My good friend Bryan alerted me to the existence of this, a 1967 attempt at a Wonder Woman pilot commissioned by the producer of the Batman TV show.
Basically, Diana Prince gets berated by her mother for not having a man, then she runs through a revolving wall, emerging as Wonder Woman who (to paraphrase the voice-over by the regular Batman announcer) “knows she has the strength of Hercules; knows she has the speed of Mercury, and *thinks* she has the beauty of Aphrodite!”
It’s certainly something completely different. And I did laugh a couple of times at the sheer unexpected snideness of it.
Ultimately, though, it’s hard for me to get behind it enthusiastically. Part of what was so much fun about the Batman TV series is that the target of the humor was the establishment; Batman and Robin are basically policemen/boy scouts; in all their humorless do-gooding, they’ve got the law and the powers-that-be on their side. The show was a masterpiece of having your cake and eating it too; you get to sneer at the ridiculous dated morality (refusing to drive through red light; refusing to hit women, etc. etc.) while still rooting for that morality to win. Batman’s the show where even cops could laugh at crime-fighting and even hippies could cheer for the establishment.
This Wonder Woman pilot, though…it tries to make fun of Wonder Woman the way that the Batman TV show made fun of Batman…but it’s just not as easy to get the balance right. The main problem is just that Wonder Woman is a woman…and as such she can’t be assimilated to the establishment the way Batman can. Instead, because she’s a women, she’s automatically marginal in certain ways. As a result, making fun of her doesn’t feel edgy or clever — it feels hackney and tired and dumb…and, yeah, sexist too. Jokes about aging unmarried daughters who are desperate for men; jokes about women’s vanity; jokes about women being incompetent…where have I heard *that* before?
For WW humor, I much prefer Darwyn Cooke’s pissed-off 2nd wave feminist version, which makes fun of WW for being overly sensitive and clueless, but also ridicules men for being venal and predictable and generally getting their asses kicked. Gender roles and wars of the sexes can be funny, and often are. But even when it’s written with some wit, I just don’t find sexism all that humorous.
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And as I’ve been pointing out at the end of each of these, this is the latest in a series of posts on post-Marston takes on WW. The whole series is here.
Bluefall’s certainly an entertaining writer and an attentive reader. She makes a strong (though to me, not convincing) case for League of One being something other than a complete piece of crap. For example, she has a nice point about WW’s attentiveness to relationships:
Diana’s plans, on the other hand, rely entirely on the League’s greatest strength, on her assumption that her friends will look out for each other. She’s able to defeat J’onn and Kyle because they trust her; she gets Clark out of the picture by forcing him to rescue their friends. She’s able to launch the League into space in the first place because she knows they’ll be okay. He plan succeeds because she sees things in terms of relationships and reactions, rather than individual physical traits.
For me, unfortunately, this is largely vitiated by the fact that all the relationships in the book are both unbelievable and vapid; it’s not especially impressive to be able to parse interpersonal dynamics when all your interpersonal dynamics basically consist of bland corporate boy scouts declaring allegiance to one another (except for Batman, who, you know, is dark because he uses reverse psychology.) Not even bluefall’s quixotic insistence on referring to them all by their first names can convince me that these badly painted figurines have any inner lives not imposed by front office dictat. Still, I guess the book should get points for the earnestness with which it attempts to move the corpses about in a lifelike manner.
What I mainly took away from reading these posts is that bluefall really likes Wonder Woman (or “Diana”.) That’s a big part of how she reacts to WW comics, it looks like. That is, she knows she likes WW, and she judges the comics to some extent on how well they live up to her image of what Wonder Woman should be. For instance, in talking about John Byrne’s run, she commented that she liked the way that Byrne made Diana as powerful as she should be relative to other characters in the DC universe.
I think this is maybe part of the reason some of my posts have rubbed some WW fans the wrong way. Because, the thing is, I really couldn’t give a pile of kangaroo-horse poop (to cite a creature indigenous to Paradise Island in Marston’s run) about whether WW is as powerful as she should be, or about whether she’s as noble as she should be, or whether she behaves in character, or out of character, or is depowered and dressed in white, or whatever. I love the original Marston/Peter run, which I think is one of the few truly idiosyncratic works of art to come out of the super-hero genre. And it’s fun to see other creators try (and largely fail) to deal with the bizarre thing Marston and Peter created. But I don’t care if creators get her “right” except insofar as they tell a story that seems worth reading. If you can tell a good story making WW able to push planets around, that’s fine; if you can tell a good story making her only slightly stronger than Etta Candy, that’s fine too (Marston probably did both of those things at some point.) If you want to make her impulsive and eager to hit people and that works, cool; if you want to make her preach peace and love and you can get that to work, more power to you (I suspect Marston did both of those things as well.) I don’t like most of the WW stories I’ve read by folks other than Marston because they’re boring and dumb, not because WW isn’t sufficiently noble or iconic or whatever. In short, I’m not a fan in the usual sense; at least not of the character.
