15 Movies Without Female Characters You Should Watch
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Loading... - Veronica Cerny
- 17 Jun 2022
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The Bechdel Test is one of the most generally used ways for judging how well-balanced a film’s gender representation is. It is named after Alison Bechdel, the comic artist who created it, and it has three simple criteria that surprisingly few movies meet: The film must have (1) at least two women in it who talk to each other, (2) be about something other than a man. It’s not a perfect metric, but it’s an excellent way to see how cinema in general treats female characters; in 2022 movies with no female characters made more than half of the list of the top-grossing films.
On the other hand, some films don’t even make it past the first hurdle; they have no female characters at all. Usually, it’s in period war movies or other isolated situations where only men would appear in the past, but some examples are a little more egregious. Here are fifteen of the most eye-catching illustrations.
To be eligible for the list, A film must not have any named or speaking female characters – Extras in crowd scenes and allusions to unseen women are permitted if they highlight a missed opportunity.
1. The Thing (1982)
The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, is a masterful horror film that combines creature chills and extreme paranoia when a shapeshifting alien infiltrates an Antarctic research station. Unless the monster is female (assuming an extraterrestrial species that reproduces through cell appropriation has a gender), there isn’t a single female character in the film; everyone on the station is male.
This is somewhat logical given the remote setting, but it is still a bold creative choice.
The 2011 prequel/remake attempted to address the gender imbalance by putting Mary Elizabeth Winstead in charge. However, given that she was a random American at what was supposed to be a completely Norwegian camp, it felt a little forced.
2. The Great Escape (1963)
The Steve McQueen-led prisoner of a war film is a television re-run staple, and it’s full of rememorable moments – the bouncing a ball in the cooler, the “good luck” trick – and performances by a who’s who of 1960s British cinema.
Of course, despite all of the unexpected twists, The Great Escape lacks memorable female characters. The film’s closest to focusing on a woman is when the soldiers tunnel out and end up in provincial Germany – there are few female extras in certain scenes, but none of them get any screentime, let alone a speaking role. The fact that there are no featured female characters, even in supporting roles, doesn’t detract from the film’s focus on the British soldiers’ attempts to flee.
When the film was remastered as Chicken Run, Aardman changed the genders of the inmates to female (because hens), which could be interpreted as a jab.
3. First Blood (1982)
It’s easy to forget, given that it was Sylvester Stallone’s first role as a muscled action star, but Rambo wasn’t always an over-the-top, adrenaline-fueled series about one man’s love of guns. The Vietnam veteran’s name was not even mentioned in the title of First Blood. To say it was a calmer film would be a stretch and only valid in extreme comparison, but it attempted to examine the effects of war on a man’s life for all the action.
Even though it isn’t a straight up war movie, Rambo’s PTSD First Blood leans heavily on the tropes you’d expect of them, and as such, there are no women, either in the character’s past or as part of the movie. The lack of an important woman in John Rambo’s life helps the film in some ways, keeping the focus on the effect of war on his psyche and implying that there is no damsel in distress for the sake of it. Of course, it’s unclear whether this was the intention.
Later on Rambo films did begin to feature more women characters in increasingly prominent roles, indicating a shift toward broader appeal and, cynically, a more formulaic style. Read More...
