Will Wonder Woman Never Cease?
By Brantley Thompson Elkins
There
are all kinds of nits to pick in Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman, and yet I agree with fans who consider it a
breakthrough movie – perhaps a classic as well as a blockbuster. And that’s
without even focusing on it as iconically feminist.
But
of course, it is a feminist triumph –
a blockbuster hit directed by a woman, and sure to lead not only to sequels and
other movies about superheroines but to greater opportunities for women
generally on the big screen and the small screen. And it isn’t just the women
watching – male comics fans love the movie. Still, it was surely overdue, after
generations of male dominance in the category.
Few
if any other movies have taken so long to reach the screen; the Wikipedia entry
details a number of false starts since 1996; during which time the DC Comics
heroine has changed a lot – in 2011, she was rebooted as an actual goddess,
daughter of Zeus, rather than an ordinary Amazon formed from clay and given
life by the Greek and Roman gods. It is the new version that Jenkins embraces –
only with Diana herself being unaware of it until the very end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Woman_(2017_film)
But
the new version of Diana (Gil Gadot, who seems born for the role in both her
beauty and the aura she projects – and is nothing like Lynda Carter in the old
TV series) is still born and raised in Themyscira, the hidden island where
there aren't any men but where women are masters of combat just in case they
need to fight – only with just swords and bows. When the World War I Germans
discover the island, in pursuit of the American spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine),
we are asked to believe that the Amazons can outfight the invaders armed with
automatic weapons and kill them to the last man, while suffering only one
fatality themselves – they can even shoot three arrows at a time and unerringly
hit three invaders.
When
Diana ventures forth with Steve into our world, hoping to stop World War I by
taking out Ares, the god of war, there is the same disconnect. She is armed
only with a sword (supposedly meant for Ares) and shield. As in the comics, she
has bracelets – well, upgraded to gauntlets here – that can deflect bullets.
But in the comics, she faced only ordinary gunmen. Here she can lead a charge
across No Man's Land in face of torrential machine gun fire – how can she
possibly move her arms fast enough, or protect her lower body and her legs
(beyond gauntlets; reach)? It's the same in a latter battle to take out the
base where the Germans are producing a new poison gas that could kill millions
are win the war for them.
There
are related incredulities. Nobody seems to think it odd that Steve has brought
a woman to the trenches, nor do the soldiers seem awed when Diana does her
stuff. It's the same when she liberates a Belgian village from the Germans –
the villagers dance for joy, and Steve gives her a dancing lesson. Yet none of
the Belgians seem to react as one would expect them to to the advent of an
actual goddess with superhuman strength and agility. When she later crashes a
German party, taking the place of a German woman, nobody notices the sword
poking out the back of the stolen dress she's wearing (She has already shown
she knows foreign languages, but Jenkins should have taken a lead from Judgment
at Nuremberg, and had the people there speak German at first, then shift into
English.).
One
of the Germans is General Erich Ludendorff, who in real life was the supreme
commander of German forces – after the war, he promoted the stab-in-the-back
legend of Germany's defeat, and allied himself with Hitler – although he later
turned against him. He even wrote a book called Total War, in which he argued that the entire physical and moral
forces of the nation should be mobilized, because, according to him, peace was
merely an interval between wars. Diana believes him to be Ares, as well she
might. Only she's wrong. Only, what's
right about the movie, what redeems it from the failures of other superhero
movies, is what happens Next...
Most
superhero movies are about nothing but fighting, often over trivial issues – as
in Batman vs. Superman. Wonder Woman, by contrast, is about something – about human nature,
about good and evil, about the forces of darkness and the power of love.
Diana
has believed that Ares alone is responsible for the evils of mankind, but she
is in for a rude awakening when she confronts the true God of War – a seemingly
meek British diplomat named Patrick Morgan. Morgan, unlike Ludendorff, is a man
of words rather than action. And it is the ordinary men of words, rather than the
men of action, who have led us into the darkness. Wars began as just exercises
in plunder – smashing enemies to grab their things. It was the men of words who
turned war and oppression into causes. It was they who created
ultra-nationalism, religious fanaticism, racism, fascism, communism and all
other isms that have plagued us through the ages and seem to be reaching a
climax in our time.
Just
look around you, Morgan tells Diana before their final battle. Look at what
they are, what they have made themselves. She seems helpless to gainsay him,
and yet she does.
"You
were right about them – but they are so much more."
She
knows we are so much more because she has met and found comfort with Steve, who
declares his love to her just before he must part from her – to hijack a German
bomber, loaded with poison gas, which is about to take off for London. He must
destroy that plane, and its cargo, at the cost of his own life, to save his
people. Greater love hath no man…
Yet
Steve isn’t alone. He has recruited old friends, no longer in the military
themselves, to help him and Diana with their mission. They are comic types, but
good men and true – the salt of the earth. And we have already seen others,
like the Belgian villagers, taking joy in the ordinary things of life.
There
is still the final reckoning with Morgan/Ares to come. But in a sense, that is
anti-climax; it has to be built up into a more conventional superhero battle by
giving him a monster outfit that conceals – for a time – the nebbish face of
Diana’s adversary. The real culmination of the story has come with the final
parting between her and Steve, who gives her a token of his love – his
wristwatch, which she has always thought rather silly. Only she doesn’t think
so now; it has become precious to her.
Sentimental,
yes. But perhaps sentimental values are the only true values, as opposed to the
sundry causes that contend for our souls but threaten to turn us into
moralistic automatons. Diana knows this, at the end:
I used to want to save the world, to
end war and bring peace to mankind. But then I glimpsed the darkness that lives
within their light. I learnt that inside every one of them there will always be
both. The choice each must make for themselves - something no hero will ever
defeat. And now I know... that only love can truly save the world.
In A Criminal
History of Mankind (1984), Colin Wilson makes the case that the wars, mass
murders and terrorist outrages of our times do not grow out of ordinary crimes
like rape and robbery motivated by nothing more than the desire to get
something for nothing, but are rather “the outcome of a twisted kind of idealism,
an attempt to create a ‘better world:’”
The
frightening thing about the members of the Japanese Red Brigade who
machine-gunned passengers at Lod airport, or the Italian terrorists who burst
into a university classroom and shot the professor in the legs - alleging that
he was teaching his students ‘bourgeois values’ - is that they were not
criminal lunatics but sincere idealists. When we realise this we recognise that
criminality is not the reckless aberration of a few moral delinquents but an
inevitable consequence of the development of intelligence, the ‘flip side’ of
our capacity for creativity. The worst crimes are not committed by evil
degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking ‘pragmatic’ decisions.
It’s very much like the take we get from Wonder Woman.