I don’t necessarily have anything against fans…or even against fan fiction, which is where this kind of investment in a character abstracted from a particular story tends to lead. I haven’t read a ton of fan fiction, but there is some of it I like quite a bit. Some of it I really don’t want to look at, but that’s just personal preference, not an aesthetic line in the sand.
Still, I think super-hero comics do run into a problem with the fan-base…that problem being that there isn’t in fact a canon. The WW bluefall likes isn’t the Marston/Peter WW, which is old and embarrassing and weird. It’s not really the Silver Age WW either, which was embarrassing in different ways; nor is it really the modern day WW, who, after all, bluefall tends to judge against an ideal, and often to find wanting (the swimsuit, for example, would be ditched if bluefall had her way.) And I think that’s all fairly typical; the ideal WW that fans enthuse about is…an ideal; it’s not an actual character or version of the character, but rather some platonic vision of the way the character would be if the perfect writer wrote her, or, I guess, if she were real.
The thing is, when you unmoor the character from any actual creative team, you drift into one of two problems. On the one hand, you end up with stories written by folks who don’t care about the character and don’t really have any idea what to do with her…and WW has certainly had that happen to her over the years. On the other hand, though, you can also end up with stories that are just devoted to showing how wonderful the character is…and WW has had her share of those, too. In fact, that seems to be the whole point of “League of One”; it’s aggrandizing fan scruff for WW fans who want to be assured that WW is just the awesomest there is. See, she beats the whole Justice League! And she beats a big bad dragon because she’s so much purer than everyone, even Superman! She’s so good and brave and awesome, just like WW should be! (Bluefall does object slightly because the script intimates that Superman could actually beat WW in a fair fight, which bluefall feels is wrong because, I guess, nobody can beat WW, damn it. But since WW beats Superman by trickery anyway, bluefall is willing to let it pass.)
In short, with no agreed upon canon,there’s a strong tendency for the character to drift towards that bane of fan-fiction, the Mary Sue. Wikipedia has a good definition:
Mary Sue, sometimes shortened simply to Sue, is a pejorative term used to describe a fictional character who plays a major role in the plot and is particularly characterized by overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors or readers. Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as “Mary Sues” is that they are too ostentatious for the audience’s taste, or that the author seems to favor the character too highly. The author may seem to push how exceptional and wonderful the “Mary Sue” character is on his or her audience, sometimes leading the audience to dislike or even resent the character fairly quickly; such a character could be described as an “author’s pet”.
Mary Sues are, as I said, usually created by fans…but everyone writing WW is pretty much just a fan at this point, the original creators being long, long gone and their concept in most respects abandoned. In any case, there’s a self-conscious reiteration of, well, wonderfulness in League of One that is extremely tiresome, and which is a consistent though less discussed aspect of super-hero decadence. At its core, League of One isn’t all that different from Marvel Zombies. The second is characterized by desperate desecration, the first by desperate consecration. But both are more interested in the act of burnishing/befouling the icon than they are with telling a story. (Which, come to think of it, is what I said about All Star Superman, now that I think about it. And, of course, I was right then too!) ______________________
Incidentally, this post is part of a series on WW’s post-Marston iterations. The entire series is called Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle and you can see all the relevant posts here.
In this post I talked about Alan Moore’s proposal for Glory and compared it to the original Marston run. In particular I quibbled with Moore’s comment that the original WW was “coy but suggestive.”
A couple folks in comments argued that the original WW was in fact coy. Eric B. says
while they ARE certainly about bondage and the sexual thrill of S & M, they never explicitly give us that, but rather come up with a number of ways to show “sexual bondage” without actually showing them.
It’s hero-jeopardy in an action adventure. That’s coy compared to, “I want to tie you up, Wonder Woman, because it’s a hot, yummy turn-on for you, me and the old weirdo who writes us! Grrrrowl!”
Both of these comments miss the point, I think. The books are explicit. Marston is a bondage fetishist and he’s serving up bondage. If you asked Marston whether he would rather get off by looking at pictures of people who are naked and not tied up, or people who are clothed and tied up, I am quite quite sure he would tell you clothed and tied up, every time. If you asked Marsten whether he would rather show look at pictures of people clothed and tied up or pictures of people naked and having sex, I’m willing to bet he would say he would rather look at pictures of people who are clothed and tied up. If you asked him whether he would rather look at people who are naked and tied up or read an elaborate narrative about bondage and dominence which narratively requires the characters to be clothed — well, narrative fantasy is really, really important to masochists. I think WW is Marston’s erotic fantasy…not something like his erotic fantasy, not pointing to or suggesting an erotic fantasy, but his erotic fantasy, period. There’s no feeling of something held back in the WW comics; no sense that the real sensual pleasures are being deferred to heighten tension or for censorship reasons. The obsessive reiteration of a fetish isn’t coy or disingenuous. It’s a really different mindset to say with Moore, in the one case, “I’m going to cutely suggest situations which I find sexually stimulating, but hold something back” and, in the other, with Marston, to say, “I’m going to fill a book by obsessively repeating the situations– the very ones — that I find sexually stimulating.”
