by Andi Zeisler
The belief that women, as well as nonwhite people, are not an audience has been Hollywood’s most naggingly persistent fiction. Nora Ephron noted, shortly before her 2012 death, “It is always a shock to people at studios that women do go see movies”; Nia Vardalos, whose My Big Fat Greek Wedding remains one of the most successful indie films in history, revealed in a 2009 Huffington Post article that she’d been asked by a studio executive to change the sex of the lead character in her next film from female to male because “women don’t go to the movies.” (The same exec, who apparently lives somewhere inside his own ass, called high-grossing female-fronted films like Sex and the City and Obsessed “flukes.”)
Meanwhile, the idea that male audiences might possibly be expected to reciprocate the attention that women have always paid to their onscreen buddy capers, shoot-outs, space flights, romantic trials, existential struggles, car chases, and dick jokes is, in Hollywood, almost laughable. “Studio executives believe that male moviegoers would rather prep for a colonoscopy than experience a woman’s point of view, particularly if that woman drinks or swears or has a great job or an orgasm,” wrote the New Yorker’s Tad Friend shortly before Bridesmaids came out, in a piece that grimly laid bare the industry’s lack of prospects for female comic actors. “Funny Like a Guy: Anna Faris and Hollywood’s Woman Problem” brimmed with unconcerned statements from anonymous studio executives (“Let’s be honest, the decision to make movies is mostly made by men, and if men don’t have to make movies about women, they won’t”), references to constant dieting, and anecdotes from women about being told to “get some tits.” Everyone quoted in the article described this as business as usual, even when they knew it shouldn’t be.
But let’s back up: Did Bridesmaids work as a floodgate-opener for female-focused movies? Well, yes and no: a few female filmmakers—including Bachelorette’s Leslye Headland and Kay Cannon, who wrote Pitch Perfect and its sequel—noted that its blockbuster status success definitely helped their own films get made.9 And Bridesmaids’ gross-out factor might have made Hollywood more likely to get on board with something like Maggie Carey’s raunchy 2013 sex comedy The To Do List (which, among other things, revisited Caddyshack’s famous poop-in-the-pool gag). But the flip side is that each one of these films, not to mention other post-Bridesmaids efforts, were inevitably compared to their predecessor and found wanting. The fear that Bridesmaids director Paul Feig articulated—“The whole time we were getting ready to do this movie, I had a lot of angst: if I screw this up, Hollywood is just waiting for an excuse to say, ‘See, you can’t do a movie with this many women in it’”—shifted to filmmakers who now had to worry about any female-friendly project they made being panned with negative comparisons. Attaching a male name to the project and invoking Bridesmaids is something of a fail-safe, as was made clear by the promotional posters for 2015’s summer hit Trainwreck, directed by Judd Apatow. Though it was written by and starred Amy Schumer, her name was absent from the posters: instead, they read “From the guy who brought you Bridesmaids . . ., ” a reach that, while not technically untrue—Apatow produced the film, but Paul Feig directed it, and the script was by star Kristin Wiig and Annie Mumolo—was meant as audience assurance. (“Don’t panic, guys—this is kinda like that other thing you grudgingly concluded was ‘pretty funny for a chick film.’”)
There’s even more cultural mulishness when it comes to action movies either directed by women or featuring female leads. When they succeed, as with the nail-biting war narrative The Hurt Locker (directed by Kathryn Bigelow) and the boxing drama Million Dollar Baby (starring Hilary Swank), they’re brushed off as lucky breaks, shining exceptions to the rule that women and grit don’t mix well. When such movies fail, however, their performance is used to buttress the belief that “women don’t see action movies” or “female directors can’t do war films,” or any number of other industry maxims. In 2009, an internal memo from the desk of Jeff Robinov, president of production at Warner Brothers, surfaced on Hollywood reporter Nikki Finke’s blog: the studio would no longer be doing any films with a female lead. It seemed that after the disappointing box office returns of the Jodie Foster action drama The Brave One and the Nicole Kidman thriller The Invasion, Robinov decided to put the onus for the studio’s underperforming movies squarely on women—a move, noted Finke, that was reductive to a bizarre degree. (“I’m told he doesn’t even want to see a script with a woman in the primary position.”) After all, plenty of Warner Brothers films with male leads—in fact, with majority-male casts—had underperformed at the box office in roughly the same time period as The Brave One, including the George Clooney–starring, Steven Soderbergh–directed The Good German, the brotastic western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the sinking-ship remake The Poseidon Adventure, and the superhero reboot Superman Returns.
