Wolf of Wall Street

Avery Arellano

Blog 2

The representative test, AKA the Bechdel Test, is something that movie watchers use to ask three simple criteria questions about a movie: (1) does the film have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about something other than men. This test it to help viewers bring awareness to feminism and how it is never brought up even in popular movies. The movie that I picked to watch was “The Wolf of Wall Street” which is a very popular film based on a stockbroker named Jordan Belfort who owns a very successful firm on Wall Street. Although the film seemed to be very entertaining to many viewers, it scored a total of zero points on the Bechdel Test. So for each category, none applied to this movie. This is because the protagonist is a male, who actually looks as women as nothing but objects in the film. For an example, since his company was so successful, he gained a lot of money and interest throughout the movie which caused him to be exposed to the wealthy life. Being exposed to this lifestyle, he could do whatever he wanted with his life and his company, which led him to ordering over 100 strippers soly for all of his workers. Now if that does not say he is only using women for personal use, then I do not know what does. Another example from the movie is that in the beginning of the film, he was not very wealthy and he was married to what people would view as a mediocre wife. As his success starts to build, he then finds that the more money he gets, hotter girls will start to approach him, leading him to cheat on his wife because he thought he could do better.

Personally, I believe every movie should not be based off whether or not it passed the Bechdel Test because most movies have different plots and storylines to them. What I mean by this is that there's so many different movie genres that they are not all going to meet the standards of the test. With that being said, I think that this method is not fair for rating movies because it gives certain movies zero chance at passing the test, even though they are still entertaining movies to watch. But, I do think some movies, such as the Wolf of Wall Street, could use some improvement on making sure that some aspects of the Bechdel Test can apply to the film because I do believe some of the requirements are important to not only the film, but to women as well. Some of the requirements that I believe should be identified in a movie is the question that asks if  a women is viewed as more than an object. To me that means a woman who is seen in a move other than for her appearance, or sexual output, or even her body. A women should not be seen as an object, and in the movie that's all that women were seen as, so I think the movie could do a better job at representing women in general.