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Bechdel.io

Does your favorite movie pass the Bechdel Test?

2015 · with Laurel Karlsson

See it live →View on GitHub →Read why I built it

Artist statement

Bechdel.io checks movie scripts against the Bechdel Test. The test comes from a 1985 Alison Bechdel comic strip, and it asks three things: are there at least two women, do they talk to each other, and do they talk about something other than a man.

It sorts a wall of movies most people have already seen into pass and fail. About half of the 218 films on the shelf fail, and a lot of them are favorites.

We released it as open source because we saw it as feminist activism.

Try it

Pick a movie to see whether it passes. Open it full screen →

Bechdel.io: the headline "Do two women talk to each other about something other than a man?", the shelf of movie posters marked passes or fails, filtering to films that pass, then the Gone Girl page scoring 3 of 3 and its cast sized by lines spoken

Screenshots

The Bechdel.io shelf: search, show and sort controls over a grid of movie posters, each tagged passes or fails with its year and how many of the three rules it meets
The shelf: 218 films, 111 of them pass
The Gone Girl page: release details, then the cast sized by lines spoken, with Nick at 496 lines in white and Amy at 287 and Boney at 196 in pink for women
Each film page sizes the cast by how many lines they speak

How it's made

Node.js · NLP · JavaScript · MongoDB

The scripts came from Movie Script Scraper, and the cast from a film database API. The 2015 write-up goes deeper.

It has two weak spots. Words about men run all through English, and a keyword can't tell what a sentence is about. And it takes each character's gender from the film database, which credits everyone as an actor or an actress, so it can't see a trans or nonbinary character.

SCREENPLAY a plain text file READ THE TITLE from the first line title MYAPIFILMS.COM cast, characters and their genders SPLIT INTO SCENES 10-12 keywords like int. and ext. COLLECT DIALOGUE by character TWO+ WOMEN? no yes CHECK THEIR DIALOGUE for he, him, father, king... ABOUT A MAN? yes SCENE FAILS no SCENE PASSES
SCREENPLAY .txt file READ THE TITLE from the first line title MYAPIFILMS.COM cast, characters and their genders SPLIT INTO SCENES 10-12 keywords like int. and ext. COLLECT DIALOGUE by character TWO+ WOMEN? no yes CHECK DIALOGUE for he, him, father, king... SCENE FAILS ABOUT A MAN? yes no SCENE PASSES

Lineage

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