Why Wonder Woman Is The Most Honest Film I’ve Seen This Year
It is a sad fact of adulthood that I very rarely go to the cinema. One excuse for this is the exorbitant cost of the Odeon these days — ‘these days’ being 2017 in Oxford as opposed to 2008 in Birmingham, where you could get a 2–4–1 student ticket on a Wednesday for £1.75¹. A more tragic excuse is that, unlike in Birmingham in 2008, I have to put in more than a couple of hours of work a day and that, after a long commute I don’t have the energy to walk 400 metres to the cinema and engage emotionally with what’s on the screen (the irony of this excuse is that I do seem to find the energy to regularly go to both the gym and Pizza Hut, which are a) less culturally enriching and b) an inefficient combination).
That said, due to an unexpected number of trans-Atlantic flights this year, I have managed to watch a large number of recent releases. Being on a plane for seven hours away from internet, friends or the washing up leaves me without excuse. Over plastic bread rolls and greasy, foil-clad pesto pasta² I have enjoyed, in chronological order: Suicide Squad, the all-female rehash of Ghostbusters, Nocturnal Animals, Disney Pixar’s Trolls, Dr Strange, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, The Girl on the Train, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Passengers, The Lego Batman Movie, Baby Driver, Mind Horn, Dunkirk, and Wonder Woman.³ That’s a lotta frequent flyer miles right there.
Not only will this list reveal to you my ‘system’ of always following an intense thriller with a comedy (to avoid FLIGHTmares, gettit?) but it also shows you that my taste in films is not very highbrow. I’m not sure there’s a single Best Picture nominee in there. Probably the only film among these that could make the Oscars is Baby Driver, which has an understated intensity to rival Whiplash, and also Kevin Spacey.⁴ After the stress of the airport and a couple of mini-wines I want to watch something predictable and fun, and perhaps that’s why Wonder Woman came as a shock. It’s not a particularly controversial film, which is unsurprising when you think that DC is known as the squeaky clean all-American alternative to Marvel. It’s not even, in my reckoning, a particularly positive film for women, despite all the hopeful feminist readings of it in the press. Let’s face it, any film which depicts a female hero dragged into a war by the appearance of a man, who spends half the film telling her to sit still and commenting on her clothing, cannot really be considered much of breakthrough.⁵ Yet still, far more than the unlikely victory of Baby or Emily Blunt’s far-too-beautiful Rachel Watson, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman got quickly to the heart of the human condition.
Why do I think that? Well for one thing, the key lesson that WW learns from her early experiences of mankind is that in this messy, broken world there are no good guys and bad guys. The Americans who are heroes to the struggling British troops in 1918 were enemies to the Native Americans who they murdered, moved and disenfranchised over the previous four centuries. The evil German general plotting chemical warfare is being fed victims by the disinterested British politicians in back Westminster. As with any film set in the First World War, there is also an undercurrent of irony to the heroic attempts of the protagonist fighting in ‘the war to end all wars’. We know that progress is but temporary. Peace will not last. That lesson could not be more poignant in this current moment, when so many of us remember mournfully a recent past when it seemed like things were looking up. We’ve found ourselves very suddenly living in a world which is once again polarized and hostile. ‘The Americans’ under Trump are the enemy again, and some of us even wish we still had a German chancellor to guide us.
To make things worse, perhaps we’re starting to recognize that we might have had a part to play in what has happened. All this time, as we proudly and complacently preached the inevitable march of progress, we were creating a reality TV world where people feel they need to fight to be listened to. Likewise in Wonder Woman there’s a thread of understanding that the horrifying, global conflict that drives the narrative was caused by the actions of individuals, and it’s not just the politicians and the soldiers who are to blame. The motley crew of heroes accompanying her know that:
Charlie: May we get what we want…
Steve Trevor: …and may we get what we need.
Sameer: But may we never get what we deserve.
The point, and this is something that DC seems to have said louder and louder over the last decade, is that ultimately we’re fucked. There are no good guys to save the day, or human heroes to root for. You can blame Ares, or religion, or culture, or bad education, or the patriarchy, or the loosening of public morals, but in the end mankind is corrupted. Some people bear the mark of this more than others due to personality or personal circumstance but it lurks beneath the skin of us all — all it takes is to find ourselves on the wrong side of the war. This is what Wonder Woman learns from her introduction to the human race. As the credits role, she looks back on her time among them and explains: “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.” The cinematic Lucifer is defeated, but the people keep on fighting because that is ‘who they are’.
There is a glimmer of hope, perhaps more than the premise of the film merits — but that’s Hollywood for you. WW decides that people don’t deserve her help but Captain Steve talks her around:
Diana Prince: She was right, my mother was right… she said the world of men do not deserve you, they don’t deserve our help…
Steve Trevor: It’s… it’s not about deserve. Maybe, maybe we don’t. But it’s not about that, it’s about what you believe. You don’t think I get it, after what I’ve seen out there? You don’t think I wish I could tell you that it was one bad guy to blame? It’s not! We’re all to blame!
Diana Prince: I’m not!
Steve Trevor: But maybe I am.
Captain Steve is the first to recognize that he’s at fault for the misery in the world around him, along with the rest of mankind. But he also recognizes that WW is not saddled with the same guilt. She’s an outsider to the human mess, she’s something different. She’s the weapon that a creator God sent to sort out broken humanity. Inevitably, the Hollywood journey of WW brings her to realize that the only solution to mankind’s condition is — love. Yet ultimately, it’s not human love that triumphs. Like everything else associated with the species, human love is too weak and messy — too easily corrupted. To save humanity it takes the love of an outsider who is uncorrupted by the human brokenness that holds us back, even in our best moments.
At the start and the end of the film we see that Wonder Woman has set up camp in modern day Paris, and if it wasn’t just a story then that would be good news; because we’re in a mess now, too. We need an outsider, someone who sees through all our blame games and infighting to the heart of the human condition. We need someone who has proved they can do something about it. I feel that more acutely now than I have in many years; and perhaps that’s why over a potted chocolate desert and G&T this film seemed so honest to me.
As Wonder Woman walks through the valley of death — the ruin and decay of the First World War trenches — when all else seems hopeless, she decides to do something. She’s not the first human-God to do that.
[1] Correction: In the proof reading stages of this article I went to the Odeon to see how much it would cost to go to the cinema on a school night, and was pleasantly surprised to discover they’ve expanded their off-peak period to weekdays and bought their prices down to 7 quid! So you should definitely go.
[2] Please, please start varying your vegetarian option BA.
[3] I’m aware some of these came out in autumn 2016 but I still work in academic years, alright?
[4] In the time since I started writing this post Kev has gone from being a highly respected theatrical artist to hated sex pest, but ain’t that just Hollywood for you.
[5] Also, pet-peeve but why would an Amazonian goddess have shaved armpits?
