Nonprofit creates ‘Bechdel test for climate change’

A climate script consultancy has introduced a variation on the “Bechdel test,” a measure of women’s interactions in film, for climate change.

The two-part test, created by the group Good Energy in partnership with Colby College’s Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, applies the question of whether a movie acknowledges the existence of climate change and whether at least one character knows it.

“The Climate Reality Check is a tool that will allow writers and industry professionals to interrogate their own stories, audiences to see whether Hollywood is representing their reality on-screen, and researchers to measure whether climate change is included in any group of stories or if representation is increasing over time,” the group said in a statement.

Good Energy applied the test to 13 films nominated for Academy Awards this year and found only three passed: “Barbie,” “Nyad” and “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One.”

“Barbie” qualifies due to a scene in which a teenager castigates the iconic doll (Margot Robbie) for “killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism.

“Mission Impossible” contains dialogue in which the director of the CIA warns Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt that the next global conflict will be “a ballistic war over a rapidly shrinking ecosystem. It’s going to be a war for the last of our dwindling energy, drinkable water, breathable air.”

Nyad, the only one of three qualifying films to directly reference global warming, includes a scene in which the eponymous swimmer (Annette Bening) attempting to swim from Cuba to Florida, is stung by a jellyfish, which her coach (Jodie Foster) tells her was driven to that part of the ocean by climate change. 

Other movies analyzed included “American Fiction,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Past Lives,” “May December,” “The Creator,” “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” “Io Capitano,” “Perfect Days,”  “The Teachers’ Lounge,” and “Godzilla Minus One.”

The test specifically applies to films set in the present or the future, and several period pieces nominated for awards were not part of the analysis, including “Oppenheimer,” “The Holdovers” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Although climate change is not mentioned in “Oppenheimer,” one of its major supporting characters, physicist Edward Teller, was one of the first scientists to publicly link the burning of fossil fuels to a global warming effect. 

The original test, named for cartoonist Alison Bechdel, consists of three parts: whether a work contains more than one named woman character, whether they directly talk to one another, and whether they discuss a subject other than a man.

Bechdel herself has said the test was originally intended as “a little lesbian joke in an alternative feminist newspaper” rather than a comprehensive measure of whether a work is feminist. 

This story was updated at 3:25 p.m.