Something I've been seeing a lot of are comments about how The Shape of Water was inexplicably predictable. Specifically, these comments refer to the scars on Elisa's neck becoming gills at the end. It's not a hard call to make or guess, and a lot of people are bewildered at this choice in the narrative, as though this predictability is a narrative flaw of the movie. And of course, to each their own. I can't blame anyone for disliking that.
Nonetheless, I'm of the mind that Guillermo Del Toro never intended for it to be a big surprise or a twist of any sort. I don't think Del Toro & Company mind that their audience will guess this right away.
The Shape of Water is aware that it's a story being told and embraced the medium. We open the movie with Giles narrating over an exploration of Elisa's water filled apartment. It is a whimsical and artistic opening. He is telling us about Elisa, the central figure of the movie and the person in question with the obvious marks. We don't get to see the gills in this opening sequence, but we see her unconscious and floating above her couch. This is bookended by the movie ending on Giles narrating on top of Elisa once again in water, floating and unconscious.
At the end, we're not suppose to question that her scars are gills, we're supposed to wonder if this is real or not. Giles tells us himself that he likes to believe that she got to have a happy ending. Are we seeing the ending he has chosen to believe? Or is this really how Del Toro's story ends?
So does that mean we should think the ending is a false one? That Amphibian Man got to be free but Elisa succumbed to her wounds and this is why Giles never saw her again? The scars were just that after all. It was clearly too obvious that this is truly how the movie is intended to end.
But this isn't just a story. Del Toro & Company punctures this whimsical romance with some harsh realism. This isn't like our traditional gruesome fairytales, where things go from dark to grim. It's just... life. Elisa lives a simple, unfulfilling life. She has good friends and isn't necessarily unhappy, but it's not enough. She isn't the sexless, passive woman of many of those stories. She's real and complex and multidimensional.
We have Strickland being the epitome of 1960's toxic masculinity, chalk full of sexism, racism, and ableism. The people around him can see he is gross but they pretend everything is okay because they feel helpless or that the error is actually in themselves.
Amphibian Man is ethereal, godlike, and fantastical, but he's also scared, brutal, and lonely. He's vulnerable and yet loving.
All these things and more, throughout the movie, point to a harsh realism, and I think this is an intentional contrast. These elements are intended to be side by side. I seem to recall Del Toro saying that he wanted to make this movie as a sort of ode to cinema and the stories they tell. I find it then, most likely that this story within a story is intentional on his part. He doesn't want us to watch the movie once, go 'oh that was a good twist' and set it aside again. He wants us to to be particpants. With this story format, we get to ponder it, engage with it, and make it our own.
Personally, I choose to believe that Elisa got her happy ending. Given everything I've said above and more I can't articulate, I think Gile's story is happening side by side the actual story, and they twine together at times, and diverge at others. Does Giles know that Elisa masturbated in her tub while she cooked him eggs every morning? Are we supposed to think that he supposes that's so? Did he suspect that Elisa sat on the bus, painting her finger against the window pane of a bus, and making water follow the motions of her fingertip? It's not unreasonable, but also not necessary. And again, it's up for each and every one of us to decide.
At the end of the day though, I don't think the question was ever meant to be 'why did you make this so obvious,' but rather, 'do you really think that's how it ends' and what does it reveal to you about the way you interpret that. What does it say about the things you enjoy, the messages you think the movie is trying to convey, what you'll accept as reality vs stories, your own preconceptions, and a whole host of other questions.
So if you love this movie but are annoyed at this element, let me suggest analyzing instead what you think of the ending. Was it real? Is the movie really a beautiful love story if it's not real? Does it makes sense that we begin and end the story with Giles's narration and the twist isn't that Elisa might not have made it? How important is it that a movie surprises us?
And it's all of these questions and so much more that keeps this movie in my head, bouncing around, looking to pull all these words from me.
Stories we Choose to Tell: A Shape of Water Edition
I talk on this blog from time to time about how everything we see in a story was decided upon by writers. When talking about problematic elements in media, I often see these elements defended with arguments which take the characters of the story into account, but not the writers behind them.
The Shape of Water gave us a beautiful example of how it's not enough to say that 'it just made sense with the plot' or 'it would be out of character for this character to have reacted differently,' ignoring the circumstances which led these characters to that moment and those actions.
