Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. always understood symbolism and that words and actions had to match each other. That’s why he marched and got arrested in Birmingham, Alabama on Good Friday, 1963. While he was jailed there over Holy Week, he wrote his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. How much more powerful is that as a message and a symbol than a “Letter from a Birmingham Hotel Room”?
A blessed Easter or Passover to you all.
There are lots of movies with great relationships between men. There are a number of movies with interesting roles for women. But how many movies out there feature multiple major female characters who interact with each other? That’s the question the Bechdel Test for Women in Film tries to answer. I stumbled across this amazingly simple tool for analyzing films in one of those “You might also like” boxes at the bottom of the Mediaite page.
Here’s the scoop, quoted from Rachel Sklar’s Mediaite article (which references a post from Boing, Boing):
The Bechdel test—named for the cartoonist Alison Bechdel who wrote a long-running comic strip called Dykes To Watch Out For and the critically acclaimed graphic novel Fun Home—is a test to assess whether women have a meaningful presence in a movie. It consists of three questions.
1. Are there two or more women in it that have names?
2. Do they talk to each other?
3. Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?
Once you start thinking about it, you’ll be surprised by how many films don’t pass this test. In fact, there are entire genres (action-adventure, for example) that seem to fail the Bechdel test, by and large.
Not surprisingly, male-centric movies such as Fight Club, or Lawrence of Arabia, or Das Boot don’t pass the test. But as Rachel Sklar points out, other notable non-passing movies include:
This test doesn’t judge the quality of the movie or whether it is misogynistic, only that it doesn’t portray the interaction of two women with names dealing with something other than a man.
Let me reiterate – the Bechdel test doesn’t say whether a movie is good or bad, or whether it has positive portrayals of women (Read the full week of the comic Dumbing of Age for a great discussion of this!). It only tells us how central the interactions of women with other women are to the plot of the movie.
Here are two videos that deal with the Bechdel test. The first introduces us to the test and the second looks at how the movies nominated for best picture Oscar in 2012 fared when facing the test.
The Bechdel Test
Applying the Bechdel Test to the 2012 Oscars
So the movie of The Hunger Games is out, and it’s been an enormous success. Here are some questions the movie might raise:
The Artist won a host of Oscars in 2012, including Best Actor and Best Picture. Not bad for a black & white silent movie….
This is the trailer for the original summer blockbuster Jaws released in the summer of 1975.
Remember when you talk about “The Media”:
I don’t want to get into an argument about bias. You go looking for it, you’ll find it. Left or right. But don’t try to paint “The Media” as some monolithic institution. It’s a wide-ranging stew of content out there.
For some food for thought, take a look at the “Seven Truths ‘They’ Don’t Want You To Know About The Media“
During the advertising unit, I often interrupt the lecture for a “word from our sponsors.” Here are a few of my favorites:
The documentary Bully has been getting a lot of attention this week for the R rating the MPAA assigned it.
As of right now, the MPAA (who does the ratings) says that the documentary on bullying deserves the R rating for bad language. Movie stars like Johnny Depp as well as anti-bullying advocates are fighting the rating.
The producers of the movie say they are going to release it unrated. But that means that many (though not all) movie theaters will refuse to show it because they never show unrated movies. The Parents Television Council is pushing for theaters to hold to this policy.
Bully will carry a “Common Sense” rating issued by Common Sense Media of “Pause 13+,” the same rating that the group gave The Hunger Games. The rating means that for age 13 and higher, parents should “know your child, some content may not be right for some kids.”
Common Sense Media is dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing the trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in a world of media and technology.
We exist because our nation’s children spend more time with media and digital activities than they do with their families or in school, which profoundly impacts their social, emotional, and physical development . As a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization, we provide trustworthy information and tools, as well as an independent forum, so that families can have a choice and a voice about the media they consume.
As a side note, unrated versions of movies are quite often the standard when it comes to video releases. So it’s not as though theaters showing an unrated movie would be a sign of the cultural apocalypse.
UPDATE: As of early April, 2012, the MPAA and the producers of Bully came to an agreement to cut three instances of the “F-word” out of the movie in return for giving it a PG-13 rating.
Michael Cimino’s epic failure of a motion picture Heaven’s Gate is credited with/blamed for sinking the United Artists film studio. Some claim it was a masterpiece. Me? My wife-to-be and I saw it on our first date back in 1981. The date was fine, the movie was awful.
The documentary Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate tells the story of how the movie came to be the disaster that it was. It’s in 8 parts on YouTube:
Trailer for the film Heaven’s Gate
