bechdel testing my favorite movie
One of my favorite movies ever has 14 women in it. I was initially surprised, but then I broke down each scene that I saw a woman and I found that sometimes, the tests that we could try to rely on to ‘filter’ or change our viewing experience, can’t tell us the reasons behind why there may be no women, no people of color, no representative of the LGBTQ or indigenous community. My favorite film of all time that passes nearly NONE of the assigned tests this week, is 2001, A Space Odyssey. This 1968 Stanley Kubrick directed film was made based on the novel written by Arthur C Clarke, and was defined as the film that pushed the boundaries of cinematography and science-fiction at the time. And yet, the film only had that small number of women in it.
To return to the subject of the Bechdel test, there are multiple women in this movie - from flight attendants, the main character’s daughter, to a concierge on the space station. In reading these titles, this just appears as though the women in this movie are fulfilling roles forced upon them as females, however there are two other female characters present that allow for this movie to pass the Bechdel test. These two characters are female doctors present on the Space Station, and they speak with each other about which direction they need to be headed to go back to Earth. Though this does not seem very important (or at least important enough to pass as a ‘conversation’) I felt as though representing them as doctors with respective careers as well as mothers with families, was an interesting choice made by both the novel and the film, seeing as they were both created in the 60s.
Though this film fits none of the other criteria for any of the other tests (not having a main female character, not having a person of another race, not having an indigenous character and finally not having a character representing the LGBTQ community) each woman I listed above plays a key role in the film, whether we realise or not.
I planned to apply both the Villareal and Landau tests, before I realised that there are no main roles played by women. However, in this near two and a half hour movie, almost each woman represented is shown with a pivotal piece of technology. As an example, the first woman shown on screen in the movie is a flight attendant, who is walking through a cabin of a “space plane”. She appears in a fully white suit, with a long sleeved white shirt and long white pants, and the two pieces of ‘technology’ she is showcasing is the ‘bonnet’ made to keep her hair from floating around in zero gravity, and the “Pan-Am Grip Shoes” she’s wearing to walk throughout the cabin. These two articles of clothing may not seem as though they provide a pivotal change to how we can see technology, but this does show the manner in which the filmmaker put thought into the manner in which women could be represented in space. In addition to this, she is also represented in slacks, which was uncommon for Pan-Am stewardesses (or any stewardess at all really!). A concept that we can relate this to from this week’s textbook reading was the link between Sexuality and Power. Catharine MacKinnon’s 1983 theory on the manner in which sexuality in male-dominated societies is considered as gender binary, provides an answer to the question about the reasons why gender representation in film matters. I find that to represent the first ever “space stewardess” to be a woman, keeping in theme with the current form of stewardesses worldwide, displays the manner in which the female gender is labelled hand-in-hand with the roles of providing hospitality, and keeping an almost artificial facade of domestic bliss, in an environment as clinical and dark as space. Returning to MacKinnon’s theory, this means that the women pictured in space are serving to the male figures, displaying that the 1968 film hypothesised that even in the year 2001, gender equality and the power balance between genders was yet to be achieved (and Kubrick was not wrong…)
Another concept that the female characters can be tied to from the concepts in this week’s reading, is the manner in which women are represented as working women, as opposed to mothers. One piece of information that stuck out to me from the content this week is that, “the patterns of gender differences [observed] in society (...) do not extend from biological differences between people. Rather they emerge as a consequence of the different expectations, meanings, roles and opportunities that society scribes to people based on these observed physical differences.” As I mentioned earlier, with the domestic bliss the female characters are trying to maintain in space, this may link the job of a stewardess to that of a matriarch. Displaying the fact that the expectations pushed onto women in this film, is that they must be polished, practically perfect without a hair out of place (callback to space bonnet) and provide the utmost care no matter the environment. This allows to inform us on the overall social inequality in our larger society (even to this day and not just in the 60s), leading for women to stay in their hospitality based and domestic occupations that have been identified to the female gender throughout history.
This means that not all films picked across time may be able to fit the tests which means that, the tests can’t tell us the true context or meaning of the time they were made in. The women pictured in 2001, or more accurately the women in the 60s displayed in the context of the year 2001, serve to show a different side of the clinical nature of space, and instead provide as much warmth through the small acts of hospitality displayed throughout the film. Though I was initially surprised by the small number of women in the movie, each woman played a role in showing something meaningful in the context of the movie, which all meaning would be lost if purely based on a criteria that is not representative of every movie ever made.