"The Women" hype

[unbibium]

There was a story that reached the front page of Digg, entitled "The Women Will Destroy You and All You Hold Dear", "The Women" being a movie that apparently showcases everything that's wrong with American female culture.

I confess that I'm more afraid of women than anyone I know, but I don't see why there needs to be an uproar. Bad movies, and movies with controversial messages, and combinations thereof, come out all the time. And chick flicks come out all the time. If you, as a man, get dragged to one, consider yourself lucky you have someone who values your company that much. And I'm not worried about some game-changing meme spreading from the movie, because the game isn't really in my favor right now anyway. So I'm not going to link to this story just to join the male community in wetting our pants over this movie.

Instead, I'm going to ask anyone out there who sees this film if it is that rarest of things: a movie which passes the Bechdel-Wallace test, which has the following properties:

1. Has two female characters... -- the entire cast is female.
2. ...who talk to each other... -- to fail here, it would have to be the most passive-aggressive movie ever. Everyone relaying messages by telephone through men offscreen.
3. ...about something other than a man. O RLY? The article alleges that the whole film is about one guy's infidelity. So it's still possible that it will fail here, and that will be sad. Sadder still if the only exception ends up being the token lesbian, talking about women. Most likely, they'll have to talk about something else eventually. Someone will need to borrow five dollars or something.

Thanks to the XKCD blog for cluing me into this rule. As an early adopter of tvtropes.com, this fascinates me. The "rule" does have a tvtropes page, but there's not even a list of movies that pass the rule. I figured Sex and the City might be one, with all the female leads, except, you know, it's about sex.

Comments

[jwgh]

Wow, that article is quite a piece of work.

The Bechdel-Wallace test is interesting. I've seen it a couple of times before but I have not yet trained myself to be aware of it while I'm movie-watching. But thinking back on movies I've seen recently:

Iron Man: two female characters, talk to each other once, but it's about the main (male) character.

Speed Racer: I guess there are a few female characters with speaking roles but I'm not sure they ever talk to each other and if they do I'm sure it's about Speed.

Looking at my recent Netflix rentals now. Um, I guess 'Reno 911!: Miami' is pretty much the only movie I've gotten that way recently that passes the test.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That was one of the first things Sam and I noted coming out of Iron Man, that it violated The Rule bigtime.

Netflix history

[notr.livejournal.com]

In our very latest, Stargate: The Ark of Truth, Vala and Adria talk about the Ori, who may or may not be male and female, Morgan and Adria talk momentarily about each other before destroying each other, and I'm sure Vala and Sam must have talked about something besides Daniel. Otherwise, it's 12 movies back to get to Akeelah and the Bee, and even that is dominated by Akeelah's late father and her tutor.

Re: Netflix history

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

In the original Bechdel cartoon, the alien in Alien counted as not a man, so I suppose that first example counts.

Re: Netflix history

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Science fiction is useful for this.

Before I even heard of The Rule, I was watching Voyager one day, and it was the episode where they found a really tiny wormhole that lead kinda sorta to home, but in Romulan space, and they used it to open a communication channel. And B'Ellana ran into the ready room and announced that she might actually be able to squeeze a transporter beam through it, and the two of them started brainstorming about it for a while. And I noticed. I didn't notice anything in particular; I just noticed the situation.

Of course, that was back in my DeVry days, before I actually had any experience around women in real life. Now I work, and there are lots of women around here, but they practically never talk about men, even to each other, because we have shit to do. But the shit we have to do isn't something you'd write a movie about.