The Béchamel Test

In 1985, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel first published her friend Liz Wallace’s joke that she wouldn’t watch a movie unless it had two female characters who exchanged dialogue about something other than men. Over the last forty years, the Bechdel Test has proven far too challenging for films to pass. We suggest replacing it with the easier Béchamel Test. To pass it, a movie only needs to fulfill one of the following:

• Do the female characters have any skills or aptitudes beyond the ability to whisk up a perfect béchamel sauce?
• Are the female characters’ concerns any more profound than worrying that eating a dollop of béchamel is “oh so bad”?
• Are the female characters’ decisions more important than whether the shade of their wedding dress should be eggshell or béchamel?
• Is the average skin tone of the film’s main characters darker than béchamel sauce?
• Does the film’s villain have more creative ways of showing their evil than slowly lowering the male protagonist’s female love interest into a boiling vat of béchamel?
• Does any woman coded as attractive in the film have hair other than the color or texture of extra buttery béchamel?
• Can any of the female characters be described with different adjectives than internet béchamel recipes (“easy,” “simple,” or “basic”)?
• Are the nude scenes tasteful, or at least tasty, like when a female character is taking a bath, but you can’t really see anything because she’s submerged in a tub of béchamel?
• Do the female characters collectively have more screen time than how long it takes to make a basic béchamel (eighteen minutes)?
• Does the female protagonist express her true thoughts and feelings, instead of stewing on and withholding them from a male love interest for longer than the average lifespan of a béchamel stored in the fridge (three days)?
• Relatedly, can the female character convey thoughts and feelings in a tone mildly resembling anger instead of sadness or victimhood without the filmmaker destroying her like a frozen béchamel that is not slowly and carefully thawed overnight?
• Is the female protagonist’s sexual and moral purity treated with more nuance than the phrase “if you brown the roux, you ruin the béchamel”?
• Do the female characters elevate each other, instead of only bolstering the adventures and dreams of male characters, the way a béchamel base elevates your run-of-the-mill mac and cheese so it can be served at a Michelin-starred restaurant to twenty-somethings wearing eight-hundred-dollar T-shirts?
• The next time you’re making a béchamel after watching the movie, do you think back to the film and consider the ways it destabilized your sense of what it means to be gendered in this society, leading you to examine not only how you’ve conceded to the demands of the patriarchy—making this béchamel for Matt’s parents, for example, even though he was the one who invited them over—but also how your very concessions have contributed to the maintenance of that patriarchal order? Did the film, therefore, inadvertently render béchamel itself a symbol of oppression, with its whiteness, its blandness, its willingness to accommodate and serve as a strong base for other sometimes lesser sauces, its desire to be everything to everyone (both savory and sweet), its tendency to take on the flavors of whatever’s around it, the simplicity of its ingredients, the indivisibility of those ingredients once blended, and ultimately, its irresistibility?
• If the film has only one named female character, is it Zooey Deschanel playing an adorably heightened version of herself called “Zooey Béchamel”?