It comes back to looking at media through a Watsonian versus Doylist lens (Watsonian being from the point of view of the characters and what Doylist lens being from the perspective of the writers/creators).
In The Shape of Water, our antagonist, Richard Strickland, is on a rampage to retrieve "The Asset" but doesn't know where he is. He become unhinged in his pursuit. He is spiraling out of control. He is obsessed with power and his ability to assert it. The movie gives us many examples of this, focusing on how he pleasures greatly in controlling the people around him and how unforgiving he is of any shows of disregard to his authority.
So when he follows Dimitri and discovers that he surely played a part in removing our Amphibian Man from captivity, he glories in his position of power over him, torturing him for the desired information. It's the first thing that truly seems to calm him out of the spiral he's been going down. But then Dimitri reveals that it wasn't a strike team of highly skilled Russians who swept the rug out from under Strickland, it was 'the cleaners.' In the next scene, we see how unhinged this new information makes him. His power wasn't undermined by something just as powerful as him but rather by those he who never should have had the power to do him such harm in the first place.
The writers could have written Strickland making the mental jump to Elisa. She, afterall, was the one who stood before him, a look of defiance on her face after questioning, and signed something he could not understand at him. It would make sense. The writers chose that, for whatever reason—be it his desire not to believe it was his crush or his inability to lay such agency at the feet of a disabled, petite little white girl and/or consequently his likely inclination to see a black woman as more the villain—Zelda would come to his mind first as the likely culprit. He arrives at her home more unhinged than ever.
As I watched this scene in the theater, I got really tense. I didn't want to see another black woman killed on screen. Another black man. For surely he was unhinged enough that he would rain his wrath down upon Zelda's whole family, especially after his story about Delilah and the destruction of all those people during Samson's last act of strength. At this point, I imagined the creators had written themselves into a corner. It seemed wholly inconceivable that this clearly racist, obviously sexist, power hungry, despicable man would be utterly incapable of walking away from a black woman who had known about the "theft" of all of his control without killing her.
If it had happened, people would say 'it's the only thing that made sense' and that this is where the plot was inevitably going to go. But don't forget, he could have just as easily been written to go directly to Elisa's. Elisa could have headed out—as she was determined (though admittedly reluctant) to do—before he arrived. She could have seen him pull up and Giles could have distracted him. There are a dozen different ways that scenario could have been handled. But writers wrote Strickland going to Zelda's.
However, the writers of this movie are not to be trifled with. Zelda's husband, Brewster, interjects through Strickland’s intimidation. Despite Zelda's efforts to protect Elisa and our beloved fishman, he reveals that he'd overheard Zelda's affairs and knew Elisa had 'The Asset’. Brewster, who upon Strickland's entrance, was (understandably) cowed by our unhinged antagonist and did nothing to stop him threatening his wife, speaks over his wife’s wishes and cedes to Strickland's authority and domination. Given the set of prejudices and ways of thinking of our antagonist, this was the perfect—perhaps the only—conceivable way that Strickland was to be gratified into 'bestowing mercy,' as I can't help but imagine he feels in that moment.
With Brewster's obeisance, Strickland's world falls back into place. A man, in deference to him, put his wife 'in her place' and for that pleasing (to Strickland) behavior, so will he ‘reward’ them. He didn't have to. What Zelda and Elisa did was against the law, almost certainly traitorous. He'd already linked them with a Russian spy (Dimitri), and he was willing to shoot Elisa when it came down to it. It would have been evil for him to kill them, but he would not have been punished. Zelda and Brewster were not safe from him until that moment, until Brewster gratified his ego and thus assured him that the world was, in fact, as it should be (according to The Book of Strickland ( •́ ⍨ •̀)) .
And the writers did not have to do it that way. If they hadn't, many would have defended the decision of the killing as having made sense from the Watsonian (Strickland's) point of view. But the writers (Doylist) decided that's not how they wanted their film to play out. Theirs was a story of romance and triumph/hope for those society deemed unworthy (lower class, disabled, black, gay, etc).
As I watched this scene though, I was simply struck at how this is such a clear cut example of how you cannot give a story a pass for something horrible happening just because it 'made sense' for that story/character or the world that story was set in. Creators still choose the world they set their stories in, still write the characters into these scenarios. It is a choice, and whether that choice is good or bad does not remove the responsibility of telling that story from the creators' shoulders.
