Wonder Woman: Just a Few Thoughts

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Chris Pine, Erich Ludendorff, Gal Gadot, Patty Jenkins, Steve Trevor, Wonder Woman, World War I

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 interpretaters, 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 flying 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 was 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 from 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.

The Red Baron: Something Every Historical Film Should Do

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20th Century Europe, 20th Century Germany, Manfred von Richthofen, Nikolas Mütterschön, The Red Baron, World War I

So The Red Baron (2010, dir. Nikolas Mütterschön) is, overall, a rather mediocre film. Very little about it really stands out beyond the impressive dogfighting sequences, although Lena Headey turns into a pretty strong performance as Manfred von Richthofen’s nurse/love interest Käte Otersdorf.

At the end of the film, however, it actually does something I heartily commend. As with many biopics, it ends with an epilogue sequence telling us about the characters. In most biopics, that epilogue focuses on what happened to the characters after the end of the film. But given that Richthofen dies at the end of the film and many of his friends have already died, if the film did the normal thing, there wouldn’t be too much left to say.

Instead, for those characters who had already died by 1918, the film gives us a brief historical sketch of the real people behind the film, like so:

“Manfred von Richthofen

Credited with 80 kills, he remains WWI’s most successful fighter pilot.

Killed in action on the 21st of April, 1918 at age 25.

Buried in France by the Allies with full military honours.”

The Red Baron

“Werner Voss

Fighter ace with 48 victories and Richthofen’s closest friend and competitor until he was shot down on the 23rd of September, 1917.”

Werner Voss

In some cases, the text acknowledges the ambiguities it presented as narrative facts.

“Captain Roy Brown

Received the credit for shooting down Richthofen. Until today [sic], it is not proven who truly killed the ‘Red Baron’.

Captain Brown died in 1944 of a heart attack.”

Notice how the film completely avoids admitting the massive falsehood it presents, namely that Brown and Richthofen never met. But it does admit that there is debate about who shot down Richthofen.

Arthur “Roy” Brown

“Käte Otersdorf

No further records exist on her remaining life.”

In this case, what this means is that Mütterschön didn’t bother having anyone do any real research on Otersdorf beyond a quick internet search. While Otersdorf isn’t a famous person, I have no doubt that a professional scholar could track down the basic facts of her life through census records and the like.

But then the film does something that caught my attention, because I’ve never seen a historical film do this before.

“During WWI, many Jewish pilots fought for the German Empire. Many of them were highly decorated fighter aces. They are represented by the fictitious character of Friedrich Sternberg.”

So the film actually acknowledges that Friedrich Sternberg is a composite character and not a real person. Instead of leaving the audience wondering if there really were Jewish fighter aces, or leaving them assuming that Sternberg is a real person, Mütterschön chooses to address the audience directly and clarify exactly what the situation with Sternberg is.

And that is an excellent idea. I entirely understand why filmmakers decide to collapse two or three real people into one fictitious one. The real story may be too complex or confusing to convey in a 2-hour film. Or perhaps the director realizes that introducing three characters will take up too much screen time. In situations like that, composite characters make sense. But they can also result in serious deviations from the facts and leave the audience with a fundamentally false picture of what really happened. For example, Elizabeth collapses the Ridolfi and Babbington Plots into one composite event that is essentially untrue in key ways. Elizabeth would have been a better film if it had admitted its manipulations of fact to the viewer.

From the text, it’s clear that Mütterschön wants the audience to know that there were Jewish fighter aces. Why he wants us to know this I’m less clear on. He doesn’t claim that Richthofen’s unit contained Jewish pilots or that Richthofen actually knew any of them, so Sternberg isn’t a typical composite character in that sense. Rather, my guess is that Mütterschön is trying to avoid looking like he’s glamorizing the Great War by indirectly acknowledging the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany that lead to the Holocaust during World War II. If that’s what he wants, he’s doing it in a rather ham-fisted way. But perhaps he simply wants audiences to know that Jews made patriotic contributions to Germany in the Great War. Regardless of his motives for including the character, I applaud his choice to deconstruct the fiction in the film’s epilogue.

Want to Know More?

The Red Baronis available on Amazon.

If you want to know more, you could read The Illustrated Red Baron: The Life and Times of Manfred von Richthofen. Or you could read his ‘autobiography’ (written at the urging of the German government while he was at the height of his fame), The Red Fighter Pilot – The Autobiography of the Red Baron [Illustrated].

The Red Baron: Learning Not to Love War

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20th Century Europe, 20th Century Germany, Joseph Fiennes, Lena Headey, Manfred von Richthofen, Matthias Schweighofer, Nikolai Müllerschön, The Great War, The Red Baron, World War I

One of the most well-known figures of World War I was the famous German biplane pilot Baron Manfred von Richthofen, widely referred to as the Red Baron. I ran across a modest biopic of him, uncreatively titled The Red Baron (2010, dir. Nikolai Müllerschön), on Netflix a couple weeks ago so I watched it for the blog. Unfortunately, I lost my notes somewhere between watching it and sitting down to write this post; hopefully that won’t hurt the accuracy of my review.

The Historical Red Baron

Manfred von Richthofen was a minor German noble (his title, Freiherr does translate roughly to ‘baron’, but it’s a title that all members of the family are permitted to use, not just the senior male) who was trained as a cavalry officer. The quick establishment of trench warfare, however, rendered his unit nearly useless, and as a result he pursued and received a transfer to the German Air Service. In 1915 he was trained as a fighter pilot. Initially he appeared to be a poor pilot, crashing his plane on his first mission as a pilot. But he quickly mastered flying and soon emerged as one of the best fighter pilots Germany had. He ultimately racked up 80 confirmed victories (downing an enemy plane), plus possibly as many as 20 further unconfirmed ones; in comparison the best French pilot had 75 confirmed victories (plus a possible 52 unconfirmed ones), while the best British pilot (Canadian actually) had 72. Unlike his brother Lothar, Manfred was not an impressive pilot, but he was an extremely skilled tactician as well as an excellent marksman; the combination made him a deadly opponent.

