Categories
- Art (356)
- Other (3,632)
- Philosophy (2,814)
- Psychology (4,018)
- Society (1,010)
Recent Questions
- Why did everyone start to hate the Russians if the U.S. did the same thing in Afghanistan, Iraq?
- What needs to be corrected in the management of Russia first?
- Why did Blaise Pascal become a religious man at the end of his life?
- How do I know if a guy likes you?
- When they say "one generation", how many do they mean?
My answer will consist of two important parts, in the first we will understand what the “Backdel test” is, and in the second I will express my opinion on whether it is important and helps in evaluating works of art.
The Beckdel test is a “prank that went too far” – initially it all started with a caricature of an American artistAlison Bekdel, in which one friend tells another that she “only watches movies where there are two female characters and they don't talk about men at least once”, and then adds that this is a strong restriction and the last film she was able to watch is Someone Else's. Readers of the newspaper laughed at the cartoon, but left-wing film critics took the idea into their own hands and began seriously evaluating films with this test before nominating them for awards and including them in shortlists. Well, then, following the film critics, all the other critics joined in and now this test is applied to any work of art where there are dialogues and characters at all: films, TV shows, books, plays, etc.
In other words, a piece passes the test if it contains two women who have met and talked to each other at least once about something other than men. Sometimes it is also added that both heroines should be named by name, but this is an evolution of the rule, the original does not say about names.
Is it important to follow this rule in order for a work to be “considered a work of art”? I don't think so. I am not a fan of imposed restrictions in art at all – after all, any restriction makes art weaker and more painful. In the end, all such rules degenerate into censorship. Previously, it was a party rule and everyone was obliged to reflect the role of the party in a film or novel, but now the censorship is liberal – the authors try to force them to reflect the role of minorities, women, etc. As a result, we already see a huge number of films where non-traditional relationships and an excess of female characters are inserted “for show”, they break the narrative for nothing and simply spoil the overall impression of the work.
At the same time, no one forbids the author to insert into his novel at least a hundred women who will endlessly talk to each other – there are women's novels, there are novels about women, about love, about women in the male world and male professions, there is even “Red Dormouse”, where a woman has occupied the niche of Conan the Barbarian in the vastness of combat fantasy!
My position can be formulated as follows: the author belongs to his work, if he wants to make a work about some men – please, about some women – great, as long as the work itself is good. If you don't like it, then find an author whose ratio of gender, color, and nationality in the works meets your query, it's not difficult, believe me. Art is not an assignment, where you can get an Oscar or a Nobel Prize in literature by fulfilling a number of formal criteria on the list. You don't need to turn it into a set of such lists, rules and assignments.