Duds like these were even noted in an October 2006 New York Times piece titled “After Big Flops, Warner Hopes for ‘Sleeper’ Hit in Smaller Films.” And yet we can assume that none of these disappointments resulted in Robinov and his fellow executives deciding that maybe movies with male leads were the problem. That he felt comfortable decreeing that female-led movies were, though, was naked sexism of a kind that has long existed in Hollywood. Warner Brothers issued a statement reading, “Contrary to recent reports in the blogosphere, Warner Bros is still committed to women. . . . Jeff Robinov insists he is moving forward with several movies with women in the lead. Indeed, he is offended by rumors of his cinematic misogyny.” But a look at the list of Warner Brothers films released between the time of the memo and 2013, when Robinov left the studio, suggests he was true to his original words.
In this realm—a place where 51 percent of the population is still disregarded as a troublesome niche audience not worth expending money and energy on—making what can be praised as the summer’s or the year’s or the decade’s most feminist film means, in many cases, simply making a film that acknowledges women.
The Bechdel Baseline
“I’m tired,” says Melissa Silverstein, the founder of Women in Hollywood. Silverstein is among a number of women who have parlayed their frustrations with the Hollywood status quo into producing a yearly film festival; the one she organizes, the Athena Film Festival, presents a slate of films that highlight “women’s leadership” (though they need not necessarily be directed by women). We’re talking on the phone shortly after her return from 2015’s Cannes festival, and she’s referring to the years after years of year-of-the-woman plaudits. While surely well-meaning, she emphasizes, they obfuscate how much hasn’t changed while letting progressive-minded critics bask in the feeling that by even seeing a movie like Spy or Trainwreck, they’re striking a blow for feminism. As it happens, a few days before we talked, the New York Times had featured two male columnists, Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat, talking about women’s roles with the clubby pomposity of those who have the luxury to discuss women’s equality as an occasional rhetorical diversion. “I can’t even begin to read that,” sighs Silverman. “I’m tired of praising people for doing what is right in [supporting] diverse films.”
Marketplace feminism runs on that kind of artful hyperbole, and, to be very honest, it’s easy to get caught up in it—especially if you want to at least attempt to be optimistic about the prospect of change. Let’s say you read a story, as many of us did recently, about thirty-seven-year-old Maggie Gyllenhaal being informed that she’s too much of a crone to play the love interest of a man twenty years older, and, right after it, a story about how Bridesmaids director Paul Feig is dedicating himself to directing and producing comedies starring women. It’s likely the latter that you’ll want to share on social media with a dancing-lady emoji and a bunch of exclamation points. Most of us are tired of not only the bad news itself, but of being made to feel like we’re focusing only on the negatives and ignoring imminent positives like an all-female reboot of Ghostbusters. (Which I, personally, plan to see the shit out of.) I’ll admit that I’ve often
wondered if our complicity in this kind of smoke-and-mirrors display is part of why the industry has been so slow to change.
Silverstein doesn’t think so, instead pointing to the lack of a critical mass of films by and/or about women all happening at once, a filmic version of a girl gang roaring toward the industry. “As [Selma director] Ava DuVernay said, ‘The math is against us,’” she notes. “One movie by a woman or about women can always be dismissed. But six at one time can’t. Critical mass is talked about as the key in politics, it’s talked about in business. There have to be enough of these movies being successful enough at once that it can’t be brushed off as a fluke.”