And likewise, we can enjoy a story for it's consistency of character (Watsonian perspective) and world and the ways the protagonists overcome or engage in those narratives while simultaneously being critical of the choice by the writers (Doylist) to put these characters into these settings and these scenarios where they continue a harmful trend of killing off their black and/or queer characters.
So The Shape of Water gets a hearty standing ovation from me. I'd be more than happy to go back to the theater for another viewing or another movie in this world with these characters.
Thank you Guillermo Del Toro for maintaining my faith in you. ♥♥
The scene in Wonder Woman after Ludendorf has gassed Veld and Steve has caught up with Diana is great. Diana is calling Steve out, she recoils from his touch, she is clearly angry and upset with him. In any other movie, this is the scene where the male romantic love interest would defend himself, explain how he was being (the) rational (one). It often would even include him pulling the woman into a kiss to somehow calm her down through an act of “showing his passion/love for her.”
We don’t get any of that. He lets Diana recoil from him and doesn’t approach her again. When the moment comes when she stops speaking and Steve opens his mouth, it’s to say, ‘The smoke! That’s where Ludendorf is.”
He doesn’t defend himself. He doesn’t try to rationalize away her anger. He doesn’t tell her she’s wrong or push himself onto her. He accepts that he’s upset her, recognizes she has a right to be upset, and though we don’t get an ‘I’m sorry’ from his lips, what we get is better. Instead of taking precious time away from Diana’s mission to focus on and make it all about himself, he gives her the information he knows she needs the most.
It’s this sort of thing that sets Steve apart for me. There are definitely more moments throughout the movie where he’s in a position we often see to be the typical male protagonist(tm), but the moment passes. He does something else.
I mean, I would say there are a couple exceptions to this. But for the vast majority of the movie, he gets led by the nose into these moments that could fall into what we always see, but then then they just... don’t. I love that so much. I know this has been talked about before by many others, often far more eloquently, but I’m rewatching it, and that scene just passed, and it always, always stands out to me. Every time I reach that moment, in each viewing, I subconsciously brace myself as he opens his mouth for what feels like his defense (and I wonder if he was thinking about it), but then he simply directs her where she most needs to go, and it’s so, so refreshing!
So, I feel like so far, the show is aiming us in the direction of feeling like the Upside Down is some empty mirror world of ours.
But I’ve been thinking about the description of the Mind Flayer Dustin read in the show, which included that it is so old that it doesn’t even know where it comes from anymore. It just moves from world to world, conquering all in its path.
It makes me wonder if the Upside Down isn’t actually the sort of parallel universe we’ve been led to exist.
What if it is a parallel universe in a more typical sense. There used to be people, the whole Other Hopper, Other Nancy, etc... Similar to how the parallel universe worked in Fringe.
Except. In this other universe, El got their attention sooner. The portal was open longer. The Shadow creatures and Demogorgons came through and conquered the whole world. Maybe the Demogorgon from S1 was a sentry? I did find it strange there was only one. Now there’s hoards of the growing Demogorons.
It would explain why all the same structures exist in the Upside Down that’s in our world. Sure, that other universe looks a lot different, but we saw in the tunnels that given time, the vines and whatnot would begin to convert our world. Eventually it would look just like the Upside Down.
It’s not a solid theory. Will could only talk to Joyce by interacting with the lights, which implies the Upside Down changed to match Joyce’s hanging of the lights. (Altho interestingly, when Joyce and Hopper walk through her house in the Upside Down, there are no lights hanging, which makes Will’s communication with her a bit confusing.) The SO says he’s had similar thoughts but doubts it due to these changes. He seems to recall more than me.
I could definitely see the creators not really being interested in expanding the semantics of the Upside Down, separate from the monsters, so I could certainly be wrong, but it could be a fun little twist, everyone realizing in another universe they all died and were consumed by the Shadow Creature & Co.
Though now that I say that, there was way more Demodogs than slugs Will spit out. The implication on screen seemed to be that he only spit out the one, at least in our world. What if all the other demodogs came from the already consumed humans in overcome in the Upside Down? I am left feeling like the show should explain where the hoard of demodogs came from.
