My own life barely passes the Bechdel test.

I can live with that. But I can't live without passing the human test.

Image © Julie R. Neidlinger. All rights reserved.

Allison Bechdel, an indie cartoonist whose subject matter isn't my thing, still did everyone a solid and accidentally created a standard to measure films by. In a cartoon in the mid 1980's, she created what's known today as the Bechdel test. To pass the test, a film has to meet three seemingly simple criteria:

1. Have at least two women characters.

2. Those two characters have to have at least one conversation.

3. The conversation has to be about something other than a man.

It's surprising how few films pass such a simple test.

Oh, there are plenty of films with strong female leads, or with more than one woman character, but they don't always talk to each other in accordance to the test. Many that technically pass the test do so with just the briefest snippet of passing conversation between the two women characters.

It's actually kind of a weird thing, once you become aware of it, though I'm probably not going to spend a lot of time making a list of qualifying films, or arguing about the list with people. You don't have to be an angry patriarch-hating feminist to appreciate the strangeness of it.

The Alien franchise, with Sigourney Weaver (one of the best female leads of all time in my opinion), passes the test but not with the ferocity you might expect. It's odd how in many movies where there are strong and necessary female characters, they don't actually talk too much to each other.

For the record, however, despite the awful aliens, Aliens (the second film of the franchise) is just one of the best movies ever.

The characters are off the charts and Weaver is a strong woman without today's brutish attempt to make strong women be as much like men as they can; she is not physically masculine but is strong mentally and emotionally, physically when it counts, and still shows a loving mothering side.

It's tough to get people to watch the film for the great characters what with all the rampaging monstrous aliens killing everyone, to be sure.

Anyway, I've long been fascinated with the idea of the Bechdel test, particularly since in real life, theoretically, women tend to talk to each other.

I mean, I think they do.