The Problem with the Bechdel Test

The thing about changes in media that come to reflect changing ideas about political correctness is that there isn’t really any way to measure their “political correctness” or offensiveness, or what have you. This is why we’ve got condescending movies that are supposed to be about “race relations” like, say, “Crash” or “Driving Miss Daisy.” There’s no real way to say “this is or isn’t condescending.” On the flipside of that, look at something like “Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song.” That bad boys appears to be  extraordinarily blacksploitation. But it was directed by a Black man and was even shown to the likes of the Black Panthers.

            That’s why the Bechdel—or Bechdel-Wallace—test is used so much by media critics as a sort of short hand for judging how “feminist” a book/movie/comic book/what have you is. This is in spite the problems with the concept itself.

For those of you who don’t know, the Bechdel test is named after a certain Ms. Alison Bechdel who first introduced the world to the test in her comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For”. The test goes that in order for a book/movie/comic book/what have you to be considered “feminist,” it has to fulfill three criteria: one, there has to be more than one female character; two they have to talk at some point; and three, it has to be about something other than guys. Some have added the caviat that they also can’t be talking aobut stereotypically “female” things like shoes, make-up or gossip, and while I’m writing this, I feel a second caviat should be that they aren’t obviously flirting, but you get the general idea.

Now this seems like a fairly easy test to pass, but just see how many movies or books or videogames can actually boast having passed just by rattling them off in your head. Not many come to mind, do they?

Hell apparently there’s even a sort of “race” Bechdel test where it has to be two non-white characters discussing something other than white characters.

This all seems pretty straight forward until you give it a bit more thought. How many of those movies, books or videogames you were counting off in your head were not only genuinely good but also had definite feminist themes under the hood. Movies like Mulan, for example, or even Return of the King, just because they have the one single female character amongst dozens of men. Terminator 2, whose has Sarah Connor, one of the more popular female action stars among feminists, doesn’t pass.

Not only that, but there are definitely very misogynistic movies out there that would pass, or, to use a better word, break, the Bechdel Test. Showgirls for example, a movie which could best be summarized as “The Room” but with strippers, passes/breaks, if only because of the following exchange between two characters whose names I’m way to lazy to look up.

“I like nice tits. Do you like nice tits?”

“I like having nice tits.”

Try telling me that any movie which has those two lines could possibly, in any way, shape or form be called feminist.

Not only that but both My Immortal, a fan fic which makes the Star Wars prequel trilogy look like Godfather two by comparison, and fucking Twilight(technically) of all things passes/break the Bechdel test. And if feminists can agree on anything it’s that the most important thing in life is having a boyfriend, especially one whose a century old and watches you while you sleep.

This doesn’t even begin to go into detail about how most lesbian porn (not the kind directed at lesbians) makes the Bechdel test cave in on itself.

To be fair, in the original comic she lampshades these inherent flaws by the character who suggests the concept saying that the last movie she saw that passed the test was “Alien,” and while it certainly has feminist themes—not as many as “Aliens,” though, but that’s just me—it’s not exactly what comes to mind when someone thinks of “feminist cinema.” Needless this little tidbit goes unmentioned in videos like this

Let me be clear here. I am not trying to discount the Bechdel test. All I’m saying is that the Bechdel test is a bit of blunt object when it comes to literary analysis. It gets the job done, but in the end, literary analysis is an exact science, and trying to rely too heavily on the Bechdel test is like using a leatherman knife to do an autopsy. I suppose you can try, but instead of trying to twist to be exactly what you want, why not just use an actual knife.

The Problem with GINO

So, as the title of this blog will suggest, I sure I’m not the first to say that Rolland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla was a massive pile of crap. A terrible mess 90s CGI, Jurassic Park envy, Matthew Brodrick, and cheap shots at Siskel and Ebert whose only redeeming quality was the presence of Jean Reno, one of my favorite French things, it's name will forever go down in history as one the great hollywood fuck ups. But the primary flaw of GINO (Godzilla in Name Only, at least according to tvtrope) is one that isn’t one on a technical one, or even an acting level (Jean Reno manages to just barely cancel out Brodrick in my book), but on a symbolic level.

You see, the best monsters to symbolically represent something, be it topical to it’s time (like the original Godzilla) or a basic part of the human condition or psyche. Xenomorphs represent rape. Brundlefly represented, and still represents (although not entirely intentionally), the then burgeoning AIDs epidemic. Dracula represented the repressed sexual tension of the Victorian era. And Godzilla/Gojira, well he represents the Bomb. Or, to be more specific, Hiroshima.

