Beyond the Bechdel test: here’s how films can really make us love female characters

Any time someone brings up the Bechdel Test in an open internet forum, you can count the seconds until someone complains that actually, it isn’t a reliable indicator of a film’s quality. Never mind that no one — including cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who accidentally created the test in a 1985 comic strip — claims a Bechdel-test pass proves a given film is feminist, well-written, or even entertaining. The test itself is just a conversation piece because it’s such a lo