No Small-Talk in Paradise: Why Elysium Fails the Bechdel Test, and Why We Should Care

Abstract

Discussions of women in film are always about a great deal more than they may appear to be at first sight. Feminist film theory, which Sue Thornham characterises as ‘the exploration of the complex triangular relationship between “Woman” as a cinematic representation, women as historically and culturally positioned subjects, and the feminist theorist, who speaks … as a woman’ (1997: 171), has made a significant contribution to the development of feminist theory and thus, by extension, to the political project of feminism. For a while, the relationship between representations of women in movies and the status of women and opportunities for women in the real world has been neither straightforward nor insignificant. After a century of feminist activism, women are still marginalised in many areas of human activity throughout the Western world, and women remain marginalised in the outputs of the culturally powerful dream factory, that is, the Hollywood film industry. One need not look for a simplistic, causal relationship between these two facts to infer that this is not a coincidence.