It certainly feels like one of those twists where, if revealed like this, would be an ‘ah ha!’ moment for the audience. One of those, ‘why didn’t I think about that already??’ It’s a sort of twist I could just see Stranger Things pulling, and while I’m a little tired of the ‘other versions of us exist in another realm’ trope, I feel like this show could pull it off, and obviously, it seems unlikely any of their clones would still be alive.
I keep seeing this post about Ace and his actions going around, and I also have some thoughts; however, the post is getting long, and my thoughts have taken a bit of a left turn. Mostly, because I think my interpretation of Ace might differ from a lot of those in the post and therefore lends a different rationalization to his actions. So this post is mostly my interpretation of him.
I think the closest of those who post who share my interpretation is @sentimental-mercenary. They say:
I’d like to also point out that fighting in an army does not mean 100000000% supporting the ideology of that army. A little research into the ‘comitatus’ would probably do some good here–military units coalesce around a homosocial code, so you tend to fight for your guys, rather than for that abstract idea. In other words, when I was in a firefight, I wasn’t like YO BALD EAGLES FREEEEDDDDDOOOM, or even YAY PRESIDENT, I was like, SHIT they’ve got Smitty pinned down. When someone betrays you in that system, FUCK YEAH you take it personally.
I think this sums out very well how I see Ace, because Ace is old. Ace is quite obviously between Joe and Max's ages. He didn't grow up in Citadel. He comes from a different culture and has adapted to War Boy society.
I interpret Ace as knowing better, understanding that he is living in a post-apocalyptic society of oppression and toxicity. But he's survived this long, which inclines me to believe that he hasn't so much as fought the system but rather found meaning within it.
I believe Ace bows his head reverently at Morsov's death for Morsov, and for all the other War Boys who will live better knowing their deaths will truly be honored by someone who matters to them.
I believe Ace bows his head reverently to Joe to show his subservience. To prove that he believes in this world, even if he doesn't, so Joe let's him keep his post.
Maybe he falls for it a bit, but I think he only does so insofar that he knows it's the meaning the War Boys have found.
When you live close to death (which most people who can fart around on Tumblr probably don’t) you DESPERATELY want meaning. You desperately want to believe that there’s some sense or logic–if not in a sort of ‘magical thinking’ ritual you follow, then at least in the sense that when you do lose your buddies, you want to believe that it was…for something, or that they went some place other than a plastic bag. Because if you can’t…it crushes you. —sentimental-mercenary
Ace probably came to believe that yeah, this was the best we could have of a society in this seeming end-of-times, so the deaths on missions to keep it turning are helping humanity hold on, but I also think it's far simpler than that and that he just wants to make sure that they don't live their lives in despair and know that even if their lives and deaths are meaningless, they won't be broken by the despair of ever knowing that.
I think Ace found meaning in helping and protecting his War Boys. He knows he can't protect them from battle and illness and death, but he can protect them from a meaningless, useless life. He has no power to do anything else, so this is the path he's chosen to take. And Furiosa was a leader who appreciated people for their individual abilities and that translated well into caring for his War Boys. I tend to also hold the headcanon that Furiosa didn't ask for needless, dramatic deaths at the drop of a hat. She wanted a working crew to get the jobs done, which means she valued her men, and Ace values her for it. He respects and appreciates her for it. He probably finds a bit of a kindred soul in it perhaps.
So when Furiosa does the unexpected, he doesn't immediately think she's putting the crew at risk. There is something to be said of 'following orders.' It is certainly possible she had been given secret orders, and the War Boys, who are literal canon fodder, to be expected to follow along obediently. It bothers him that she didn't trust him with the task, but perhaps he even reads in her hesitations that she wishes she could.
But when she's driving the rig at a giant sandstorm with no protection for the War Boys on it, he's upset. He realizes he's been betrayed personally, because he had dedicated the rest of his miserable life to bring meaning to the War Boys under him, and she was driving them to a useless, meaningless death as he saw it.
So I do think he's angry, desperate. And I do think he wanted answers from her. I don't think he would have been entirely against escaping from Citadel. He doesn't know when he first suspects it, if he's alright with it. He'd like to give his boys a better life, but what of those left behind? Maybe he had even had some hope himself, to be a part of an escape plan, to take himself and these boys somewhere far away from that toxic place. But then he realizes that wherever it is she's going, for whatever purpose, she has decided that he and his boys don't have a place there. They are, once again, canon fodder, and yes, he feels betrayed.
