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!
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.
Yesterday, I was talking with a friend of a friend about movies. We clearly have a similar way of consuming media, though come to very different conclusions. I’d asked her if she’d seen Wonder Woman and how I’d loved it (very mild WW spoilers ahead), and she said she had. She said she enjoyed it, but there was a lot that bothered her about the movie. Her primary complaints seemed to be that Diana wasn’t assertive enough, that her established book-smart knowledge wasn’t seemingly/realistically applied to the world around her, and that Steve had a bigger arc than necessary—one scene dedicated to him going so far as him telling Diana to stay back so as not to distract the mission, and when she shows up anyway, he is promptly distracted by her and screws up his gamble at the time. Women = distraction essentially.
I conceded on some parts, but couldn’t on all. What I felt she was saying to me, essentially, was that the movie didn’t properly center on Diana and wasn’t quite feminist enough.
So I switched to Mad Max Fury Road, because there’s a movie that didn’t pull it’s punches in female assertiveness and focus. To which she said she wasn’t that impressed with it because it was too in-your-face about it’s feminist message. I was, unsurprisingly, baffled that this was what caused her to feel ‘meh’ about the movie.
I explained that it’s not pulling it’s punches is precisely why I loved it so much. She said that it wasn’t helpful. It would just mean that people would plug their ears and refuse to listen to the message of the story.
And I got caught on how weird it was that she wanted Diana to take space in a room full of men despite their making it obvious she didn’t belong there without first even addressing why she should want to take up space, but find it too aggressive for women to flee sexual abuse even if it meant extreme violence. (i.e. Wonder Woman not being feminist enough but Mad Max being too feminist?)
But when it comes down to it, the thing that frustrates me the most is that the worthiness of, at least, Fury Road, seemed to come down to the ways in which it does and doesn’t cater to sexists and bigots.
I was the intended target of Mad Max Fury Road. Feminists were the audience Miller & Co decided to make comfortable when writing; this message was saying we are worthy of fighting for and making a story around. And the implication that a movie is lacking because it chose not to cater to sexists and bigots really has me fuming.
I did tell her at one point that this line of thinking felt a lot like tone policing and how I’ve wasted away enough hours of my life trying to politely take these people by the hand and explain things to them, and how it hasn’t worked. And if that’s not going to work, why should I cater to them in that way over and over again? I don’t. I shut them out of my life. I told her that I’ve reached a point where I believe these people should be socially ostracized if they won’t see women as equal to men—see them as deserving of being dismissed (Diana) and deserving of being enslaved (Fury Road).
And while I couldn’t articulate it then, part of this frustration too is the idea that we should cater our messages/stories to anyone who can’t watch Fury Road without plugging their ears rather than see women who refuse to be sex slaves.
Part of why Fury Road got away with the things it did was because it took everything to an extreme and played with it all on a grand scale. So I literally don’t give a single shit for anyone who watches that movie and ignores the message because the women refused to be kept as sex slaves.
And honestly, I only think people who are past the point of return on that are going to dislike Fury Road for that reason explicitly. Less sexist people are going to dislike the movie because Max only barely has more lines than Furiosa. Everyone I know who disliked it did so because Max got captured ‘so easily’ and was (in my own terms not theirs) stripped of his agency (sucks doesn’t it??) for the first quarter of the movie. Or because the Interceptor didn’t play a big enough role. None of them shut off/left the movie because women demanded space and freedom loudly and without room for argument.
But if anyone Does cite Furiosa’s determination, leadership, or the women fleeing Joe as their reason for dismissing the movie, they are NOT WORTH YOUR TIME.
And frankly, what DOES it say about how much we value women, when movies made about and for them are dismissed even by feminists as not catering enough to sexists and bigots? That might not be fair, as she never even used the word ‘catering,’ but I can’t see any other way she was approaching this critique other than to look at how the movie did or didn’t serve these people rather than what it gave to and offered women and feminists, etc.
Like, there are issues with the movie. There are elements to discuss and messages it sends that are worth side-eyeing and being unimpressed with (the way fat bodies were/were not used, how it could have used more visibly people of color, etc), but that wasn’t the conversation. And I just can’t get that out of my head.
At one point, when I tried to indirectly end the conversation but realizing I’m fairly unable to stop talking about that movie unless the other party stops, I told her this was my favorite movie of all time—trying to explain some of my vehemence. She responded that she understood but that I need to respect that it’s not hers. And I was honestly flabbergasted but unable to articulate why, and I know now that first, those are not equivalent emotional states (her frustration with the movie does not have equal weight in emotional investment as it being my favorite movie) and that second it wasn’t that she disliked the movie that had me frustrated but that her reason for disliking the movie felt like a punch to the gut.
Because, while in the grand scheme of things, being a bisexual woman isn’t that high ranking if you’re playing the oppression olympics, it’s enough that to hear that things for and about humanizing marginalized groups are only as worthy as they can convince sexists and bigots of your right to that humanity… well.. I had a lot of feelings.
But just imagine. Imagine if suddenly we held the bar for movies as high as Mad Max Fury Road. If all the movies came out without considering the feelings of sexists and bigots, how quickly they’d be left behind with old movies. How quickly they’d be out of the loop. How quickly their social circle would slip out of their fingers and they’d realize they would have to live small lives with only other toxic people to share them with. Tell me that wouldn’t be effective in making them rethink how they think about the world. Tell me how they wouldn’t quickly come to be seen as mouths screaming futilely into the void if they still refused to join the rest of the world in treating all humans like fucking humans.
Just saying. If all movies were like Fury Road, you’d see a change fast. But sadly, we still have some of those bigots making shitty, sexist shit while those close to them who know better pat them on the hand and tell them they’ll do better next time and it’s okay, one step at a time.
Okay, I’m rambling now. This whole things was a ramble. I’m the one screaming into the void now ahahaha. Mostly just because TOO MANY WORDS. Such is my flaw. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@fadagaski: You expressed interest in hearing about this rant. I don’t blame you if you don’t read it all! Hahaha
