Tox screen report
Are films becoming more inclusive and diverse? Building on the Bechdel test, new tests are demanding more than just two women who speak. They also ask: does the character have a voice, a purpose, a happy ending? And, who’s behind the lens?
If you can remove a female character from your plot and replace her with a hot lamp, and your story still works, you’re a hack, American comic-book creator Kelly Sue DeConnick said in 2013. The Sexy Lamp Test is a statement on just how sexist some Hollywood movies, movie-makers and studios still are. Since 1985, the Bechdel test has helped quantify that dysfunction. First published as a gag in a comic strip by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, it states that in order to tell if a film adequately represents women, one must ask: Does it contain at least two female characters? Who speak? To each other? About something other than a man?
A 2018 BBC study found that only 49% of Oscar Best Picture winners from 1929 to 2017 pass the Bechdel test. The test isn’t ironclad. The 2013 film Gravity doesn’t pass it, for instance, even though Sandra Bullock carries the film, because she is the only speaking female character.
To be fair, the Test wasn’t designed to be ironclad; it was designed to be eye-opening, and so it endured. In recent years, there has been a move to create new tests that might better measure gender misrepresentation and other kinds of biases. Take a look.
Are there enough women?
In 2017, the statistical analysis platform FiveThirtyEight launched a campaign to create a new Bechdel test, more suited to the present. It invited women from film and TV to devise new ways of calculating gender and racial imbalance. The conversation soon became about the massive gender gap in almost every aspect of filmmaking behind the camera too.
A study by US-based think tank Annenberg
Inclusion Initiative found that across 900 Hollywood films released between 2007 and 2016, less than 4% were directed by women. So, Canadian-American singersongwriter and actress Rory Uphold devised the Uphold Test in 2017. It states that no film can claim to represent women if women do not make up at least 50% of the on-set crew. None of the 50 highest-grossing films of 2016 passes this test.
Of colour?
Lena Waithe, the Emmy Award-winning writer on the web series Master of None (2015-), came up with the Waithe Test in 2017. In order to pass it, a movie or show must feature a black woman in a position of power and in a healthy romantic relationship. “Everybody deserves to see… accurate and layered and complex images of themselves,” Waithe said in an interview with FiveThirtyEight.
With fully realised lives?
In 2016, Manohla Dargis, film critic for The New York Times, came up with the DuVernay Test, named after black American filmmaker Ava DuVernay. To pass it, an African-American character — or any other minority character — must have a fully realised life, with their own ambitions, rather
than functioning as background characters for whites-dominated plotlines.
And a happy ending?
The Landau Test, courtesy writer Noga Landau, focuses on what a film shouldn’t have. A work is not gender-friendly, it states, if its female protagonist ends up dead, unhappily pregnant or exists only to create problems for the male protagonist.
And is the background too white?
The majority of supporting roles and bit parts as extras go to men. It’s an imbalance that writer Kate Hagen picked up on and then could not unsee. “The lack of women starts driving you mad… If we’re in New York City, why is the crowd 70% male and 80% white?” she said in an interview with FiveThirtyEight. A movie passes her test if: Half of one-scene roles go to women and the first crowd scene is at least 50% women.
Various factors, including a push from people in the industry, growing women audiences and changing demographic and spending patterns, have seen the axis tilt a little already. The UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report 2022, released in March, examined 252 of the highest-grossing Englishlanguage films released in 2021 via theatres and / or major streaming platforms and found that the percentage of leading roles played by people of colour (PoC) nearly quadrupled over the decade since 2011, and was 38.9%. The percentage of PoC directors more than doubled, from 12.2% to 30.2%.
The percentage of women in leading roles nearly doubled, and is 47.2%; the percentage of women directors increased more than fivefold, from 4.1% to 21.8%.
The change is visible at the box office. Films such as Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse (2018) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) don’t just dutifully check boxes. They joyfully inhabit an entirely parallel universe.