The main problem of the test is that it oversimplifies the aspects of the representation and narrows them down to just three criteria that cannot reflect upon the complicated dynamics of both fictional and real-life relationships. The central thesis of an essay is that while being an important trigger for the discussion of gender inequality in film, the Bechdel test itself is flawed and should not be used as a standard for measuring said inequality. This paper aims to examine the issues that such usage of the Bechdel test poses for both the film industry and the question of female representation on-screen. As seen from this example, the Bechdel test sets some kind of standard that is expected to be followed for the movie to get a better rating or review. The initiative was supported by the Swedish Film Institute. To get an A rating, the movie has to fulfil all three requirements of the Bechdel test. This system is supposed to evaluate the level of gender equality or lack thereof. For instance, in 2013 four Swedish cinemas have started to use a new movie rating system that was based on the Bechdel test. As it was previously established, the Bechdel test has become a prominent measure of female representation. This essay, however, will concentrate on the media that was originally criticized by Bechdel, namely the film. The test is also known to be applied to video games, comic books and theatre plays. Despite being originally intended as a joke, the test has become „the standard by which feminist critics judge television, movies, books, and other media“. The movies are analyzed there according to the three Bechdel’s rules with an original addition that the two female characters must be named. The user-edited database of thousands of films called was created. Nowadays the Bechdel test has not only gained the mainstream audience’s attention but also inspired numerous variations. Based on that critique and Wallace’s idea, the sketch was created by Bechdel and applied to the mostly male-dominated film industry of the 1980s. In addition to that, the relationships between women are described as „too simple“. In her paper, Woolf states that in fiction, women are almost always shown „in their relation to men“ and not as independent human beings with their own feelings and struggles. The original inspiration behind „The Rule“ comic strip came from Bechdel’s friend Liz Wallace (hence the Bechdel-Wallace test) and, more broadly, from Virginia Woolf and her 1929 essay A Room for One’s Own. The test has been used as a gauge of gender inequality in film and has gained increasing popularity in the last 20 years. This little comic strip has inspired the so-called Bechdel test, also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test and Mo Movie Measure. One, it has to have at least two women in it who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man“, said Mo, a lesbian heroine of the comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For, created by an American cartoonist Alison Bechdel in 1985. „I have this rule, see… I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. The issues of an oversimplified analysis in assessing the representation of women in cinema Nelli Abdullaeva (SoSe 2021) 1.
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