Having watched the very first Godzilla before it had been turned into the massive Kaiju--Japanese monster movie--franchise it is now, I can tell you that the symbolizism is there and it is as clear as day. The movie opens with scenes of ruined buildings and people in stretchers, while a narrator sets the scene:

·      

"This is Tokyo. Once a city of six million people. What has happened here was caused by a force which up until a few days ago was entirely beyond the scope of Man's imagination. Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world. There were once many people here who could've told of what they saw... now there are only a few."

If that doesn’t send a tingle down the spine, then I don’t know what will. If they’d replaced “Tokyo” with “Hiroshima” then you’d swear they were talking about the Bomb. It’s probably one of the more haunting metaphors for Nuclear destruction I’ve seen put to film.

While “Gojira” was definitely a very cathartic experience for the Japanese, “Godzilla” managed to speak to U.S. audiences as well. The titular lizard’s slow gait and near indestructable nature, like the zombies of the cold war era, represent the slow but sure approach that the world was making towards nuclear armeggedon.

That all being said, lets look at our culprit, GINO. Whereas the original Godzilla had the fifties, a time rife for the powerful symbolism inherent in the monster movie the, the nineties was a pretty boring time. Despite being made by Emmerich, the kind of director who made a living off of such destruction movies, there wasn’t really much in the nineties for Godzilla to be juxtaposed to. There was no threat of nuclear annihilation or even any paranoia about communism taking over. There wasn’t even 9/11. All there really was was Jurassic Park, whose success GINO aggressively tries to emulate like every other Disney blockbuster from John Carter to the Lone Ranger tries to emulate the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, throwing the essentials at us, but forgetting the damned point. This is evident in the way GINO was slimmed down and made all the more t-rex like. But the Jurassic Park trilogy worked due to the way in mixed every little boy’s love of dinosaurs with some genuinely good cinematography and a perfect balance of practical and digital special effects—a balance which I feel doesn’t get anywhere near as much love as it should these days—making it look as good today as it did back then. GINO on the other hand, as mentioned before, is an ungodly clusterfuck of terrible looking 90s CGI which manages the feat of making sy-fy channel original features look realistic by comparison.

Not only that, but the very fact that they tried—and failed, but that’s not the point of this paragraph—to emulate Jurassic Park just goes to show how little the directors got the original Godzilla. The original Gojira’s slow gait, while certainly a repercussion of the limitations of practical effects of time, hammered home the point. He may not have been that fast, but it didn’t matter because he was unstoppable. Throw as many mortars, bullets and missiles you like at the great beast, but it didn’t do squat in the end, because Godzilla was a juggernaut. A force of un-nature that will destroy everything in it’s path. Like, you know, the A-bomb.

How it can work, in my opinion

For those of you who pay attention, you may have heard that there’s another American Godzilla being made, this time by Garth Edwards, the guy who made Monsters (no, not that one, that one), which is a good sign, seeing as how Monsters at least got that monster movies can have very real allegorical value. And while Movie Bob, my go-to guy for movie reviews, might've panned Monsters, I for one am cautiously optimistic.

That being said, in my opinion, it would work best if they did exactly what the remake of King Kong did, and set it in the same time period as the original. This way, the movie could focus on the tension between the americans and the Japanese, as well as give more depth to Serizawa's sacrifice in the end. At the time, the Japanese were probably afraid of saying anything too overt about Hiroshima, seeing as how they were the losers in WWII.

Or they could go all out and just do an over-the-top homage to Kaiju flicks in general, but then they’d be ripping Pacific Rim off wholesale, and the mistakes of the past would continue be ignored.

Blatherings: Why I hate the Snowflake Metaphore: An Exercise in Cynicism and Redundancy

So I was looking around on Okay Cupid the other day (yes, yes, make of that what you will) and I found this one girl—for the sake of anonymity, I won’t reveal names—who seemed pretty cool. She was mildly self deprecating, into David Lynch and French flicks, liked discussions of philosophy, that kind of good stuff. However there was one mild turnoff, even if it was in jest: smack-dab in the middle of her profile was the phrase

~*BuT waIt i'M A bUTtIFuLL UnIQuE SNoWfLAke JSt LuV mE *~

Now if there’s one metaphor that’s always gotten on my nerves, it’s the old “every person is their own unique, beautiful snowflake.” I’m sure you’ve heard it, if not during kindergarten making one of those stupid cutouts that never, ever end up looking anything like a damned snow flake, then either on one of those motivational posters they’d always post around school, and if not there than in fight club. Tyler Durdan once said to his underlings in Project Mayhem “you are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying matter as everything else.” Now while I certainly understand what Durdan’s getting at, I’m going to have to disagree with the comparison, not in that I think we’re beautiful or unique, but that by calling someone a snowflake, no matter how beautiful, you might as well be comparing them to the same decaying organic matter as everything else. 