I'm sure one can imagine why I might harbor some sympathy for ‘Good Guy Ace.’ In the face of feeling powerless to fight against the oppression of the society, he carved out for himself some meaning, that being of bringing some amount of kindness and compassion into the lives of these boys who are taught nothing but war and competition. I appreciate that he thought he found a like soul in Furiosa, and my interpretation that even she had in fact found some life and meaning with this very crew.
But it doesn't make him less complicit, and it doesn't make it any less necessary for Furiosa to leave him behind.
Just saw Wonder Woman in the theaters again, and it was just as amazing! In fact, better in some ways.
Interestingly, I ran into a post about a week back now that posited that Steve works really well as a trans man. I’m hesitant to reblog the original post because some of the impact of the wording is very problematic toward trans people (as that was the response I got from the trans friend of mine I excitedly showed the post to anyway) even if the intent was clearly never meant that way.
But I was on the lookout for it this watch, and it stands up really well!
“You’re a man!” “Yeah! …Do I not look like a man??”
“I’m above average” only to be followed later with “I’m not average,” both in contexts of sex/sexuality. First one could easily have been sly (he doesn’t yet know if he believes that she’s never seen a man before) followed by it said more somberly later on.
“What do women here wear into battle?” “They don’t—” stops trying. I’ve always felt this line/lack thereof was a nod to the women who dressed up as men to aid in the war effort, but just as easily, it works for trans women who haven’t/don’t want to transition, and it does also work in general for this idea that gender doesn’t dictate your participation in the war/fighting for the greater good.
“What’s it like?” [A life without war] “I have no idea.” Obviously this is in many ways supposed to mean that the war has felt like it’s gone on so long, that it’s hard to imagine the times before it. But it also easily works as his way of saying that he doesn’t know what a “”normal”” life is like. Especially in the face of him being a fully adult male who made it clear he doesn’t ‘get’ marriage.
The way he interacts with Diana in the scene they’re about to have sex. It’s so… drawn back. Even when she moves in to kiss him, he hesitates for a long while. Not to say trans people can’t have confidence in the bedroom, just that in the time period presented, you might understand some expectation of rejection on his part (and ofc Diana would be like ‘no you’re perfect).
And ofc, we have Dr. Maru in this universe creating gas that can decimate a gas mask. It’s not so much of a mental leap to imagine that HRT was a thing in this universe at this time. Perhaps cutting edge technology or a really great father who’s a doctor and/or knows one. We don’t get much about Steve’s father except that he didn’t believe in doing nothing and instead doing the right thing…
It just… I really feel like it works. And I love it!
Now we just need to learn that the bath he bathed in was the fountain of youth, and he magically survived the plane crash. ☆～（ゝ。∂）
(Disclaimer: Any quotes are as I remember them from my three viewings and almost certainly not word for word. I unfortunately do not have unfettered access to the movie.)
In the wake of the release of this amazing movie, many people have talked about the decision to set the movie during World War 1. I’m not historically informed enough to get into details, but it’s not hard to learn that World War 1 wasn’t nearly as 'good vs evil' as World War 2. Nazi’s weren’t a thing yet, the holocaust wasn’t happening, and neither side had much in the form of moral high ground.
And that was important to the message of the movie. At the end, Diana—in a voiceover—sums the message up, stating that there is a darkness inside people’s hearts, a terribleness, that each individual must battle, and it is through love that the light they also carry can defeat the dark.
I want to look at the ways the movie was telling us that this battle exists in everyone, and then articulate how it failed to effectively show this: articulating to us that the battle had never been black and white and that the Germans were not strawman villains.
Diana begins the movie naive, and through the course of it, her understanding widens, and we follow her journey. We’re first introduced to the Germans by Steve Trevor after he crashes into Themyscira. Right away, he tells Diana that he’s a good guy, and those “are the bad guys.” Pretty juvenile language. He’s trying to convey something very quickly, and in doing so, he gives the audience the ‘layout’ of the movie.
Unfortunately, we never really leave Steve’s perspective on this. He is Diana’s POV and guide through this war. And this sets up how the movie fails in showing us that the Germans are also as whole and complex indiviuals as the English.
Despite the fact that Diana is portrayed naive in many ways, when first discussing the war, she insists to Steve that Ares has corrupted these Germans, and if she can just defeat him, they would be free of his influence.
