A Bar Set on the Floor, and Half of Hollywood Can’t Clear It

The test has three rules: two named women in the film, at least one conversation between them, about something other than a man. That’s it. A bar so low it’s practically decorative—and yet The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Good Will Hunting, Pulp Fiction, and The Social Network all fail it. That list alone tells you more about default Hollywood assumptions than a decade of op-eds.

The rules were originally devised by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel in 1985—a throwaway gag in a comic strip that turned out to be one of the bluntest diagnostic tools in film criticism. Sweden has now attached it to a formal rating system, with some cinemas and broadcasters declining to screen films that don’t pass. The Swedish Film Institute adopted it as an official benchmark, which is either admirable policy or a category error depending on where you stand on whether cultural institutions should be in the business of rewarding narrative choices.

What I find interesting is that the test doesn’t measure quality, depth, or anything resembling nuanced representation. It just measures bare minimum presence. When something this minimal becomes a controversial ask, the reaction is the data. The films that fail aren’t failing because they’re bad films—plenty of them are great—they’re failing because their default world is one where women exist primarily in relation to men. That’s the habit the Bechdel Test exposes. Whether Sweden’s approach changes anything or just produces a new set of films that technically pass while spirit-failing the whole exercise—well, we’ll see.