What’s the Mo Movie Measure, you ask? It’s an idea from Alison Bechdel’s brilliant comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. The character “Mo” (actually, not Mo – see below) explains that she only watches movies in which
1) there are at least two named female characters, who
2) talk to each other about
3) something other than a man.
It’s appalling how few movies can pass the Mo Movie Measure.
By the way, when I coined the phrase “Mo Movie Measure,” I screwed up — the character in “Dykes To Watch Out For” who says it, isn’t Mo! From Dykes To Watch Out For: The Blog:
We were excited to hear that someone still remembers this 20-year-old chestnut. But alas, the principle is misnamed. It appears in “The Rule,” a strip found on page 22 of the original DTWOF collection. Mo actually doesn’t appear in DTWOF until two years later. […] Alison would also like to add that she can’t claim credit for the actual “rule.” She stole it from a friend, Liz Wallace, whose name is on the marquee in the comic strip…
Ooops!
Also, the bit about the two female characters having to have names – which I thought had been in the original comic strip – was apparently added by me. Oops again.
That’s how these cultural ideas develop – it’s just a giant game of “telephone.”
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Hi, do you happen to know what the name is of the character introducing the rule in the comic strip, if it isn’t Mo? Thank you.
I don’t know the name of the character; I’m not sure if she even had a name. You can read the strip that originally introduced the Bechdel Test here.
That’s one of the main characters. It’s been years since I’ve read DTWOF so I don’t remember her name. But she’s got a name. Helpful, I know.
She bears a strong resemblance to Ginger, but it isn’t a definitive resemblance. The strip is from before DTWOF developed an ongoing cast of characters, so it is hard to tell if Bechdel intended Ginger to have been that character from that strip when Ginger started appeared in the strip. The character in “The Rule” seems physically bulkier than I recall Ginger being, but that could be a shift in drawing style.
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The episode entitled “Women in film” of the BBC Radio Three series “Sound of Cinema” is available for the next ten days in the UK (I don’t know if it is available outside the UK) at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b053rzw9
The blurb begins as follow:
In his verbal description of the Test, Sweet remarks that the women should be “preferably with names”.
Another program I regularly listen to is “Kermode and Mayo’s film review” (currently available episodes can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lvdrj/episodes/player ). They frequently refer to the Bechtel Test.
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