Bechdel Test Movie List

/bech·del test/ n.
1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man

[[1]] Whiplash (2014) [imdb]

This movie passed 1 of 3 tests. It was entered by NessieNos on 2014-10-08 16:30:06.

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Comments

NessieNos said:
This is a movie about the relationship between a male teacher and a male student, largely at what appears to be a boys-only music school. The only named women are very minor characters: a girlfriend in a couple of scenes who only exists to get dumped, and an aunt who's dismissive of the main character. They never meet.
Message posted on 2014-10-08 16:30:06
Sophie said:
Sadly the school is not boys-only but the important bands are all male. In one scene at a lesser band group the women is single out as sitting in first seat only because she is pretty. Apparently there was a woman in the last band scene but I missed her. The women are not only minor but the one named woman represents the entanglements that women bring.
Message posted on 2015-02-13 13:04:53
Cake said:
Not a boys only school. There's a female student at the start who's told she only got her spot because she's cute.
Off topic, despite this being a movie about Jazz, all the characters who speak more than two sentences are white.
Message posted on 2015-02-17 17:02:48
Alia said:
@Sophie

Nicole is a character of her own autonomy and serves to show Andrew's lack of regard and understanding for people that do not share some form of his manic ambition. Damien Chazelle (writer/director) "I thought it was also weirdly indicative of Andrew’s state of mind that he has this whole speech to this girl, where he basically purports to know everything about her, and her hopes and dreams, when we’ve literally seen them go on one date. Maybe they’ve gone on a couple others that we haven’t seen—that’s left ambiguous—but certainly they’ve not been a couple for a long time. He purports that he can just sit down and X-ray into her. And that, to me, was really him becoming a mini-Fletcher. Fletcher has a single conversation in a hallway with Andrew, then decides he knows his entire backstory, and knows exactly how to twist the knife. It’s a subjective movie, so you have to stay in Andrew’s point of view, but hopefully in terms of how that scene was staged, it clues the audience in to the fact that Andrew is not the only person in the story, and his actions actually have consequences on other people."

@Cake

Fletcher's comment regarding the woman is to further the point that he's an irredeemable asshole (as it comes in a line of insulting other people solely based on their appearance) and serves to give the viewer no reason to accept his tactics. Also the lawyer that gets Fletcher fired is black, as is the entire band playing when Andrew sees Fletcher playing at the club, and it would be confusing if Andrew's family were a different ethnicity than him (and that basically rounds out the speaking parts because what this film is actually about is the relationship between Andrew and Fletcher).
Message posted on 2015-02-25 14:49:08
mat disagreed with the rating and said:
The rating is wrong: it's a ZERO because only a single woman is **named**, the girlfriend Nicole. The aunt, the lawyer, and the female musicians are nameless.
Message posted on 2022-06-06 09:59:11

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