Bond, Bechdel, and The Female Gaze

Examining representation in film through 'The Bechdel Test'

Woman Holding Clapper Board by Ali Pazani

As a book lover, it’s a very rare thing to enjoy the Hollywood film version of a book anywhere near as much as the book.

The 2002 Stephen Daldry big screen version of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours was a film that, for me, broke this theory.

Not that there is anything shabby about the book.  When a friend loaned me a copy several years ago, I tore through it, entranced by Cunningham’s prose, his originality in tying together the three women characters from different eras of the 20th century, and his modern take on the themes of Woolf’s own work. 

The novel features modernist writer Virginia Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman in the film) as she attempts to write one of her most famous novels, Mrs Dalloway.  (Cunningham borrows Woolf’s original title for the book, ‘The Hours’, for his own story). 

The book also features two other female characters: Laura Brown, (played by Julianne Moore) a 1950’s American housewife, living in post-World War 2 Los Angeles, pregnant with her second child, and reading a copy of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and Clarissa Vaughan (played by Meryl Streep) a present-day Mrs Dalloway, obsessed with throwing the perfect party for her best friend and former lover, who has won a writing prize.  

I was intrigued when I came to watch the film as I couldn’t think how a director would be able to bring these three extraordinary disparate women together, without the script feeling disjointed.  But they managed it.  The film is every bit as good as the book (in my opinion, as well as clearly the Academy, since Kidman received the award for best actress in a leading role for the part of Woolf).

Re-watching the film recently put me in mind of a conversation I had whilst writing my Masters’ dissertation on women’s war narratives and the idea of the female gaze in art.

The Female Gaze

The idea of the female gaze originated as a feminist response to Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema’, which had introduced the idea that film-goers are encouraged to see the world through a ‘male gaze’, whereby the narrative and the action is seen through the central male character.  The female gaze, in contrast, allowed for women to be seen as subjects instead of objects.

Simone de Beauviour in her deep study of women’s lives, The Second Sex, develops the concept of man as subject, woman as object – seen as ‘other’.  Some women, de Beauvoir argues, are complicit in this, with women stuck in roles such as duties of motherhood and biological destiny, whereas she saw males as able to transcend this. (For a fascinating and accessible discussion on The Second Sex and de Beauvoir’s ideas, check out the ‘Breaking Down Patriarchy’ Podcast).

I was reminded recently of a perfect example of the filmic male gaze when catching the end of one of the old James Bond films.  Clearly, the audience are meant to see the world through the glamorous lens of Bond as he navigates action packed car chases, evil villains, and beautiful women, whilst any females are essentially objects, available to look nice and be seduced by Bond.  Within films, (or other forms of art such as literature), a film seen through a female gaze would allow for the woman to become the central subject of the story.

I found myself wondering what film, if any, perfectly sums up the idea of the female gaze as a concept.

An interesting idea about women in film was introduced by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, known as ‘The Bechdel Test’, and used to measure the misrepresentation of women in film (and other fictional works). 

To fulfil the criteria of the test, the film should feature at least two women talking to each other about something other than a man.  This is sometimes extended to the two female characters also being named within the film.  This test draws attention to gender inequality in film and fiction and originated in 1985 when Alison Bechdel created the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, accrediting the idea to both her friend Liz Wallace and, interestingly, the writings of Virginia Woolf.  

After the test became more widely discussed in the 2000s, a number of variants and tests inspired by it emerged.  

Though there are various websites proclaiming films which meet the criteria of The Bechdel Test, and there are much more representations of this now than when the early Bond films came about, I do find that within books and films both, even when the action is featured through a central female character, the women’s conversations often divert to men.

Hollywood by Paul Deetman

Though a useful tool, the test is not a complete representation of inclusivity within films, and other systems such as the The DuVernay Test, which looks at as well as gender representation, ensuring screenwriters consider POC characters are represented within scrips as fully developed characters with their own plotlines, such as The Color Purple and Dear White People.

There is also the The Vito Russo Test, which ensures that LGBTQ+ representation should be observed, including ensuring that at least one character be bisexual, lesbian, gay, and/or transgender, but are not solely defined by their sexuality, and are a part of the central plot of the narrative. Examples include Brokeback Mountain and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

In my post on female friendship, I mentioned the recent BBC iPlayer series Everything I Know About Love, based on Dolly Alderton’s book of the same name, and which focuses on the central character Maggie’s female friendships.  This kind of series is a good step towards women’s narratives which foster women’s interests away and apart from men, featuring them as subjects rather than objects. All four of the main characters are female and all are named, and although they have relationships with men, their main concerns are careers, friendships, and having a good time.

Other successful film offerings that meet the Bechdel criteria include Kill Bill Volumes 1 & 2; Frozen, featuring the love between two sisters who save one another rather than needing rescue by a male figure; and the 2017 re-make of Wonder Woman.

I would suggest that The Hours also fulfils this remit.  It not only passes The Bechdel Test, but the action and reactions of each character’s narrative is focalised through a female gaze lens.

The book (and film) work as a response to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, but also as a love letter to the writer.  The themes and tropes Cunningham employs in this book exemplify both the best of Woolf’s writing and ideas, as well as bringing a fresh and modern touch to the themes within it, striking me as a book that Woolf herself would have written.