The Girl Rule

I have always felt something of a distance from action, war, and legal movies. That's a pretty big cliché for me, a young female critic. And of course, there is something to be said for the fact that many of these movies are designed for men, and maybe that creates a natural distance. But it's not that I can't follow the story, or that they’re just about "man things". I simply find myself much more involved with a film if it includes female characters to whom I can relate. Now, you may say that that makes me a dumb blonde who needs women characters around who can explain things to me (and, yeah, that can be helpful). 

But put yourself in my shoes, menfolk: you don’t enjoy the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, do you? And why not? Well, for starts, because there are no male characters that are not romantic objects for the girls. There is no guy you can relate to on his own terms, rather than from the perspective of women. Flip this around, and this is the case with dozens of films released each year. As my boyfriend will attest, I’ve always carried a “girl rule” with me to the movies. “Okay, but there has to be a girl in it. And she can’t be just eye candy or a sex object. And she has to talk.” On one hand, you could regard that request as shallow and even sexist—I can’t even connect to a movie without a gender representative? But on the other, if you think about it for even a bit, it’s a pretty simple request, and one that would reflect reality a lot better than the glamorous babes that pollute action flicks just so they can make the poster look better. It really handicaps your audience to not create a character that half of your audience can relate to on one of the most basic levels, gender solidarity. I’m not asking for some kind of affirmative action; if it makes no sense to have a woman character, don’t put one in for me. But there is something that draws me in when there is a woman in there, someone who, at least on some level, thinks the way I do. If you need more persuasion, ask yourself if, as a man, you would enjoy a film with all women characters, no matter the plot. There’s simply a barrier, a difficulty breaking in. 

 For a good example of the Girl Rule followed in a “man’s genre,” take “The Silence of the Lambs.” Of course, Jodi Foster is now kind of a dyke-feminist poster girl, but at the time she was just a young actress who happened to the protagonist of a crime thriller. The film acknowledged her femininity and its unusual presence, but the movie managed to not be about that. It was about solving a crime, and Jodi just happened to be the one with the smarts and guts to do it. The rest of the movie was populated with men, and without Jodi in the lead it would have been a typically male film. But allowing her to have the role of a woman who was more than a romantic interest opened up the film’s accessibility immensely; I believe that undercurrents of gender issues in the film contributed to its success. 

All this is to say that I’ve always thought I was being a pain in the ass for longing for the Girl Rule to be fulfilled. When, lo and behold, I discover the Bechdel Test, which was created by some awesome feminists who have the same problem as me with movies created by men, for men, with no real “in” for half the population. It’s a simple formula: there have to be at least two female characters in the film, they have to talk to each other, and the conversation cannot dwell exclusively on men. Obviously, there are great films that fail this test, and I do not believe art should be subject to tests and quotas. However, it’s a great tool for awareness, because it shows how simply filmmakers could make their films richer, more realistic, and more accessible, and how often they fail to do so.