In college, my roommates, two gorgeous division one athletes, said something while we watched a Nicholas Sparks movie that stays with me today.
"You know why I like Nicholas Sparks?" Syd asked.
"Cuz, his main characters are girls," Brynne (not her real name, she hates us now) said.
"YES!"
Obviously, I opened my mouth to respond because college is just a series of debates and fun conversations. I planned to retort with writers, directors, and producers that made films and shows with women as the main character. Head tilted, mouth open, I decided not to respond because I genuinely couldn't think of one at the moment.
This was a holy-shit moment for me.
I realized that girls grew up watching maybe thousands of hours of movies and shows about the journey of a man, while I'd watched maybe a handful of hours where the lead was a woman of any kind.
Now, I don't think that Nicholas Sparks portrayed powerful, ambitious women, but what do I know. Regardless of the story, they were almost all about women first and foremost.
That winter, I took a three-week class exclusively about Jane Austin's masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice including the original novel and various adaptations and fictional depictions. In this class, I learned about something called the Bechdel test.
The test namesake is a cartoonist and storyteller named Alison Bechdel. She came on the scene with a comic strip before earning high acclaim and commercial success with her graphic memoir Fun Home before winning the MacArthur Genius award.
If you don't know, the Bechdel test is an easy test for how women are portrayed in fictional work such as novels, short stories, and motion pictures.
To pass the Bechdel test, there must be a scene in which two women are alone and talking about anything other than a man of any kind. That means no fathers, husbands, children, bosses, etc. Some have added that the women have to be named and represent actual characters in the story, not just an extemporaneous character like a barista or a passerby.
If this test seems like a preposterous low bar for sex and gender inclusion, you're right. But, if you start paying attention, you may notice just how often stories fail this test.
Combined with the heart-breaking realization that not only aren't there many female main characters but there are barely any scenes when a supporting female character has anything on her mind other than a male, I decided to look for them.
Since then, I have found quite a few. In honor of Syd (and Brynne), I am going to blog reviews of movies and tv shows with strong female characters and female leads. There are no genre requirements to my blog and no agenda. I'm just a white dude who's learned a bit about film and literature speaking from my own point of view.
PGOAT, some of you may know, is an acronym of one of the main four or five characters from David Foster-Wallace's Infinite Jest. It stands for Prettiest Girl Of All Time. In the book, the PGOAT, Joelle Van Dyne, aka Madam Psychosis, is deemed so shockingly gorgeous that it's a defect or deformity. She finds extreme pleasure in the nerdy technical aspects of filmmaking such as cameras and lenses.
While she's enabled and tutored by an older male expert, that man also casts her due to her extreme beauty, a point that is essential to the overall plot of the book.
I find her story, in the book, to be a perfect example of the point. In the book, she's en route to being a brilliant technical filmmaker, but her beauty and sexual attractiveness define her and, arguably, dominate her life -- a story I suspect rings true for many millions of women throughout history.
I could be analyzing that wrong, but I don't care. That's what she means to me.
The reviews will review the story, plot, casting, etc., but will not really dive into the feminist symbolism. It's just a review of stories about women. So, if you're looking for show or movie recommendations, I hope you'll consider my reviews of these shows with women or females who are either the sole main character or one of the main characters in an ensemble.
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