Manfred von Richthofen

In early 1917, after 16 victories, he received Germany’s highest military honor, the famous ‘Blue Max’ medal, and he was appointed to lead a squadron. At this point, he adopted the bold strategy of having his biplane painted red; although this made it stand out against the white clouds and blue sky, it also meant that he was crafting a reputation that would intimidate his opponents. It was this that led to him being nicknamed The Red Baron.

In July 1917, however, Richthofen was badly injured when he suffered a bullet wound to the head. The injury caused him problems with disorientation; he required numerous surgeries to remove bone splinters, and only returned to flying in September. But by that point he had become famous as a heroic flying ace in Germany; the German government actively promoted this legend, including circulating false claims that the British had created an entire squadron whose sole purpose was to find and kill him. The government began to worry about the effect his death might have on German morale, and asked him to retire, but he refused.

Richthofen’s red Fokker Dr. I

On April 21st, 1918, von Richthofen was shot down over the Somme River, taking a bullet to the heart and lungs that probably killed him before his plane crashed (although various stories claim he either died shortly after crashing or was stabbed by those who found him). There is controversy over whether he was shot down by fellow pilot Canadian Arthur Brown (who received credit for the kill) or by ground forces. It is possible that his head injury may have contributed to his death by disorienting him at a key moment. The British treated him with great respect and buried him with full military honors.

The Red Baron

The film basically follows the facts as I’ve outline them above, watching Richthofen (Matthias Schweighofer) as his career develops, and placing heavy emphasis on his relationships with various other fighter pilots, including his brother Lothar (Volker Bruch), Werner Voss (Til Schweiger), the Jewish pilot Friedrich Sternberg (Maxim Mehmet), and, rather improbably, Arthur Brown (Joseph Fiennes). The film depicts him shooting down Brown early on, rescuing him so that he can be nursed back to health by Käte Otersdorf (Lena Headey), and then Brown being released in a prisoner swap. Later he sees Brown crash-land in No Man’s Land and lands to help him, but damages his plane in the process. After sharing a drink, they hope they won’t meet again until after the war, but sadly Brown shoots him down at the end of the film. None of that is real; the two men never met.

Schweighofer and Fiennes as von Richthofen and Brown

One of the main subplots of the film is his relationship with Otersdorf. He first meets her when she helps tend to Brown’s wounds. She continues popping up throughout the film, pushing him to stop thinking of the war as a chivalric game; in a key scene, she takes him to a field hospital and introduces him to German amputees, which causes him to finally realize that war is hell. When he suffers his brain injury she is sent to tend him and she’s somehow there when he leaves on his last mission. Two weeks after his death, she inexplicably arranges for Brown to escort her to von Richthofen’s grave.

The reality behind this is murky. Von Richthofen was nursed by a woman named Käte Otersdorf after his injury, and there is at least one picture of the two of them together. Long after the war, when she was an old woman, she claimed that they had exchanged love letters. There were rumors that von Richthofen had a secret love that he planned to marry after the war, but it’s not clear that Otersdorf was actually that woman.

Otersdorf and von Richthofen

Perhaps more problematically, the film also seeks to present him as being more peaceful than he actually was. In the film he emphasizes the importance of shooting down the planes rather than killing the pilots; at one point he quarrels furiously with Lothar when the latter strafes a downed pilot. In reality, von Richthofen emphasized exactly the opposite strategy; he wanted his men to focus on killing the pilots and not worrying about the planes. Late in the film, he tries to persuade the German government to accept the necessity of surrender rather than fighting to the last man; he denies the idea that Germany is culturally superior to France or Britain. This too seems to be the film’s invention.

The problem here is that director Nikolai Müllerschön is wrestling with a deep-seated discomfort in Germany with depicting war as heroic. Since World War II, Germans have tended to view war very negatively, and they have worried that valorizing warfare might lead them toward championing men like Adolf Hitler. Müllerschön, however, wants von Richthofen to be a fairly traditional war hero who accomplishes feats of derring-do. His solution is to give von Richthofen a personal conversion moment when he realizes that his gallant activities are misdirected; thereafter he opposes war and wants to stop the slaughter of innocent Germans. So we get to have a valiant war hero in the midst of an ugly war. It’s not an entirely convincing depiction, and it was a quite controversial one when the film came out in Germany.

Another problem with the film is that it was filmed in English, not in German. The cast can’t seem to figure out what sort of accent to use. Schweighofer sounds German, Headey is using some weird German-French hybrid, and several of the supporting actors play Germans with formal British accents. It’s rather jarring.

Headey as Otersdorf

But the film does have two things going for it. The first is the aerial combat scenes, many of which are extremely well-done. The film makes a serious effort to help the viewer understand the reality of biplane dogfights, and it is these moments that are probably the best in the film. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better depiction of aerial combat (not that it’s a subject I’ve seen lots of films about). I’ll get to the other thing I like about this film in my next post.

Want to Know More?

The Red Baronis available on Amazon.

If you want to know more, you could read The Illustrated Red Baron: The Life and Times of Manfred von Richthofen. Or you could read his ‘autobiography’ (written at the urging of the German government while he was at the height of his fame), The Red Fighter Pilot – The Autobiography of the Red Baron [Illustrated].