I saw Wonder Woman last week. I loved it, despite a rather plebian third act that was, frankly, boring and generic. Patty Jenkins brought plenty of feminist elements to what might otherwise have been a rather weak Zach Snyder script. I thought I would offer just a thought or two about things that particularly connected to this blog’s purpose, namely history.
Spoiler Alert: If you’re one of the few people in the country who hasn’t seen the movie yet, you may want to put off reading this until you do, because I discuss a couple major plot points.
Wonder Woman and WWII
When I heard that the movie would be set during the Great War (World War I) instead of World War II, I was puzzled. Wonder Woman is in origin a World War II character. She debuted in 1941, and was to some extent a nod to the role women had taken in the US Armed Forces during the war. While women did not hold combat positions, they played a range of important roles during the war. WACs, WAVEs, WASPs, SPARs, Marine Corps Women’s Reserve members, and others served in a wide range of roles, including typists, secretaries, nurses, air traffic controllers, weather forecasters, interrogators, intelligence interpretation, drivers, mechanics, and even pilots. By 1945 , there were more than 100,000 American women in uniform, with 6,000 of them being officers. Several dozen US servicewomen died during the war and others became POWs, and many received Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, and other medals. So a female superhero was an obvious choice for a time when women were demonstrating their ability to directly contribute to the US war effort.
Wonder Woman’s origin involves an American pilot, Steve Trevor, crashing his plane near Paradise Island (later renamed Themiscyra). Although the comic never definitely stated where Paradise Island was located, it was broadly hinted that it is somewhere in the Pacific Ocean (although how Greek Amazons got to the Pacific Ocean was not explained). A location in the Pacific makes sense, since the US probably had a larger Air Force presence in the Pacific theater than the European theater and because Paradise Island was located a long way from civilization; it’s unlikely a solo American pilot in Europe could be a long way from civilization.
Wonder Woman’s original costume strongly emphasized her specifically American identity. Her costume is red, white, and blue; she has an eagle on her bustier; and her skirt is blue with white five-pointed starts.
Note her costume
In the early comics, she frequently fought Nazis and Japanese, as most superheroes did. Her first recurring villain was the German spy and saboteur Baroness Paula von Gunther. The villainous Dr. Poison was revealed to be a Japanese princess. Other Nazi opponents included Mavis and Gundra the Valkyrie. The Duke of Deception turned out to be the driving force behind Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, as well as Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union. In the 4th issue of Wonder Woman (April-May 1943), she led a group of marines in an attack on the Japanese, and for a while her battle cry was “Keep ’em flying”, a common WWII slogan.
Why the Great War?
So initially I was really puzzled why the decision was made to push Wonder Woman’s origin back two decades and have her involved in the Great War instead. On the surface, it’s a little forced. The film has to contort things a bit in order to make the American Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) be able to crash on Themiscyra, given that the Americans only got into the war comparatively late, in April of 1917. Trevor must be a damn good spy to be able to fake being a German fighting ace and sneak into a secret munitions base in modern Turkey. Apparently in this film, Themiscyra is located in the eastern Mediterranean (which makes more sense in terms of the Amazon origin story, but not in terms of comics history).
But very soon after Diana (Gal Gadot) and Trevor get to Britain, I realized that transplanting Wonder Woman to the Great War actually makes good sense. Diana’s mission is to put an end to the whole idea of war by locating the god Ares and killing him. The idea of killing the very concept of war echoes the post-war notion that the Great War as the War to End All War, a war so awful it would teach people not to wage war. That makes Diana essentially the incarnation of this optimistic approach to the horrors of the war, and her essential optimism starts to seem both realistic and impossibly idealistic at the same time. Faced with the horrors of the Great War, how could she not want to end warfare once and for all, but how can she possibly accomplish such a huge goal?
The film positions her in a remarkably complex war that ought to serve as a good foil for her goals and idealism, because it is hard to say who were really the good guys and bad guys in this war, as opposed to just who were the winners and losers. As has been pointed out, however, the film betrays this approach by making it clear that the Germans really are the bad guys, since they’re willing to embrace Dr. Poison (Elena Anaya) and her murderous super-weapon, and Gen. Ludendorff (Danny Huston) is willing to negotiate an armistice in bad faith, while the British are sincere in their desire for peace.
General Ludendorff
Erich Ludendorff was a smart choice to serve as a major protagonist for a heroine who wants to end all war, because he was one of the most militaristic of German generals during the Great War. He was a brilliant general. He was an advocate for ‘total war’ in which the German military essentially took control of much of the German government and geared Germany’s economy toward the waging of war. Although he never completely accomplished that during the war, his approach still helped drive the collapse of the German economy by the end of the war. He pressured Kaiser Wilhelm II into permitted unrestricted submarine warfare against Britain, ignoring the warnings that sinking US ships might bring the US in to the war against Germany, which in fact happened after the sinking of the Lusitania. When an armistice was proposed in 1918, he advocated for using it to quickly rebuild and then launch a renewed attack on France. This was a man who truly was committed to warfare and so he makes a plausible candidate for the mortal incarnation of the God of War. And he was in Belgium in 1918, which is when the film has to be set.
