Why We Needed More from Wonder Woman 1984
A feminist mother laments
Disenchantment with “Wonder Woman 1984” — a film about an idol with a noted comic book legacy as a female rebel — has been profound.
In a year marked by little to look forward to, we needed WW84 to save the day as 2020 limped to an end. Directed and co-written by Patty Jenkins, whose glorious 2017 tribute to the female icon was a fitting escape from the reality of HRC’s loss and the ascendance of a Misogynist-in-Chief, it was a movie my family of superhero movie fans was excited to watch on Christmas. And like so many things in 2020, it left us — especially my daughter and me— bereft.
“Disappointing,” said my 11-year-old girl. “The plot was patchy.”
The story, mismatched as a crowded ’80s mall, was the least of it, as critics noted with haste. Less noted: Wonder Woman let our kids down. Though “just” a superhero movie, kids need heroes that inspire humans to be and do better — especially female superheros, and especially now.
To put it bluntly, the film’s vision of female power is about as empowering as shoulder pads. And while the movie’s cheesiness may have been otherwise enjoyable for grown ups and kids alike, the anachronisms in women’s representation distract as much as they detract.
Narratively, the film is more Back to the Future than Orwellian. As Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman, recently notes, its vision of history is incomplete. But it’s not merely the erasure of women’s history in a movie centering a female icon that bothered me. The film’s distortions made the feminist historiographer in me jump out of her seat in disbelief.
In WW84, the decade known for legislative rollbacks on women’s rights, a culturally conservative backlash against women’s so-called liberation, and the rise of the religious right is merely a flashy fashion-backwards backdrop for a pre-feminist 19th-century motif.
Set in the Reagan era, bad guy Max Lord’s mantra “You can have it all!” is a rallying cry for corporate greed. In the actual 1980s “having it all” was a cultural catchphrase meant to sell white women on the glory of seamlessly combining motherhood and career. What WW84’s Diana Prince can’t combine is more “retro,” however, than that. She must choose between superpowers and a man — a throwback to the Victorian marriage plot, wherein an independent literary heroine either marries or dies by the end of the book.
Diana’s love interest, Steve Trevor, is not the only dead thing resurrected. In a film featuring an Israeli leading woman and a Latino leading man, Latinx and Arab stereotypes abound, resulting in a weird cacophony of racial distortion and pre-feminist refrain. In WW84, two smart women are posited as Betty and Veronica. The one wants a man, and the other wants what the popular girl has. The final battle is a cat fight. And on.
Because Jenkins herself had given us the Wonder Woman of the previous film, along with multicultural sidekicks who were at least actual characters, we who care about such things expected better tropes.
To expect more from a female director is a double standard, to be sure. But we must. A September 2020 study from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative shows that despite pledges to transform an industry known for not having many women at the top, the balance of power hasn’t changed. The percentage of women working on top-grossing films in the roles of director, writer, executive producer, producer, cinematographer was 21% in 2019, up only 3% from 1998. When a woman is in charge, we expect stories that go beyond the romance plot, female characters who aren’t defined by the male gaze.
By the end of 2020, you might think we’d have transcended the retrograde representation WW84 brought back. The Marvel Cinematic Universe gave us Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Agent Carter, the Wasp, Gamora, Okoye, Shuri, Lady Sif, Valkyrie, Nebula, Scarlet Witch, and soon Lady Thor; in addition to Wonder Woman (2017), the DC Extended Universe brought Mera, Cat Woman, and Harley Quinn. While none of these sheroes crush the patriarchy, some of them at least have range.
But even the female villain in WW84 disappoints. Cheetah’s archness comes as a refreshing contrast to the mousey Dr. Barbara Minerva (the film’s representation of a female PhD merits another post). But we don’t get to relish her rise. According to my daughter, who admires female bad guys, “Cheetah was cool, but she didn’t get to be Cheetah for long.” And yes, it’s sad that Cheetah, evil in black-eyeliner, looks like something the movie Cats dragged in, tarted up.
WW84 could and should have been better. Released in the wake of the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the #MeToo movement, and Trump, WW84 could have been as iconic and iconoclastic as “Black Panther.” As Lepore reminds us, Black Panther (created in 1966) resonated onscreen in 2018 partly because of the continued lack in racial progress. So, too, in these times, we needed WW84.
Real-world losses last year were severe — and particularly for women, who suffer disproportionately from the economic devastation wrought by the pandemic according to economists. We lost real-life superheroes (RIP, dear RBG), mothers, grandmothers. Our need for cinematic heroines at year’s end was intense.
Certainly, the film has its heroic moments and highs. Wonder Woman flying, to be precise. And the opening scene showcasing epic Amazonian strength and female camaraderie made me want to hop on Diana’s invisible plane and move there. But when a movie that takes off with a panoramic vision of feminist utopia crashes so low, it smarts more than the Lasso of Truth.
There’s an ethical message in here that reviewers have floundered to name (careful what you wish for? we’re in this together?) and a timely message about toxic masculinity unchecked. But the latter brought cold comfort when we’d been forced to watch the real-life version for four long years, nonstop.
One could argue that superhero movies exist to divert. And I’ll be honest: for two and a half hours on Christmas Day, I stopped thinking about 2020. For me, time even blurred at the end. The closing montage — people touching each other, hugging, standing less than 6 feet apart! — felt escapist, like Themyscira. Was this the past or the After Times we were now in?
The After Times, one hopes, are closer than the imaginary far-away Paradise Island. The vaccine and the Biden/Harris Administration are days and weeks away. In the After Times my family and I long for, female superheroes, imaginary and real, pull us toward an as-yet-unimagined future. They don’t drag us back to a sorry past. My daughter and son, raised on a diet of expanding representation, expected better. They — we — deserve nothing less.
Deborah Siegel, PhD is the author of Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild and teaches in the College of Communication at DePaul University. She is the founder of the Bold Voice Collaborative, a new initiative to transform lives through expression.
