Three hours, a 100-million-dollar budget, and now a BAFTA win, but this 'best film' is still a Bechdel fail

I finally watched Oppenheimer, and I have some things to say

On Sunday night I watched the BAFTA Film Awards. Having a little cry over Samantha Morton’s acceptance speech about how representation is everything, I messaged a friend I knew would also be watching. We then had a back-and-forth WhatsApp convo about how we wished the TV edit of the ceremony didn’t skip over the awards seemingly deemed less important. When it got to the ‘most important’ category, for Best Film, my friend messaged asking, ‘Which gets your vote?’, and I had to admit that I hadn’t seen all of the nominees yet, including, as it turned out, the winning film: Oppenheimer.

This is partly because I hadn’t done the Barbenheimer thing at the time (although a whole day at the cinema would usually be right up my street). When I went to see Barbie, it was as a surprise outing for my partner's birthday because Greta Gerwig is one of his favourite actors/writers/directors. The idea of following Barbie with three hours immersed in ideas about the atomic bomb didn’t exactly (or at all) say ‘happy birthday, honey’.

But this week, with an afternoon off already marked in my diary for Tuesday and rainy weather on the cards, it felt like the time had come to watch this now-BAFTA-winning film.

Two-thirds of the way through, it became clear to me that Oppenheimer was, disappointingly, yet probably unsurprisingly, not going to pass the Bechdel test — the ‘is this movie feminist or sexist?’ test that emerged from a 1980s comic strip by Alison Bechdel, in which a character (a woman) says to her friend (also a woman):

‘I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it ... who, two, talk to each other, about three, something besides a man.’

You can see the full comic strip, ‘THE RULE’, at Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For website.

Bechdel got the idea about this ‘rule’ from her friend Kate Wallace who had in turn been inspired by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I studied film studies at A level, but I don’t think I heard anything about the Bechdel test then, and — doing a bit of research now — it seems it only gained traction at about that same time: 2005. Alison Bechdel said in an interview with journalist Kara Swisher that ‘... it was just a lesbian feminist joke of the ’80s, the kind of stuff we were all saying to each other. And it … just disappeared. But then, 20 years later, these young feminists resurrected it. I think it started with women in film school who were being told the exact opposite — “If you want to sell a movie to Hollywood, don’t put more than two women in it.” Etc.’

I first heard about Bechdel from this eye-opening and funny PechaKucha talk I saw just a few years ago, and the rule is now always in mind whenever I watch a film.

That Oppenheimer fails this test is immensely frustrating to me. A mega budget, brilliantly skilled creators, crew, and cast, a luxurious three-hour-long runtime to play with, and yet not even sixty seconds of one woman speaking to another woman (and about something other than a man)?

Then in the middle of the night I woke up wondering if maybe I’d missed a conversation — had the film definitely not passed the test? I went to the Bechdel test website’s comments section (surely, a broken night’s sleep is the only appropriate time to read a comments section? Or maybe the worst time to). Users referenced the ‘conversation’ where Charlotte relays a coded message from Oppenheimer to Kitty:

So, two women do speak to each other ... but barely, and it’s over the phone and only to relay a man’s words, which are coded in what that man presumably thinks is the only code a woman could know: the language of laundry.*

Christopher Nolan has said of the ‘take in the sheets’ metaphor: ‘For me, Kitty Oppenheimer is one of the most interesting characters in the film—one of the most interesting characters of Oppenheimer’s real-life story—their relationship was complex. So I love the idea of a coded message between them that only they can understand.’ But to me, it’s just interesting that the only time Kitty gets to talk to another woman in this film is to receive a message from a man, a message that only one of the women in the conversation has enough information to decipher, via a seconds-long phonecall that that man really should have made himself. Nolan says that the code is a fact he found in the biography of Oppenheimer that informed the film script, and I’m not suggesting that history should be rewritten – although for the invention of the atomic bomb, I wish that were possible – but that the brief phonecall shouldn’t be the only woman-to-woman interaction that gets included in the storytelling.

