Skip to main content
Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Oppenheimer and Barbie may be best friends at the box office—thanks to the Barbenheimer double features that led to both films surpassing financial expectations—but online, fans of the two films are battling it out. The weapons of choice are not atomic bombs or pool noodles, but instead, strongly-word tweets. (Sorry, Elon: xeets.) Yes, that’s right, the tiresome part of the Oppenheimer vs. Barbie discourse is well under way.
Inevitably, that means that people want to know if Oppenheimer passes or fails the Bechdel Test. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the movie tells the complicated story of the man who is credited with inventing the atomic bomb. (AKA, the bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended World War II at the cost of tens of thousands of Japanese lives.) Nolan, who based his screenplay on the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, depicts Oppenheimer’s work on The Manhattan Project, conducted in secret at at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Nolan also walks viewers through a hearing later in Oppenheimer’s life, in which the physicist was accused of working for the Soviet Union.
Does that sound like a movie that would pass the Bechdel test to you? Let’s get into it.
Does Oppenheimer pass the Bechdel test?
Oppenheimer does not pass the Bechdel test, because it does not have a scene that features more than two women in a scene, who talk about something other than a man. The rules of the Bechdel test are as follows:
- Does the movie feature at least two women characters? (Oppenheimer does.)
- Does the movie feature these two or more women characters talking to each other? (Oppenheimer does not, in any significant way.)
- Does the movie feature these two or more women characters talking to each other about something other than a man? (Oppenheimer does not.)
Oppenheimer does feature two women in leading roles, including Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, and Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer’s mistress, Jean Tatlock. The movie also takes care to highlight Lilli Hornig (played by Olivia Thirlby in the movie), a Czech-American scientist and one of the few women to work on the Manhattan project at Los Alamos. However, none of the above women ever have a scene together in which they discuss something other than a man. Therefore, technically, Oppenheimer fails the Bechdel test.
More On:
Bechdel Test
But here’s why that doesn’t matter. First of all, Oppenheimer is, as the title suggests, a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer. He’s a man who worked in a man’s world. His most famous life event, The Manhattan Project, took place from 1942 to 1946. The other major focus of the movie—the security hearing in which he was questioned by powerful government officials about his alleged pro-Soviet agenda—took place in the ’50s. So, the ’40s and the ’50s—two historically sexist decades in which women held even less power in the world of science and government than they do today. Unless Nolan wanted to invent an alternative version of American history, there simply aren’t a lot of women involved in the story he was trying to tell. The exception is Kitty and Jean, both of whom do have substantial roles in the film. But Nolan’s version of Oppenheimer simply isn’t very interested in these two women outside of their relationship to him, and the movie is told from his point of view.
Second of all, the so-called “Bechdel test” is a meaningless gimmick of film analysis that was never intended to be taken seriously by its creator, Alison Bechdel. Alison Bechdel is a brilliant cartoonist, writer, and feminist with whom I am proud to share an alma mater. Her weekly feminist comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, ran from 1983 to 2008, and, in one of those strips, she had a character introduce “the rule,” now known as the Bechdel test, as a joke. It even comes with a punchline!
It’s a cheeky, somewhat pointed joke meant to highlight the fact that movies, in general, are dominated by male characters and male issues. That was even more true when this strip, titled “The Rule,” was published in 2005. It was never intended by Bechdel to be a hard-and-fast endorsement or indictment of whether any particular movie was “feminist” or not. (I can think of a few movies that, technically, do pass the test that one would be hard-pressed to argue as feminist masterpieces—like, for example, the Divergent movies.)
I have my qualms with Oppenheimer—like the confusing, non-linear storytelling—but I doubt a contrived scene between two women for the purpose of passing this test would make anyone happy. It’s time to stop using the Bechdel test as a shallow replacement for actual feminist critique—especially when it comes to historical biopics about a man.