If there’s any kind of silver lining here, it’s that more people than ever are talking about Hollywood’s woman problem as pattern behavior, rather than movie-by-movie shortcomings. Feminist analysis of movies was for a long time a niche concern, with critics like Laura Mulvey, Molly Haskell, B. Ruby Rich, bell hooks, and others writing outside mainstream media to academic or otherwise self-selecting readers. But in just the past two decades, thanks mostly to the advent of the Internet, a wealth of feminist film criticism has emerged via blogs like Silverstein’s own Women and Hollywood, as well as webzines, fan communities, and other participatory media. Bitch’s very first issue featured analyses of two then-timely films, Kids and Sleep with Me, whose representation of women and sexual themes we knew mainstream reviewers would gloss over; twenty years later, digging into feminist themes is itself, in many cases, mainstream fare.
What this means is that movie audiences, especially ones who are nonwhite and non-male, are in many ways speaking a completely different language than the people who create the movies. Hollywood’s version of “feminist” content often feels like presenting a graduate student with a copy of Pat the Bunny and saying, “I heard you love to read!” Marketplace feminism, in the form of mainstream movies where women get to kick ass and take names, is increasingly responsible for a bridge across that gulf. But in a time when ostensibly “feminist” content has become a moviegoing trend, the bridge might be less sturdy than Hollywood thinks.
The Bechdel Test’s swift glide into the lexicon of film criticism is a fascinating, if sometimes frustrating, dimension of marketplace feminism. For those who haven’t heard of it, the test is named for graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, who started her career with a comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For that followed the lives of a close-knit group of multicultural activist lesbians. In the 1985 strip “The Rule,” the butch, acerbic Ginger and her date ponder what movie to see, and Ginger explains that she requires a movie to pass three basic tests: “One, it has to have at least two women in it, who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man.” The punch line (“the last movie I was able to see was Alien”) underscores just how rare it is to find a movie that satisfies even these basic requirements. The test (though Bechdel credits the test itself to her friend Liz Wallace, it retains her name) began to be name-checked in blogging and online film criticism in the late 2000s, and, thanks to the power of the Internet, was a full-fledged meme by 2010, when the Web site bechdeltest.com began logging movies that passed the test.
As the Bechdel Test began to creep into the sightline of mainstream movie criticism, it was notable to see the surprise of some male critics that their favorite movies—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Goodfellas, The Princess Bride, Clerks, the original Star Wars trilogy, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and even Tootsie, when you get right down to it—so soundly flunked it. For many women, the reaction was more of a shrug, along with relief that, finally, there was a simple way to help writers and directors step over an embarrassingly low baseline. To be clear, applying the rule isn’t about snatching away the well-earned status of Raging Bull or The Godfather or even This Is Spinal Tap. As Anita Sarkeesian, creator of the Web site Feminist Frequency, noted in a 2009 video about the rule, “It’s not even a sign of whether it’s a feminist movie, or whether it’s a good movie, just that there’s a female presence in it.”
The latter point is something that many people fail to grasp when trying to explain away why their favorite movies don’t pass the test (“But Batman is the hero of the movie! Of course the women characters are going to talk about him!”): the Bechdel Test is not a judgment of quality or nuance. After all, the beautiful, moving Gravity fails the test, while a formulaic rom-com like 27 Dresses passes with no problem. But the test itself is a simple, bloodless assessment of whether female characters are deemed important to a story—and a way to conclude that, most of the time, they aren’t.
Its simplicity hasn’t kept the test from being denounced as politically correct nitpicking or, worse, a nefarious plot to make all movies conform to feminist dogma. In 2013, a small coalition of theaters in Sweden announced a pilot project that would rate movies according to the Bechdel Test, awarding passing films an A. One of the organizers, Ellen Tejle, told the Associated Press that seeing more women onscreen would mean opening up more imaginative possibilities for women themselves: “The goal is to see more female stories and perspectives on cinema screens.” Naturally, this proclamation was greeted with outrage from other film-industry machers, who protested that the test prioritized a limited view of what makes a film meaningful, placing quantification above ineffable qualities of character development and plot; the CEO of the country’s Ingmar Bergman Foundation called the new rating “the final sacrifice of meaningful cultural criticism at the altar of honourable stupidity.”10
Feminist and antiracist film critics and fans have noted the limitations of the Bechdel Test and proposed further, similar kinds of measures: Shortly after the 2013 release of robot-battle movie Pacific Rim, one Tumblr user proposed the Mako Mori Test, named for one of the film’s scarce but beloved characters. It tweaks the Bechdel criteria in small but specific ways, suggesting that the bar is cleared if a movie has “a) at least one female character; who b) gets her own narrative arc; that c) is not about supporting a man’s story.”11 A rule named for TV critic Eric Deggans proposes that a show/movie passes the test when it features at least two nonwhite characters in the primary cast of a movie or TV show that is not about race. And former Bitch editor-in-chief Kjerstin Johnson suggested, after seeing 2015’s Ex Machina, that assessing female nudity in films would also be a useful measure. (“How long [is she] naked? For whose pleasure are the shots? Is she a corpse?”)
