McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Bechdel test observations
Quantus:
--- Quote from: LizW65 on July 03, 2012, 05:29:07 PM ---That was why I mentioned in an earlier post that it's almost necessary to eliminate plot-relevant dialogue from such a test; in, for example, a police procedural/crime thriller, much of the dialogue will be discussion of the various suspects, some of whom will almost certainly be male. I don't believe anyone would consider it sexist for detectives Carol and Alice to discuss the probability of Bob's guilt rather than Mary's.
(Of course, that brings up the question of whether all non-plot-essential dialogue should be edited out anyway...one can make a pretty good case either way.)
--- End quote ---
Precisely. The more you look at the test the more you realize you have to discount in order to make it work, at which point what you are left with is all pretty trivial anyway.
OZ:
Yes. If the story centers around taking down a bad guy, then most of the dialogue is going to be about the bad guy. Any that isn't is probably going to end up on the cutting room floor. If the main character is male then he's going to be involved in most of the conversations. If he's just standing watching two women talk about some random subject it is going to be
a) a little strange (why doesn't he join in the conversation) and
b) probably superfluous and again will end up on the cutting room floor.
Now I am certainly not saying that this is true of all movies. If the movie is about a family then the mother talking to another woman (or her daughter if she has one ) would make perfect sense. If there is a female villain it makes great sense for two female cops,reporters,lab techs, etc. to be discussing how to catch her. If the driving plot of the movie does not involve a human villain but rather deals with survival from nature or aliens or the supernatural or whatever then it would make much more sense to have two female characters discussing the problem.
knnn:
To make a fair benchmark, you need to first consider the ratio of non-protagonist male/female characters. If the ratio is fair, then given the we assume two random characters are speaking to each other the chance of them being both female is (f/(f+m))^2.
Thus, if the males outnumber the females by merely 2:1 (IMHO quite reasonable for things like police/army and probably *much* worse for action flicks), then we'd expect female-female conversation to take up only 11% of the dialogue. Given that movies have a limited time frame, I don't expect the characters to be doing small talk unless it is germane to plot of the story. If they are talking, they can either be talking about other characters (random 2:1 it is about a male character), or some plot device. Assume 50-50 (at best), giving us around 7% "Bechdel worthy".
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: LizW65 on July 03, 2012, 05:29:07 PM ---(Of course, that brings up the question of whether all non-plot-essential dialogue should be edited out anyway...one can make a pretty good case either way.)
--- End quote ---
I do think dialogue does other things as well, like characterisation and world-building, and while ideally as much of it as possible will do more than one of those things, if you cut everything that's not doing lots of things at once you end up with "The Waste Land" or "Four Quartets", which are awesome things to have, but not novels.
knnn:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on July 03, 2012, 06:42:54 PM ---I do think dialogue does other things as well, like characterisation and world-building, and while ideally as much of it as possible will do more than one of those things, if you cut everything that's not doing lots of things at once you end up with "The Waste Land" or "Four Quartets", which are awesome things to have, but not novels.
--- End quote ---
I would argue that world-building dialogue is more relevant to novels. Right or wrong, "Show don't Tell" for movies usually means that you substitute dialog for a spectacle.
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