And in fact, the first German she speaks to, she wraps in the Lasso of Truth, asks where Ares is, and declares she is asking for his own good. Despite him having just attacked them, she’s insisting that, if only a corrupting force didn’t exist, he would be a good man.
I think it’s important that our heroine never truly believes that the Germans are all bad guys. In the end, it is what tests her faith in humanity, the moments when she discovers Ludendorff wasn’t the god of war and when Ares, under the power of the lasso, says he never made anyone do anything—merely showed them the way.
The corruption, the darkness, cannot solely be laid at Ares’s feet.
And her faith before this, and the faith that results in the end, are all the more powerful for it.
But our villains are decidedly a German commander, Ludendorff, and his scientist, Dr. Maru. In each of their scenes—to which there are several—they are depicted as agents of destruction, relishing in the power of the gas weapon Dr. Maru created to the point of sadism. This emphasizes Steve’s statement at the onset: Germans are the bad guys.
The Englishmen need to fight them.
And yet, when Diana arrives in England, she sees men talking over pleas for peace. She asks Steve why they won’t let Sir Patrick talk when he’s discussing peace. I wish they would have followed up on that better, because despite it, the next time they’re in conference with the heads of the army, they refuse Steve when he asks to go in and take out Ludendorff’s new weapon on account of the peace talks. Steve presses the need to do this or else “hundreds of thousands will die on both sides.”
The fact that he includes ‘on both sides’ to a room full of men who almost certainly don’t care about the Germans is an interesting piece of dialogue to include… an important one. Steve may have oversimplified: “me good; germans bad” at the beginning, but this expresses a belief he holds—one I suspect he develops over the course of the movie until he asks if he is just as much at fault. That sounds like another meta though.
The general replies to Steve’s plea: “They are soldiers; it’s what they’re supposed to do.” [die] This is coming from one of the supposedly ‘good guys.’ Fortunate for us, Diana is having none of it. She calls him out, telling him that he’s a bad man if he sits and does nothing while thousands die. And I think the fact that we, as the audience, don’t see this general’s statements as actually 'evil’ is our own perception of what becomes necessary in war—something Wonder Woman would clearly, adamantly, disagree with us about.
On a somewhat side note: he asks who this woman is and dismisses her berating of him on account of it and has, so far in the movie, repeatedly shown her nothing but contempt; something we only see from the English side of this war interestingly enough. Diana, Princess of Themyscira, has her presence repeatedly questioned because she is a woman, but Dr. Maru exists in Germany with seemingly no issues surrounding her gender.
But Diana and Steve are going to save those hundreds of thousands anyway. He takes her to collect 'backup,’ and they pick up Charlie and Sammy, two men she initially dislikes for being a liar and a murderer. She immediately questions their goodness, which I think was an important step for this movie. For this to be their message, she had to have allies that even she doubted. She does seem to accept it quickly enough though despite neither of them proving for quite time yet that they are, in fact, good people.
She’s starting to learn. People are complicated. The good guys are leaving their own to die. The good guys won’t stop Ares. The good guys dismiss her because she is not a man. So… what are the bad guys like anyway?
They board a train and head for “the front.“ As they get off, we see a crowd of English soldiers, singing war songs, looking hopeful and ready for a fight. Feels a lot like naive Diana, but they don’t have the purpose she does, so instead, it comes off feeling far more like they’re experiencing a nationalistic fervor—a blind loyalty to stay on mission, follow orders… just like the soldiers in Veld later must have felt.
And then Diana and co. continue on, and we see those who have already fought, and they are shell shocked and wounded and far from cheerful. It is an exchange much like you can’t help but imagine is happening in kind on the German lines. And each nation chooses to continue this exchange, sending more sheep in the place of those who come back wounded, unable to continue fighting.
And then we meet Chief. And Chief… he’s especially interesting. He does two things with this narrative. He is introduced as a smuggler: he provides goods to both the English and the Germans for profit. This means, he’s the closest we get to a POV from the enemy side that isn’t evil. And when she calls him on it—for aiding, even in a small fashion, the other side—he says it’s what he has left after his people were destroyed, and when she asks who destroyed them, he points to Steve.