There are other ways to defend the directorial decisions (or, I suspect, omissions) that mean the film fails the Bechdel test — you could say that it’s because we’re invited to inhabit Oppenheimer’s world, his point of view, his apparent disinterest in women’s lives outside of his own interactions with them, and his absolute singleminded focus on his work. It’s the same type of argument that could be used to explain why the film ‘protected’ viewers from facing the horror caused by the indiscriminate mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or from stepping into the experience of survivors, or of any lives outside of the white men of the western world. And it’s the same argument that can be used to make the filmmakers feel justified in invisibilising the half a million people living in a 150-mile radius of the Trinity test site who were given no warning of the test blast or of the deadly radioactive fallout that contaminated the water and earth around them.

But it’s an argument that just isn’t convincing. Because, with all that budget, all that time, all those stretchy solutions-focused creative minds, couldn’t the film have been cleverer than that?

It’s worth saying that the Bechdel test is not perfect either — as my own imperfect take on things shows. It is one lens through which to view a film, and because of that, it can lead to a limited conclusion filled with intersectional blind spots. It has, however, inspired other tests using similar principles to determine whether a film passes or fails for representing people of colour and LGBTQIA+ communities. The pass/fail dichotomy is problematic too — films that pass may still have very limited representation that does not show the depth and detail of people’s stories. And Wikipedia tells me that, ‘The Bechdel Test stirred a minor controversy in 2022 when writer Hanna Rosin evoked it in a tweet to criticise the gay romantic comedy Fire Island. Rosin’s tweet was criticised for attempting to apply the test to a film about gay Asian men, a marginalised group, with some noting a film like Fire Island was not the type of film the Bechdel test is designed to criticise. In response, Alison Bechdel said on Twitter that she added a “corollary” to the test according to which “two men talking to each other about the female protagonist of an Alice Munro story in a screenplay structured on a Jane Austen novel,” i.e. the plot of Fire Island, passes the test.’

Of course, the Bechdel test can also fall down if a movie has only one, two, or very few characters — Gravity, Castaway, and Moon all fail for this reason. (Though, to my mind, that’s sometimes a lazy get-out-of-jail-free card.) The rule is also sometimes criticised for the fact that a ‘bad’ film could pass, and a ‘good’ film could fail. Which is why Jurassic World Dominion gets a green tick, but Oppenheimer (which I do actually think is otherwise a ‘good’ film) fails. But if a film where the main characters are actual dinosaurs can pass, couldn’t a film filled with metaphorical dinosaurs manage it too?

And, thinking of dinosaurs, Oppenheimer also misses the opportunity to bring any real focus to creatures or nature beyond the human. When there’s dialogue about Oppenheimer’s work having the potential to ‘destroy the world‘, it very much seems to be the world of humanity that the characters (and the filmmakers) have in mind – the planet belonging to the father of the atomic bomb, not to mother earth.

This morning, listening to the radio, I heard the perfect counterpoint to this lack of engagement with the natural world. The guest on today’s BBC Desert Island Discs was the volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer (no relation to J. Robert Oppenheimer, as far as I know). His choice of luxury item was a seismometer, ‘to listen to the music of the earth’. This is the level of love, awe, attention, care, and awareness that I hope creates the Best Film next time.

Footnote: You know, I almost scrapped this post entirely because of the thought that ‘it could offend Cillian Murphy’, which shows how much of a Ken’s world we’re living in.

*I found some articles online that suggest ‘sheets’ has a double meaning referring not just to the laundry but to radioactive sheets. However, I couldn’t find a reliable reference (maybe it is described in the biography, American Prometheus, which I haven’t read). But even if it does have this dual meaning, audiences aren’t given enough info to be ‘in on it’ too.

Links:

See the full comic strip, titled ‘THE RULE’ at Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For website

Watch the PechaKucha talk about the Bechdel test

Andria Moore’s interview with Christopher Nolan’s on the Motion Picture Association website

Read the transcript of Alison Bechdel/Kara Swisher interview

Bechdeltest.com