I mean let’s think about snowflakes for a bit here. They may each seem to have their own perfect geometry that seems to be crafted by the hand of god, Himself, however you’ll hardly be noticing that when you’re stepping on them left and right, letting your dog piss on them, or shoveling them out of your driveway into piles on the street for them to turn into brown slush.

            Let’s look at the lifespan of a snowflake. After a snowflake forms in the sky via whatever scientific process creates snowflakes, it floats to the ground as gently as a feather, or, well, a snowflake. This could be likened to the process of being born, or better yet, becoming an adult. Once you hit the ground, so to speak, it’s nothing but hell from thereon in.

            For the first few hours of your existence, yeah, you’ll make everything look all nice and sugarcoated, but people’s wonder lasts only so long before people decide that your current placement is too much of an inconvenience to be tolerated. Chances are, if you aren’t stepped on, sled upon or pissed on by some dog, you’ve shoveled into a giant pile of along with god knows what else was in the road, dirt included. If you’re lucky, you’ll be used to maybe make a snowman or molded into a snowball (although if that’s the case, there’s also the very real danger of further corruption, depending on how cruel the child is). But if they do, then you’ll be smushed against your brethren, each of you losing your uniqueness so that the shape you’re being formed into is stable.

            Not only that but your entire existence is dependent on the harshness of winter. As beautiful as you are, you are a hazard. You and your brethren cause hypothermia and frostbite in any humans unequipped to deal with. Your existence is dependent on the blocking out of the sun, preventing plants from photosynthesizing and creating more life.

            And when winter does eventually end, you’ll melt, not all at once, mind you, but inn short enough bursts so that, even if you’ve been molded into a snow man, you’ll become deformed and misshapen, as if the rays of the sun have given you down syndrome. If you’re lucky some kid whose likes to think he’s clever will save you snowball form for some unsuspecting victim; but in the end it’s just delaying the inevitable? Whether it's at the beginning of March or at the end of summer, you will melt.

            In short, by comparing either yourself or anyone to a snowflake you’re saying that our existence is small and fragile. Despite it’s outward beauty, it is wholly dependent on the harm and burdening of those we share space with. Each one of us may be unique, but that uniqueness is buried beneath the uniqueness of several millions of other of our peers before disappearing with barely a trace. The best we can hope for is to become a part of something bigger, our uniqueness unseen beneath the general shape we have become a part of. And yet together we cause more harm than our beauty truly deserves.

            Isn’t that inspiring?

Review: World War Z

If there’s one thing that World War Z does well that no other zombie movie does right, it’s that it manages to capture the shear scale and insanity of an initial zombie outbreak. It neither relies it’s main character waking up in medias res like in Walking dead or 28 Days Later—one of the few things I dislike about both—nor does it just leave it’s audience to assume that the world has been overrun like in most all zombie apocalypse movies before it save maybe 28 Weeks later. We hear the news reports of chaos breaking out all over the world and just like the trailer shows us, we see the chaos the initial outbreak causes. And we also see get to see the rest of the world go to hell in a hand-basket. I suppose this is one advantage to zombie being so damned popular is getting to see a movie where all we get to see all this. The sequences in Israel and the one on the plane have to be two of my favorite zombie scenes put to celluloid, if only because I knew exactly what song they were playing in the former.

That being said, this intensity kind of works against it. While the aforementioned in medias res approach to both Walking Dead and 28 Days are sort of a copout, they were necessary so that we the viewer get to see the harsh, unrelenting reality of living both with the threat of the undead but also that of the living pushed to the brink. World War Z loses this emotional punch beneath the crazy chase sequences and scientific accuracy.

While I’m at it, I’ll add a few last minute nit-picks: some of the sound effects sound a little too “trailery”, the various booms and bwa-wa-wa’s sounding a bit like something out of Inception. Not to mention the final sequence at the end feels a little lack-luster in comparison to the majority of the scenes before it, making it feel a bit anti-climactic.

TL;DR

While it lacks the emotional punch of either Walking Dead or 28 Days Later (the latter my favorite zombie movie to date) it makes up for it with it’s intensity and sheer scale. I say give it a look, if only for that one Israel scene.