Wednesday, April 06, 2022

Lord of the Rings Passes the Bechdel Test



The movies in the Lord of the Rings trilogy total more than 11 hours. It was an awesome story, though, and many of us sat through the whole thing in theaters without an intermission. But does LOTR pass the Bechdel test? To do so, a book or movie must have three things: 1. at least two women 2. who talk to each other 3. about something other than a man. To show that LOTR indeed passes the test, Eight Foot Manchild made a supercut of the scenes in the movie in which women talk to each other. He said he scanned more than 13 hours of footage, which means the extended versions. That's a lot of work! And I guess that the movie technically passes. Yet the top discussion at reddit was about the lack of dialogue between Legolas and Frodo. (via reddit)


2 comments:

Debra She Who Seeks said...

Hahahahaha, so yes it does pass -- TECHNICALLY! Peter Jackson actually invented more female characters than were in the original books because there were just SO FEW of them. Tolkien created a virtually all-male world in his books, which reflected the all-male institutions (military, war, university, literary world) in which he largely lived and worked back in the day. Women were very much in the background as wives, mothers, servants and that's pretty much about it. Except for the unobtainable "Goddess on a Pedestal," Galadriel.

WilliamRocket said...

I am sure Galadriel was in transition.

I read the books when 15 years old.
I tried watching the movie at 45 and found the first 5 minutes so twee I had to go get a bucket and never went back.

Nothing personal against the makers but then they made a Tin Tin movie and I really got annoyed at books being ruined by the movie versions.