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

Comments

[sesquipedality]

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]

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]

Yes this.

[a_cubed]

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]

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]

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.