6 Reasons We Need A Wonder Woman Movie
Like, Yesterday.http://www.buzzfeed.com/sedem/6-reasons-why-there-should-be-a-wonder-woman-movie-cjrb
All so true.
A (well-made) Wonder Woman movie would be AWESOME. But the thing is that they’ve been TRYING to make a Wonder Woman movie. It’s the ‘well-made’ that’s been the stumbling block.
That ‘too complicated’ point is actually a real, major stumbling. It’s not her backstory that’s too complicated. It’s the character.
See, there’s a really good reason why nobody’s managed to get a Wonder Woman movie even halfway off the ground: people have a lot of trouble figuring out what Wonder Woman is actually ‘about.’ And you can’t tell a story about a character if you don’t even know what the point of that character is.
It’s not a feminism thing. It’s a myth thing. (Which is kind of ironic, considering Wonder Woman is literally, given her background, a being of myth. But.) Superheroes are myths. They’re archetypes. And like any good archetype, you can spin that out in a thousand different ways, but at the root, they are recognizable. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Captain America, Iron Man.
Yes, it’s really annoying that all the big superheroes are men. They don’t have to be; most of these characters could have been made as women and still be what they are (there was a Toni Stark meme going around at one point that was just hot). But the thing about Wonder Woman is that she’s a superhero who is ABOUT being a woman.
So what does that mean? How do you boil down ‘archetypal woman’ exactly?
I don’t recommend you try to answer that, because it’s a trick question. Trying to boil down ‘woman’ into a single archetype is offensive and minimizing—which is the exact problem. Frankly the fact that people have recognized their attempts so far suck ass too much to even keep moving forward on is probably a good sign for the growing enlightenment of our culture.
Now, dodging that bullet, the next-easiest thing to do with Wonder Woman is try to boil her down as an icon of feminism. But that’s problematic, because 1: the history of feminism in her stories can be pretty rocky sometimes, and 2: trying to make feminism the centerpiece of her story without it coming off like a preachy sledgehammer of social justice would be difficult, in a purely technical, entertaining writing sense.
Oh, and 3: trying to sum her up as a superhero crusading for female justice oversimplifies her, and frankly it still oversimplifies and insults women. ”Oh yeah, the female superhero obviously fights for feminism, while the male superheroes, you know, save EVERYBODY and stuff.”
(Yes, I know that feminism, properly practiced, is for everybody. But see #2. If you have to spend most of the movie educating your viewing audience on the principles at work, then you are writing a social commentary, not a movie. God knows people could use some educating, but it’s not going to sell a summer blockbuster.)
Another part of Wonder Woman’s story is that she’s an ambassador (sometimes a bona fide one with UN-recognized status and everything). The Amazons sent her out into Man’s World to try to bridge gaps, advocate for peace, demonstrate a different way the world can be.
And then she’s literally a living myth. The daughter of god(desse)s. A statue given the gift of life. She is, depending on how you define the term, a PoC. She is not from Western culture. She’s rooted in a different cultural context. That’s the whole point. She’s from ‘somewhere else’ where they do things differently, and JUST MAYBE we could stand to shut up and listen to her a bit, instead of insisting on barreling ahead with the way we do things regardless of how fucked up it is.
So when they say Wonder Woman is ‘complicated,’ they’re recognizing that you CAN’T just write her story as The Woman Superhero or The Feminist Superhero. You have to figure out what she IS, and you have to lay the groundwork to establish her context, because her context is not ours. And you have to do it while doing service to the underpinnings of her superhero myth—like Superman is an alien and Batman is an orphan, Diana is a daughter of gods.
I actually think the immigrant angle is the truest one for her. She’s the outsider. And she’s not looking for assimilation, exactly (unlike Superman, who’s basically a second-generation Kryptonian-American). She has no intention of losing what she is. But she hopes to make this her home and contribute to it, to make it richer and stronger with additional perspectives and a deeper, wider understanding and compassion.
Of course then there are her villains. The Cheetah is kind of…eh, generically crazy. (Though there was a stint where she was possessed by the Goddess of the Hunt that was kind of cool…except also weird because Diana’s actually named after the goddess and last I knew they were on good terms.) And her other really big villain is Ares, god of war. Which is totally kickass, but I dare you to write a script where that doesn’t come off like the cheesy, heavy-handed allegory it is. (Seriously, though, I kind of would love to see him throwing tanks around and maybe driving well-meaning soldiers into frothing, adrenaline-fueled battle-madness.)
All of which is not to say that a good Wonder Woman movie is an impossible task. But there are reasons it hasn’t happened yet. (Granted that many of those reasons are probably male studio execs.)