Steve. The good guy
The Englishmen. The English destroyed a people
They are not paragons of perfection
The movie doesn’t linger on this or even have Diana question it, but she also doesn’t call Chief a liar. She seems unsettled, and she lets the subject go, and later, we observe Chief interact with Steve’s men in the trenches, and he is like a saving grace to them. Diana sees no evil in him despite what she is told he does/who he associates with.
And then we have Diana, talking to Sammy about Charlie, the man who kills without honor. She remarks on how he couldn’t do what he said he can, and Sammy replies that “Not everyone can be who we want to be all the time.” What a wonderful, beautiful, human line. I LOVE this line.
“Not everyone can be who we want to be all the time.”
And it’s so true. Interestingly, the way he responds to her question, it sounds on some semantic level like Charile wants to be the murder her claims, but that’s not what Diana sees. This reveals to her a man who never wanted this sort of life and who suffers because of it (his flashes of PTSD/nightmares), and she knows he isn’t evil. He’s… complicated. Yes she saw a darkness there, but now she sees a light.
Sammy reveals to her he always wanted to be an actor, but his 'skin is the wrong color.’ That has nothing to do with the war. The way she was treated as a woman had nothing to do with the war, nothing to do with Ares. This is complicated in a way she’s not prepared for and sowing the seeds of understanding later on. And the exchange ends with Sammy telling her, “We’re all fighting our own battle Diana.”
We all are.
BUT, the Germans we got to know are unquestionably evil. Only, there are some hints that perhaps Ludendorff and Maru do not represent all Germans. We get a scene where the Germans are revealed to be cold (huddling around trash fires) and starving and without sleep. The German man we see trying to defend his men and their plight to Ludendorff gets killed brutally and without warning by him.
Ludendorff is evil, even to his own people.
And then we get to meet Germans arguing for the armistice. Sure, they appear to be doing it because they have nothing left to fight with, but even when Ludendorff insists there is, they refuse him. After all, we had plenty of Englishmen yelling at Sir Patrick, trying to drown out his talks for peace. But Ludendorff kills those Germans who would do the right things, viciously and brutally and with great pleasure.
And we have the gala. We have Steve and Diana in a position to take out the key players, and Diana insists on doing so… but Steve stops her. He lets Ludendorff get away and order the strike against Veld. If he hadn’t stopped Diana, an entire village would not have perished, because Ludendorff would be dead. Even though he wasn’t Ares, in the confusion and without a sadist at the helm, Veld would not have perished. This does not make Steve guilty of their slaughter, but it still stands that if he had acted differently, they would not have died, and Diana tells him as much.
(I think this is the closest the movie was willing to get to make Steve culpable, so I find it important to read it as such. It was an attempt at showing one of the English, someone close and important to our protagonist, make a human error of destructive proportions. They didn’t want to make Steve look too bad and lose the audience’s sympathies though, so it was played down and maybe even lost some of it’s impact/purpose.)
And then, then Ludendorff is dead, killed by Diana, but the war is not stopping. And Steve arrives and tells her he needs her help. She realizes, quite on her own, “It’s all of you. My mother was right, you do not deserve me.” Steve doesn’t contradict her statement that it’s not ‘all of you’ and instead, he seems to finally fully take it to heart. It is all of them. Humans. Perhaps… even, it’s him. He has reached a realization that there has been complicity on each side. He certainly has a certain weight on him after what happened to Veld. He asks her, “Don’t you think I wish I could tell you there’s one bad guy making this all happen? But what if it’s not? What if it’s us… Maybe it’s me.” And his guilt and this realization drives him. It drives him to beg Diana to see that although he has caused harm, his belief was in saving those people and his belief now is to save more and to end the war, that he’s going to back up those beliefs with action, and if that isn’t good for something, what is?
And it’s so… so fascinating that Diana’s arc includes her coming from a naive sense of nobody being evil unless corrupted, to seeing that no, there is evil within humanity, and then to return to something adjacent to her original conclusion but with more nuance and more accountability on those who fight those battles… it’s just… it truly is beautiful. The corruption isn’t just Ares, it’s inside them all along, and only they have the power to overcome that.
There are two things left—I know, this is getting so long—that tells me the movie was truly trying to convey that Germans weren’t just 'the bad guys.’ The first is that Ares turns out not to be a German at all, but English.
This is actually a bit strange, given that his origins do not make him English and it’s also undercut by the fact he isn’t a human.
