The test includes questions such as “Does the movie avoid celebrating offensive racial, ethnic, and cultural stereotypes? and Does the film avoid glorifying violent men? with each positive answer being awarded one point, plus a bonus if the protagonist is a woman, an LGBT person, or a person with disabilities. We used the test to rate a couple of recent Hollywood success stories, and while The Avengers and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy both end up with an abysmal D grade (1-3 points out of a possible 27), The Hunger Games: Catching Fire scrapes through with either an A (11+ points) or a B, depending on whether you interpret Peeta and Katniss as characters with disabilities. Marvel’s “girl movie” Thor manages a C, mostly down to its three whole female characters (a practically unheard-of achievement in the superhero movie genre) and the presence of Idris Elba in a role that avoids racial stereotyping. The obvious caveat is that this kind of by-the-numbers test is a teaching tool, rather than a checklist for what movies must achieve if they want to avoid being a racist, misogynist pile of crap. There are plenty of very sensitively-written movies that would achieve a low grade on the Rep Test purely because their cast only includes a couple of people, and there are always shades of grey when attempting to gauge the overall atmosphere of a movie.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 08:44:38 +0000
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