characters and no character can do that. They’re simply too diverse a group, as is any group. I like the old 1970s blacksploitation movies but as I said back in 2011, they offer a narrow range of black roles. The problem isn’t blacksploitation per se, it’s all the movies with different kinds of black characters that didn’t happen.
That’s one reason the Bechdel test is a useful metric. The more women a story has, the more they have going on besides being The Hero’s Girlfriend, The Hero’s Secretary, The Hero’s Mother, etc., the more the range of women’s lives we see. If some of the roles are stereotypical or stock, the others can balance it out, much as the diverse Chinese characters in Deja Vu balance out the stereotypical (for Western viewing, anyway) wise old mystic.
In Southern Discomfort, my protagonist Maria is a former Army nurse and Vietnam veteran (the story’s set in 1973). She’s been hammered by tragedy and loss, she’s a federal fugitive and she starts the story completely closed off to people. Joan Slattery is a waitress, a nice girl unsure what she wants to do with her life, but ready to step up and do the right thing when it matters. Elizabeth Mitchell is black, politically aware and angry about the murder of one of her friends. Susan Moreno is a teenage science nerd fascinated with the paranormal. Cohen is an FBI agent conscious that if she blows this case, every woman in the FBI — she’s one of the first class of women agents — will be judged a failure. Olwen McAlister, elf and immortal, is an entirely different kettle of fish.
None of them have to bear the burden of being the woman or representing all the women. And that’s a good thing.
Covers by Bechdel (top) and Rich Buckler, all rights to images remain with current holders.
