Blog Option 1: Landan Rivers

When looking at this prompt, I knew I wanted to relate it to a popular movie in theaters. My hope was that society had advanced enough to produce popular movies that would be able to pass the Bechdel test, so I decided to do it on the last movie I saw in theaters. I was happily surprised to say it passed, but I was also slightly disappointed by the fact that the setting of the movie isn’t one directly related to current-day life for most people. So what did I see last?

For those of you who haven’t seen Divergent, the entire movie is set into a futuristic Chicago where society is divided into five distinct factions. Tris Prior, the protagonist in the film, is a “divergent” and doesn’t naturally fit into any of the factions but must still choose which one to live out her life in. There’s a lot of drama about trying to succeed in her chosen faction, a plan for all divergents to be destroyed, and a love affair thrown in.  While one could argue that her main co-star is her love interest Four– who also happens to be a divergent – I’m choosing to focus on two supporting characters: her friend Christina and her Mom.

Tris and Christina are both new to being Dauntless and share a bond since they both switched from their faction of birth to transition into being Dauntless. The two women mostly talk about he rigors of their training. Very little is discussed on the relationship of Tris and Four, as it’s pretty much a secret.

Tris’ mom shows the strongest sense of passing the Bechdel test because she essentially helps her stop the other faction from killing divergents and saves Tris’ life. The two women never talk about relationships, but rather show a strong mother and daughter bond that develops throughout the movie even though they interact very little since they are from different factions.

In all, I think this movie passed because of how Tris interacted with two influential women in her life. She was shown to have a true friend who stood beside her and a mother who ultimately gave her life for her. They are normal women in the sense of how they act, but the setting is what takes some of the realism out. It’s difficult to imagine a futuristic life divided into factions ever actually happening. For this reason, it passed yet still seemed to fail in general in my eyes.

 I think it’s important to have movies that have strong female leads and give girls a role model to look up to. The media distorts views of what women are capable of when they continue producing movies that fail the Bechdel test. While Divergent showed a strong female character with strong females behind her, they still threw in the love story, had a male lead character with Tris, and placed it in a hard to imagine setting. My hope is that the movie industry continues to produce films that pass the Bechdel test, but also tries to produce them in realistic settings that directly relate to day-to-day life.