Movie Review: "Wonder Woman"
“Wonder Woman” (2017)
Directed by Patty Jenkins; Starring Gal Gadot and Chris Pine
SPOILERS
I’m just going to start out saying that I LOVED this movie! I did. It was exciting, fun, thoughtful, laugh-out-loud funny, and not something I get to see every day—or every time I go to the movies—or basically, hardly ever. Was it perfect? Of course not. Why should it have been? As the Daily Show’s Michelle Wolf exasperatedly said--after her montage of dramatic headlines that all had behind them the assumption that this movie should win the culture wars for feminism once and for all: “You know when we’ll feel women are equal at the box office? When we get to make a bad superhero movie and then immediately make another bad one.” As men have so often done. Well, despite the expected conservative whines and some feminists’ critiques about the movie not having enough female characters once Diana left Themiscyra, or enough of a sisterhood focus (I do agree that more Etta Candy as an integral part of the Ares-hunting team would have rocked and made the movie better), or enough of a focus on the original fight for women’s equality, “Wonder Woman” set box-office records and won positive reviews from both professional critics and movie-goers. And, I argue, it was strongly feminist in ways that many critics don’t look for.
Psychologist Dr. William Moulton Marston created Wonder Woman in 1941, a press release explained, “to set up a standard among children and young people of strong, free, courageous womanhood; and to combat the idea that women are inferior to men.” “The only hope for civilization,” it argued, “is the greater freedom, development and equality of women” (quoted by Jill Lepore in her New Yorker article on the film).1 In the 75 years since then, Wonder Woman has gone through numerous iterations of her stories; real-life women’s history has been full of change, evolution of status, and back-tracking; and there are still so few Hollywood movies centered on a female protagonist and directed by a woman (zero when it comes to superhero flicks, until Patty Jenkins made this one), that when one does emerge, it is heavily fraught with the weight of too many factions’ expectations. Lepore is disappointed that the plot of the movie didn’t focus on the kinds of fights for equality that many real-world feminists (including Marston and the women in his life who helped him devise Wonder Women) were engaged in during the 1910s: fighting for suffrage and establishing birth control clinics.
Yet, in this film, Diana Prince is not just opposed to, but horrified by, the Great War and wants to make it end. There were many real-world feminists who were felt the same way. But, more even than that, the movie takes on one of the projects of many feminists in our time period in which it was made: recognizing that much of the continued inequality between men and women emerges from our over-reliance on gender binaries (everything can fall neatly into the category of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’) and then working to deconstruct those binaries. Real people, their skills, strengths, weaknesses, and dreams don’t align so neatly into just one category. And, gender binaries are related to other either-or categorizations. In its blurring of such boundaries—as well as in its depiction of this super-heroine—“Wonder Woman” demonstrates its feminism.
Traditional thinking about gender is related to thinking about war: “real men” are warriors, while women are supporters on the sidelines, not directly involved. Yet, there is nothing inherent in femaleness that means passivity, silence and inactivity in a man’s world. There is also nothing inherent in maleness that means they have to be violent, aggressive, war-like and mean. Steve Trevor is not; even Samir, Charlie, and the Chief change their attitudes. Charlie rebukes Diana when she is solicitous of him after his nightmare; he’s angry that his vulnerability and what today we would term PTSD have been revealed. The Chief says, “He sees ghosts.” But, after the victory in Veld, Charlie sings in the tavern. The next day when he suggests he wouldn’t be useful to the group as they go after those readying the gas, Diana says with a sweet smile, “But, Charlie, who would sing for us?” A man’s value can be in shooting or in singing.
Diana at first believes that if she can only find and kill Ares, his influence over men’s hearts will be eradicated, and they will get back to being good people who will no longer want to destroy each other. Yet, she gradually comes to understand that human beings are complicated; they embody both good desires and qualities AND bad, warring impulses at the same time. As Steve Trevor tells her, “We’re all to blame.” Setting up an Ares-less world structure will not eradicate war any more than setting up a world structure with laws and government agencies pushing equality between the sexes will eradicate sexism. The movie dramatizes how the typical boundaries between “good guys” and “bad guys” is blurry, just as it demonstrates how the boundaries between feminine and masculine aren’t neatly drawn.