Part of the problem with the Bechdel Test is that its utility has been elevated way beyond the original intention. Where Bechdel and Wallace expressed it as simply a way to point out the rote, unthinkingly normative plotlines of mainstream film, these days passing it has somehow become synonymous with “being feminist.” It was never meant to be a measure of feminism, but rather a cultural barometer. After all, the Twilight movies, which are essentially about a young woman in a semi-abusive relationship with a vampire and a slightly more autonomous one with a werewolf—squeaks over the baseline. Bride Wars, the 2010 movie in which Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway play best friends who go full-bore Bridezilla when they schedule their nuptials on the same day, hurdles over it, as does Sin City, a movie in which almost every female character is either sexualized as a stripper or prostitute, or the victim of horrific male violence. Meanwhile, wonderful films like My Dinner With Andre (a movie that is literally just two men talking) or Run Lola Run (in which the titular character is onscreen, though largely silent, almost every second) are whopping Bechdel Test failures. And films by, say, a director with avowedly worrying attitudes toward women (waves to Woody Allen, my personal bête noire), can’t be considered feminist by most stretches of the imagination, but are undeniably Bechdel-friendly.
In a marketplace-feminist world, it’s all too easy to imagine writers and directors who essentially game the system, scripting in just enough named female characters and not-about-men conversations to clear the benchmark while doing nothing to alter the overall sexism. In some cases, it already seems to be happening: the 2014 Marvel blockbuster Gu
ardians of the Galaxy boasted a female screenwriter and a trio of Strong Female Characters, but was also beset with what reviewer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw called “a miasma of douchiness” that included green-skinned assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana) being called a “whore” by one of her male space colleagues and another one suggesting that she use sex to spring them all from prison.12 As with the special-interest attitude toward female directors, it’s very easy to dole out the Strong Female Character roles here and there to make sure there’s an empowerment factor in otherwise formulaic films. It’s much harder to actually commit to changing the attitudes of both moviemakers and audiences.
Still, as one part of what Silverstein calls the Film Equality Movement, the test is undeniably useful—not as an ending point, but as one producers, writers, and directors can jump off from. It offers a language for pointing out the pattern sameness of Hollywood product; it gives a framework and a context to story editors and producers who have been regularly ignored when they point out to their bosses what’s missing from scripts and plotlines. The Bechdel Test has grown to be something of a standard for people who write about films, if not yet for those who make them.
Which brings us back, at least briefly, to Mad Max: Fury Road, the feminist fallacy, and what makes a cultural product feminist. It’s not just a female writer and/or director, as we know from the oeuvres of Nancy Myers and Nora Ephron, delightful as kitchen-porn fare like It’s Complicated and Julie and Julia might be. It could be a movie with a Strong Female Lead® doing stuff usually reserved for dudes, but it just as easily might not be. It’s the job of Hollywood to be honest in its attempts to do better by diverse moviegoers—and if it takes an investigation by the ACLU to get that done, so be it—but it’s also the job of invested audiences to help change the conversations and the standards. Getting beyond marketplace feminism requires that we reword the question of “Is Mad Max (or Trainwreck, or whatever) feminist?” because otherwise we’re suggesting that what matters most about a movie is that people who identify as feminists can enjoy consuming it with a clear conscience.