BUT! He had a position of power and was allotted that power by the English. And it makes it all the more clear that he was influencing both sides of the war, a puppet master driving his dolls to destruction. He reveals that he didn’t make anyone do anything, merely gave them the thoughts and the knowledge and the power to do them. He kindled their darkness where Diana would have kindled their light.
But the final, and perhaps most obvious attempt at this, comes from the Germans, realizing their leaders were gone and their weapon destroyed, standing down. Taking off their gas masks, showing they are all but children, and showing utter relief that it’s over. Chief even grabs and hugs one of them. Remember, Chief smuggles for them too. He might actually know some of these kids.
So yes. I believe the movie in many, many ways did attempt to portray the Germans as not entirely evil and not entirely culpable. I’m just not sure they effectively managed to show us this.
I get the sense that the movie really, really wanted to surprise us with Sir Patrick. Wanted to surprise us with their message. We’re so inundated with imagery of the Evil German, that it was so easy to prey on this iconic representation of evil without question, that we would be unprepared for when they reveal that no, this struggle of good and evil exits inside everyone, not just the Germans. In doing so, they gave us more than two full hours of confirming our long set bias in this matter and listening to the characters call the Germans bad, watching our heroes kill them, and being disgusted by Dr. Maru and Ludendorff’s sadism, that there simply needed to be MORE to provide a counterweight.
We needed something clearer.
We needed a German character to assist—perhaps one of those occupying Veld who switches sides and tells them he could get them into the gala to stop Ludendorff, because patriotism isn’t worth it when weapons like those are being created.
A German soldier switching sides upon learning a German commander would kill hundreds of his compatriots in order to obtain victory over their enemy.
We needed the English to have created an awful, terrible weapon they would threaten to use against the Germans if the armistice wasn’t signed. An English scientist eager to try out their invention.
We needed, somehow, to see the English be an Active participant in the war and not just responding in defense of… what?
We needed Diana telling someone that the Germans are truly good, just under the influence of Ares, and have someone ask her how it is then that she can fight and kill them so easily, without hesitation.
What I wouldn’t have given to hear Wonder freaking Woman tell someone that stopping people from hurting others, despite what they might think their intentions are, is more important than letting them do so.
We needed clear cut articulation that there are bad (human) Englishmen (that don’t transform to goodness) and good Germans. We never really got 'good Germans.’ We just got 'Germans who are glad the fighting is over.’
Like yes, it’s poignant that the Germans we see at the end are practically children, but the scene passes so quickly and without even a line from Diana such as 'They’re children!“ to drive it home to the audience, that it doesn’t outweigh the two+ hours we got of seeing them be villains.
If the movie hadn’t tried to save the punchline of this message until that last moment, there truly was so much room in the narrative for it to have been obvious, and the message would have been cleaner, more poignant. As it stands, there’s a certain emptiness to the message unless you really look into the examples I mention above, and on a first watch, one where the movie likely successfully fools you with it’s 'Germans bad’ misdirect, it’s so easy to overlook the other examples as unintentional or having different implications.
I do think they were intentional though. I just believe that without presenting a good German character, one who battles their darkness and finds their light, there was no way for the movie to manage it. A message like the one the movie aims toward should not be subtle. It’s a message too important to let the audience walk out of unsure about.
I know I, for one, will be watching out for an extended cut, where I hope they will have included either an improvement I suggested, or something else to that effect.
The last season of Parks and Rec's feud between Ron and Leslie is the perfect example of women having to take on emotional labor. The rift began because Ron wouldn't open up about being unhappy that his friends went to work with Leslie instead of him. The rift was cemented when he tore down Anne's house. When he did it, he made a frame out of the door, making it clear he understood how important this would be to Leslie. He never gave it to her because she was mad at him. He had the key to solving their issue by showing that he understood the gravity of what he did and explaining to her about the importance of his building/business. Instead, it wasn't until Leslie grilled him all night only to later admit to Not Knowing he was in need and apologizing profusely, essentially forgiving him because he was in pain... as if her pain no longer is relevant. He knew he hurt her and wouldn't take the effort to explain himself or apologize. She finds out he was hurting and forgives all and apologizes in the spot. Leslie carries that relationship. And it's just... seen as normal. I love the series and I even like that episode but this drives me out of my mind every time I watch it.
