Jon alerted me to the existence of the 'Bechdel Test'. It consists of the following rules, to be applied to films, but could easily be extended to literature.

1. Does it have at least two women in it,
2. Who [at some point] talk to each other,
3. About something besides a man.

Writer Charles Stross adds that 'if you extend #3 only slightly, to read "About something besides men or marriage or babies", you can strike out about 50% of the small proportion of mass-entertainment movies that do otherwise seem to pass the test.'



Once you know about the test, it's impossible not to apply it, however casually. Stross is right – huge quantities of cultural output (possibly even more than he suggests) fails. The last film I saw, The Dark Knight (about which I am going to say nothing, as too much has already been said), passes by a whisker, when a female cop tells the wife of another cop to leave her house over the phone, but she is forced to do so at gunpoint by a gone-bad Harvey Dent, so I'm not sure it really counts.

Several things spring to mind:

1. What is so frightening about women talking to each other without the mediation of their supposed interest in men/marriage/babies?
2. Does cinema/literature have a duty to representation such that it is duty bound to include such scenes, as opposed to pursuing its own set of agendas? Why should literature/cinema be 'realistic' when it could be whatever it wants to be?
3. Does reality itself pass the test? How much of the time?



Chytilová's Daisies is one of the few films that basically passes the test throughout, and its clear that it disturbs some as much as it charms. Who are these irresponsible young women who find it more amusing to play with each other, and occasionally with men, but only so they can be yet more 'spoiled'? The formal inventiveness of the film would undermine its claims to 'realism', but this is all the better. Powell and Pressburger in their own unique way have some brilliant dialogue between women. In their 'metaphysical love story' I Know Where I'm Going!, women not only get interesting, engaging lines but they even talk to each other, sometimes avoiding the topic of men completely. Imagine. The same is true of many of their other films. Contemporary mainstream cinema seems, on the whole, retrograde compared to its earlier incarnations, as if a possible space for such things has been closed off for good.

There is something strange about the weird absence of women talking from cinema. Aren't women supposed to always be talking? Of course, they're not meant to be talking about anything important, which is presumably why the camera only turns to them when men are mentioned.

Kant's in his Anthropology (1798) is quite bothered by women's 'loquacity', mentioning it several times, particularly when it goes 'wrong':

'Amentia (Unsinnigkeit) is the inability to bring one's representations into even the coherence necessary for the possibility of experience. In lunatic asylums it is women who, owing to their talkativeness, are most subject to this disease: that is, their lively power of imagination inserts so much into what they are relating that no one grasps what they actually wanted to say.'

Too much talking prevents even the possibility of experience - no space/time for you, girly, you just sit there in the corner and babble crazily to yourself! It's not that women think just about men, it's that they think about everything, madly, all the time. How could cinema possible deal with that?



Films that appear to be 'all about women', such as Sex and the City are paeans to a curious combination of ultra-mediation and a post-religious obsession with 'the one'. You go to the City in search of 'labels and love'; the one mediating the other – the nicest thing your boyfriend can do for you is have a giant wardrobe installed for all your 'labels'. Drinks with 'the girls' are dominated by discussions about whether he is 'the one' or not. What does this obsession with 'the one' mean? The bourgeoisie may have 'drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation', as Marx and Engels observed, but certain religious motifs are harder to shake than others. The 'one' as the transcendent culmination of an entire romantic destiny demonstrates a curious melange of the sentimental ('we were always meant to be together!') and the cynical (if there's a 'one' then the 'non-ones' don't count; the sex with them is of no importance, there is no need to behave even moderately pleasantly towards them).

There is no emancipation here, if all effort is ultimately retotalised onto the project of 'the one'; if all discussions with 'friends' are merely mediating stepping-stones in the eschatological fulfillment of romantic purpose. Contemporary cinema is profoundly conservative in this regard; and the fact that it both reflects and dictates modes of current behaviour is depressingly effective, and effectively depressing.