Gen. Erich Ludendorff
However, he didn’t slaughter the rest of the German High Command, and he wasn’t killed in the waning months of the war. He survived the war, opposing the German surrender because he refused to accept that the German army could possibly be defeated; he denied reports that German army units were refusing to obey direct orders. He was suffering from severe sleep deprivation, which may account for his growing fanaticism at the end of the war. He was briefly exiled, but returned to Germany in 1919. After the war, as he began to be blamed for the failure of the war and the collapse of the German economy, he resorted to promoting the theory that the real reason for the German defeat was the ‘Stab in the Back’, the notion that the German army and government had been betrayed by unrecognized traitors in their midst. He blamed the Stab in the Back on German Jews, thereby helping promote the anti-Semitism that became such a major element of Hitler’s ideology. And he was an early supporter of Hitler, although he began to become disillusioned with the man during the 30s. He died in 1937 for liver cancer, not a sword through the chest.
Want to Know More?
Wonder Woman is still in the theaters, so it’s not available for home viewing yet. But you should read about Wonder Woman’s history, because it’s really interesting. Her creator, William Moulton Marston, lived a very…non-traditional life, and is credited with helping invent the lie detector (the Lasso of Truth…). He was a bondage fetishist, a female supremacist, and had a polyamorous marriage long before that was a thing. So take a look at Jill Lapore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman.
A couple more reasons I think it was actually a good idea to move Wonder Woman to WWI is for one it actually shows how that was the war took “magic” away from the world. The world got it’s first taste of total mechanized warfare in WWI and it destroyed a lot of myths in the process. It’s no surprise that in the years that followed many people tried to find evidence of the mystical in the new world that seemed to have banished it forever. The spiritualist movement gained considerable popularity around this time, so much so that Harry Houdini would spend the rest of his life debunking them. The Cottingley Fairies photographs would first appear right around the time the movie is set. Regardless of whether or not they were real they showed how much people still wanted to believe in mysticism, to the point where they hoped science would validate it instead of debunk it.
Which brings us to Wonder Woman and her unique standing amongst DC’s “Holy Trinity” of superheroes. She alone amongst them is a character of myth, legend and magic. Superman may have mythic qualities, but he is truly is “The Man of Tomorrow” cause his story is pure pulp science fiction. His powers that would in another time be explained as gifts from the gods are instead explained by science and his origin from outer space. Batman has no superpowers, he is a detective and has pushed himself to the limits of human endurance. Both of them represent the future where humans and science rule instead of gods and magic.
Wonder Woman is different, she actually stands right in the middle between the past and the future. She is a myth, her people and origin come from myths and legends. Her original origin (which the film presents as a possible lie her mom told her) is drawn equally from the myths of Prometheus and Galatea. She is magic, her powers are never explained any other way, even her invisible jet is described as such. And yet she is also the future, the future of strong women who would win the right to vote in Britain and America just a few short years later. Those women would continue to fight for equality to this day.
When Diana crosses No Man’s Land carrying a sword and shield into battle against machine guns she is a symbol of many things. She is the last triumph of magic against science before science would rule the rest of the century. She is the past shouting out to the future that it can’t be forgotten. She is the sense of wonder and innocence the world had at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. She is the suffrage movement personified. She is all that at once, she is the one superhero who truly belongs at that one moment in history.
Amazing that a superhero movie can elicit all those themes at once. At least it does in my opinion.
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That’s quite a good analysis and I have to agree with it. I usually tell my students that WWI is the war that taught us that war is awful. So Jenkins definitely manages to make the new context work.
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Thank you. Hey btw there’s a movie about Marston, his wife Elizabeth, and their wife Olive Byrne coming out later this year. It’s called PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN, it stars Luke Evans as Marston, Rebecca Hall as Elizabeth, and Bella Heathcote as Olive. It’s due out in October.
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Really? I hope it does their alternative lifestyle and influence on kink justice.
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Yes we shall have to see. The film is being written/directed by Angela Robinson who has worked on the tv shows TRUE BLOOD, HUNG, and THE L WORD. Her one major Hollywood film was D.E.B.S which was based on her own short film. She is a lesbian, she and her partner welcomed a son in 2009. Based on all that we can assume she will treat the subject with respect.
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Neither True Blood nor Hung inspire me to think that she’ll strive for accuracy. But she’s probably a better choice than many others.
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Many thanks for this review. I have to confess that when I saw the trailer I rolled my eyes and thought “whatever next” but having read your review and based on feedback from friends and colleagues who have seen the film, I might overcome my prejudice and watch the film.
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It certainly is not a truly accurate depiction of 1918, but there are a few nice touches. Etta Candy is basically a suffragist, which is in keeping with her character in the comics. The British officials are very uncomfortable having a woman in their meeting. There’s a nice sequence looking at the effect the war has had on a sniper who works with Trevor. And the film shows that a lot of non-whites were part of Britain’s war effort–something I’ve never seen acknowledged before.
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Many thanks. I watched the old Wonder Woman TV series in reruns as a child and Lynda Carter became the image I had of her. Looks like the bits you mentioned at least showed that the film makers did at least made the effort to depict the attitudes of the time.
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