Tag Archives: Movies

December Pandemic Viewing Roundup It’s December. The election is behind us. And 2021 is nigh—hopefully with the promise of a brighter future ahead. In the meantime, we all deserve some time to recover from a year that, we imagine, few will be sorry to see come to an end. As such, for our final Pandemic […]

I have a confession. Prior to this past June, I had never heard of the holiday Juneteenth that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. Several months after the Civil War ended, a General and his troops traveled to Gavelston, Texas announcing all slaves were now free. Despite the historical importance of this […]

As you probably know, the BECHDEL TEST hails from a gag from DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR, a 1980s underground comic strip by CERTIFIED GENIUS, ALISON BECHDEL. It unfolds when two women pass by a movie marquee and one asks the other if she wants to catch a flick. The friend declines with the following qualification:

“I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man.”

She concludes that the last movie she was able to see was ALIEN [1979].

To reiterate, this idea came from a comic strip, that’s C-O-M-I-C, meaning it was intended to be funny. Yet, since then it’s evolved (devolved?) from a witty exaggeration into a cinematic aspiration. And why? Because so many contemporary Hollywood films fail this absurdly deficient litmus test. And when the occasional anomaly does manage to hurdle this ridiculously low-hanging bar, some people have the poor taste to call that “progress.”

How did this happen?