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• 1 2018-05-05T07:54:56-07:00 Bechdel Test In relation to Gone Girl 11 Zainab Amiri plain 2019-05-14T10:44:36-07:00

      The argument of whether females are portrayed fairly in media, mainly films, and books, remains a controversial topic. This controversy is baffling in itself, since the fact that there are arguments about this means that there is some form of inequality in women’s representation in popular culture. The Bechdel (or Bechdel-Wallace) Test examines female representation in fictional works. Named after graphic artist and author Alison Bechdel and her friend Liz Wallace, the test has three rules to see whether a film or any work of fiction attempts to give women depth of representation. There are three original rules, from the actual comic strip, that is used to see whether the film or text passes the test. The first one being that there must be two female characters who have names, the second is that they must have some kind of dialogue with each other, and the third is that this dialogue must not be about a man.
  

  They seem simple enough, however, the number of movies and books that actually pass this test is increasing, but that's not saying much. Some of the most famous and well-loved films out there don’t pass it, such as “ The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “The Star Wars” trilogy, and even “Avatar”.
            Bechdel claims that she originally got the idea from a Virginia Woolf passage where she questions the relationships between women in novels, calling them “too simple," and noting that she couldn’t recall the last time she read about female characters who were friends rather than mothers and daughters. One of the novels this path examines, Gone Girl, was turned into a film of the same name, and actually, both adaptations do pass the test. The story itself is about a man, or a woman’s plans to sabotage this man’s life. So there would be a smaller chance for two women to talk about a topic that is not a man. But, there are a few instances where Amy speaks with her mother, at the launch part of “Amazing Amy.” There are other small instances in the novel where females exchange dialogue about a subject other than a man, and in this case, Nick. These examples serve to give Amy more depth as a character, though the irony remains that she herself manipulates societies' preconceived views of women to conceal her intelligence and machinations. This test has now evolved and added more explicit rules since many people claimed the previous rules were too basic and still did not represent women a way that is even remotely close to how much exposure men get. 

   

  References:
  Garcia, David, et al. “Gender Asymmetries in Reality and Fiction: The Bechdel Test of Social Media.” Proceedings of the Eighth International AAAI Conference.

  Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl. New York, Penguin Random House, 2012.