April 11th, 2010
by
Yonmei
In 1979, the movie Alien became the first known film to pass the Bechdel Test. Thirty years on, where are we at? James Cameron’s big sci-fi movie for 2009 has three women playing major roles – Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacon), and of course Doctor Grace Augustine herself (Sigourney Weaver)… and yet fails to pass the Bechdel Test. I don’t think any of the three women ever get to speak to each other.
[Before any more Constant Readers point it out to me: Yes, I managed to muddle Cameron, who directed Aliens, with Ridley Scott, who directed Alien. Oops. *facepalm*]
I went to see Avatar with a friend just before Christmas, and we both enjoyed it – for the background special effects rather than the plot, of course.
Walking away from it afterwards, I thought how Cameron could have made a film that passed the Bechdel Test (and would had at least a superficially more-original plot) simply by taking the same “risk” he took thirty years earlier – and casting a woman to play Jake Sully instead of a man.
Yes, all the bloody race issues are still there, and yes, taking a classically boring heterosexual white soldier falls for “native woman” does not actually become that much more original plot when the white soldier is a woman – but … even if Brokeback Mountain wasn’t that great of a gay story, wasn’t it still astonishing to see two men in love in a blockbuster movie? Wouldn’t it be astonishing to see two women in love in a PG-13 you-can’t-see-the-nipples sci-fi action movie where the central plot is not all about how titilating it is for the guys to have two women making out on a big screen?
Or am I just being too hopeful? The Playboy interview about why the Navi have to have breasts even though they’re not mammalian does not sound like James Cameron has spent any time in the last thirty years learning anything except that women don’t buy cinema tickets and female characters exist to promote male leads, and of course: you can spend millions creating a realistic alien world, but by god the female aliens must be otherness without being offputting – to heterosexual men.
I could dream about what Avatar would have been if Cameron had been brave enough to cast a woman as Jake Sully. But really, if he had, wouldn’t everything else he learned in thirty years have come to the fore, so that Jake and Grace would spend their movie-time together talking about what Jake feels for the Navi man that Cameron would have wanted to hook her up with?
![[Slashdot]](http://slashdot.org/favicon.ico)
![[Digg]](http://digg.com/favicon.ico)
![[Reddit]](http://reddit.com/favicon.ico)
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif)
![[Facebook]](http://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
![[Technorati]](http://technorati.com/favicon.ico)
![[Google]](http://www.google.com/favicon.ico)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.stumbleupon.com/favicon.ico)
- More blogging by
Yonmei at
http://yonmei.insanejournal.com
Previous:
FailFandom to Hugo Awards: Pity? I don’t think so --- Next:
Who invented fanfic?
Filed under Sexuality & queerness, TV & Film, female characters | Comments (10)
My theory is that Cameron’s movies started to slide downhill after he and Gale Anne Hurd (and Kathryn Bigelow too) got divorced.
I agree with what you’re saying about James Cameron & the female roles in his films, but what did you mean about Alien being the first known film to pass the Bechdel test? Did you mean first SF film? There have certainly been films before 1979 which passed the test – the Katharine Hepburn version of Little Women comes to mind.
The article you linked to about a screenwriter being pressured out of Bechdel-passing scripts is so very, very depressing.
Verstehen: seconded. Movies Cameron made without Hurd: Avatar, Titanic and True Misogyny, sorry, True Lies. Movies Cameron made with Hurd: Aliens, all the Terminators, The Abyss.
Cameron had nothing to do with the original Alien, so I’m confused about you using it as a benchmark. In fact I think there is a compelling argument that Cameron undermined much of the femisim in the first film when he made Aliens.
As Pete points out, James Cameron wasn’t involved with the making of Alien. It was Ridley Scott, that film’s director and producer, who decided to cast Ripley as a woman. Cameron came in for Aliens, the second film in the series, which despite some serious feminist cred doesn’t pass the Bechdel test unless one counts Newt as a woman. The only adult female characters in that movie, Ripley and Vasquez, never speak.
I do rate Cameron as a feminist filmmaker (and I don’t think that the Bechdel test is the only way of gauging feminism), or perhaps more accurately as a filmmaker whose films are notable for giving women their own stories, and who has given us some of the most memorable images of female action heroines in the last thirty years, but there are things that his work never sought to accomplish, such as depicting a society of women, and there’s no question that there’s been a steady decline in the prominence and pro-active quality of the roles he’s written for women in the second half of his career.
My own opinion is that Cameron, while he fetishizes strong women, almost always punishes them for being bad mothers or ensures that they end up paired off with a stronger male figure. This isn’t to say that Ripley or Sarah Connor aren’t strong women, but that their very heroism disguises a relatively reactionary and conservative world view that permeates most of his films, at least when it comes to gender.
Tansy: but what did you mean about Alien being the first known film to pass the Bechdel test?
I meant that in the original Alison Bechdel comic strip, when the first dyke says to the second dyke that “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.” the second dyke says “pretty strict, but a good idea” and the first dyke says “No kidding. Last movie I was able to see was Alien …the two women in it talk to eah other about the monster.” (I copied the dialogue just now from the comic-strip in Dykes to Watch Out For, published 1986.)
Abigail: which despite some serious feminist cred doesn’t pass the Bechdel test unless one counts Newt as a woman.
You do know she’s not actually a newt?
…okay, fair point. Still, I figure little girls can count.
(We do not know that the original dyke dialoguers wouldn’t have counted it: the original “The Rule” strip is on page 22, so probably dates from 1983 or 84, a couple of years before Aliens came out.)
Avatar passed the Bechdel test just barely – in a group conversation, Trudy made a certain comment (I forget what) which Grace responded to by saying “Damn.” (I’m not positive that was the only Bechdel moment, but it was there.)
(self-promotion!) I made an LJ post a while ago about all the unnecessary aping (…blue-cat-peopleing?) of sexist irritations from IRL that cropped up in Avatar: I just mirrored it on my blog now, if you want to see.
I like your rant, Thene: thanks for linking to it.
It makes me feel embarrassed that I did actually enjoy Avatar at the time I was watching it: I wasn’t expecting anything cool from the plot, I just wanted to sit back and enjoy viewing the world. I like your idea of being able to talk with all the NPC…
Thanks for the info. Can I use some of this on my site?
[The IP address for this comment is from Westin Hotel, California. The URL is jamescameronsite dot com, which is in fact ... James Cameron's website (and has an IP address in Dallas Texas). The E-mail is admin at jamescameron dot com, which is a website first registered in 2005 by "Dreamseller Inc - In Stealth Mode", which appears to be a squatter company that makes a living by buying up good domain names and re-selling them: I would imagine their purchase of jamescameron dot com is why James Cameron's website has the URL it does. Investigating spambots is usually duller ... and shorter.]