The set-up of, and challenge to, these categories starts early on. During the beautifully set and choreographed scenes on Themiscyra, we hear some of the background mythology (movie version) and learn that it is Ares’ lust for war and his ability to influence so many human men to share it that causes the downfall of the gods’ world. This is very different from the cause for the Fall laid out in the book of Genesis, which blames Woman and her desire for knowledge that the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil would impart. The alternative Fall mythology places women and men differently. Because Ares couldn’t stand his father’s creation, he sowed jealousy and suspicion among humans to get them to turn on each other and wage war. So, they went from being good people—men—to warring, but the gods created the Amazons to bring them back to love and reason. At this point, it is a simple gender reversal: indicting all men and their war-loving natures instead of women and their desire for knowledge and independence. It can seem refreshing to feminist viewers that it’s not woman—Eve--bringing down man and requiring divine punishment because of it, but men causing and precipitating the Fall, needing women saviors. The women even get sent to Paradise for their protection and training. Diana comes to see, though, that things are more complicated. Over the course of the film, her experiences lead her to reassess her thinking, and we are given the material to do so as well. Despite the way the British get their women to dress so that they could not be fighters, despite women’s banishment from parliamentary rooms in which decisions are made, women can be warriors: for evil purposes like Doctor Poison, and for good, defensive purposes like Diana saving the village near the Western Front.
The funny scene in which Etta and Steve take Diana clothes shopping so that she might better fit in shows her criteria for an appropriate outfit: not how she looks, but how well she can kick, spin, and move in it. The gender standards of early 20th century England are being challenged. Women don’t need to dress in such starkly different (feminine) ways than men (masculine). Focusing a critique on clothing—though humorous in the scene—might seem to be trite, except the focus is on functionality. Edwardian dress is designed to keep women only doing “feminine” tasks. It is a means of communicating role; as such, it is worthy of a feminist critique such as the movie provides.
Yet, blurring boundaries between the traditional gender categories is not just about critiquing traditional femininity or making female characters “masculine.” The movie’s Diana exhibits much compassion and a desire to take care of others in need—attitudes typically classified as “feminine.” When in the trenches on the Western Front, she is—like Steve Trevor—appalled at the suffering, and wants to stop to help everyone: a woman who describes to her what happens in the village, soldiers in pain. Steve and the misfit team are mission-driven and want to keep going. “You can’t save everyone, Diana,” Steve says as he urges her on. Yet, she asserts—in perhaps a typically “masculine” way--her intention to stop to help. As she dons her Wonder Woman uniform, she leads the way across the battlefield, stopping bullets so that her team and others can make it across to save the village: she is exhibiting a blend of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits: she is a woman leading men, with men following her into battle; she is a woman fighting and prevailing, and none of them are conforming to traditional gender categories.
In one of my favorite images, Wonder Woman stands atop the village church, in the gaping hole left by its spire being blown away. Steve Trevor and the rest of the ragtag mercenaries worked together to help our hero leap from a severed car door they hold to the bell tower where a sniper was poised. If the church represents both the religions that set the governing myths that so many live by—whether the ancient Greek pantheon’s stories about Ares being responsible for men’s warlike natures or the bible’s story about a woman’s desire for knowledge leading to a human fall—and the resulting dualisms of gender and human nature, then Diana’s act of destroying it while saving the residents (a typically-masculine military act borne out of a more feminine desire to save and nurture everyone) represents transcending these boundaries.
Yet, Diana still has more lessons to learn. Like us more ordinary beings, learning isn’t on a nice linear trajectory. When she kills the German officer whom she thought was Ares and the war didn’t stop, she was ready to give up. Steve tells her, though, that it’s not just one bad guy. “It’s them.” It’s all of us, actually. “We’re all to blame.” This coming together of dark and light in one being is hard for her to wrap her head around at first. But, then she encounters the real Ares, also a fundamentalist. He still—after ages—believes that humans are all bad: selfish, hateful, etc. She tells him, “You’re right about them. They are everything you say. And so much more.” It becomes, at the end, a struggle between fundamentalist/simplistic ideology, which can lead to generalizations about large groups of people, and a belief in complexity and understanding deeply who people are.
At the end, she reflects, while reading Bruce Wayne’s email about the photo, that the light and the dark are in everyone. As masculine and feminine are in everyone. “I used to want to save the world,” but now she knows that things are not that simple. Inside every human there is darkness and light. One hero can’t save them from that, but love can change things. We all have choices to make about what we can do to make a difference. Though none of us can save the world, we all can act to try, do what we can to love and save someone. Despite what some feel the film lacks in wider female representation, this gender and other dualism boundary-blurring makes this a strongly feminist film. And damn fun super heroism.
1 http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/wonder-womans-unwinnable-war
