I love the Bechdel Test.

I’m up to the same season of MM and I completely agree with your take on this. Ultimately though, I think the show is about the construction of identity itself.

Many thanks for the post. (As an aside, how awful was ‘Inception’? Or am I the only one who thinks so?)

I saw ‘The Ghost Writer’ on Sunday and was about to apply the test when you saved me the trouble up there. But doesn’t the catty exchange between the PA and the wife about polishing one’s nails in the back of the car count? Probably not — that’s ‘about a man’ subtextually, I guess. Does subtext count?

I think on the season 1 DVD one of the writers/producers or some such behind Mad Men described it as a show about the insecurities of the American male and the people who suffer because of it – namely the women: Peggy, Joan, Betty etc. For some reason that description has always stuck in my head as rather apt.

Kerryn – I did have to think about the Ghost Writer, in that they have the two women in it, both of whom are important characters. But I felt their interaction was all about their relationship with Adam Lang so I suppose I’m saying that subtext counts – or it does in that example anyway. That said, I did think Ruth Lang was a terrific character – albeit in very much in the film noir (duplicitous woman) mode. But she was riveting.

singular-plural stuff up alert: ‘ in that they have the two women in it, both of whom are important characters.’ should read ‘in that it has . ..’

Yes, I was almost joking when I asked if subtext counted — if it didn’t, what a very thin thing fiction (including narrative/dramatic film) would be. I agree with you about the Ruth character — not least because she was practically the only actor in the movie apart from Ewan McGregor himself to maintain any kind of convincing or consistent accent, thereby not constantly testing our suspended disbelief the way most of the others did. The friend I saw the movie with told me that apparently Polanski insisted they all say their lines exactly as he modelled them, which would explain everything, including why Pierce Brosnan sounded half-Irish half-Polish when he was supposed to be more or less Tony Blair.

I did not know about the Bechdel test. Count me educated.

(But aren’t Peggy and Joan discussing a man in that first part of the scene?)

Well, they’re discussing the fact men expect them to be supplicants, which is different to fighting over a man. But I take the point. It was hard to get a clip of them – most were disabled so I couldn’t embed them.