I think my commenters and Moore, are somewhat thrown off by the fact that they don’t share the fetish. As it happens, I don’t share the fetish either — but Marston is clear both in his other statements and in the book itself about what his intentions are.
I guess you could say, well, *Marston* may not be coy, but the reader will perceive it as coy or suggestive. I still don’t see it, though. “Coy” is about being in control — which is certainly an important aspect of Moore’s art. Obsession is about not being in control; about submitting. Marston’s WW feels obsessive in its repetition, its outlandishness, its monomania, and its philosophical integration, it doesn’t feel like he’s placing this stuff out there to tantalize *you*. It feels like he’s caught up in it; like he can’t stop and doesn’t want to. In the way he blatantly, obsessively puts his fetishes out there, he’s much more like R. Crumb than he is like Moore’s Cobweb.
Update: In other-people-who-disagree-with-me news, Bluefall has an impassioned post about the coolness of truth and how I denigrated same when I said that WW’s lasso of truth was better when it was a lasso of control. I guess in response I’d say there are truths and truths, and that the psychotherapeutic new-agey self-actualizing that seems to carry the day in WW mythos doesn’t, to my mind, have the kind of power that Bluefall claims for it.
Also — and this was my point in the original post to a great extent — it seems like any self-knowledge worth its salt would be a self-knowledge that would allow you to figure out that, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m wearing a swimsuit and bondage gear…maybe I should put some clothes on.”
Relatedly, Bluefall seems outraged that people think that WW is a ridiculous character; she sneers at those who say “”this character fails” or “she shouldn’t be popular” like that’s actually going to make her fail or stop being popular,”
But…she can be a failure aesthetically even if some people like her…I mean, some people like anything, even Tom Petty. And moreover, she’s not especially popular. Sure, there’s a small fanbase, but it’s not big even by the standards of comic-book super-heroes. She’s got nowhere near the pop-culture cachet of Superman or Batman or Spiderman or Hulk or even the Flash.
To the vast majority of people, WW isn’t even on the radar. If she is on the radar, she’s a joke. And those people are right. The character is preposterous — gloriously so, I would argue, but still. I guess that may be an uncomfortable truth to face for some…but embrace it! It will set you free, or tie you up, or something.
There’s no doubt that Moore’s a smart guy, and he certainly keys into some of the things about Marston’s work that I like. For instance, Moore describes Steve Trevor as “one of the most truly pathetic love interests in comics” — and argues that this is a strength, not a weakness. Has anybody played Steve for mascochistic laughs after Marston? I don’t think I’ve seen it (certainly not the most recent animated movie where Steve’s an action hero and teaches WW to love (blech.)
Some of Moore’s other readings of the material don’t strike me quite, quite right though. In general, he does tend to pick out things about the original work that are fun or weird or entertaining — and then he suggests updated analogues that are almost but not quite as fun, weird, or entertaining.
–He mentions Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls as “sickening Nancy Drews” and points out that they could be used for humorous effect or (suitably aged) for a poignant touch. And it’s true — the Holiday Girls are completely bizarre. (Though they started in the 40s with Marston, not in the 60s as Moore suggests.) But the *most* bizarre thing about the Holiday girls was that Marston played them straight. Etta wasn’t there for laughs (or not only for laughs); she was actually frequently the hero, often tougher and more competent than WW, and always tougher and more competent than Steve. I don’t see any indication that Moore noticed that.
–Moore talks about the Invisible Plane, calling it “exactly the sort of lovely, pointless idea that I think we should encourage.” But then he goes on to suggest it be updated to create something which “fits more” with Glory’s mythological background. He decides on a Diamond Chariot, an intelligent crystal growth which can “reform itself according to any configurations that Glory programs into it.” Which is fine… but probably the most entertaining thing about the plane in the first place was its utter incongruity and awkwardness. Why do the Greek mythos Amazons have an invisible WW II plane lying around? Why is it invisible, anyway? Where on earth (literally) is she keeping it? Moore rationalizes the trope — but rationalizing isn’t necessarily making it better.
–Moore has got some fun villain ideas (the bondagey Venus Fly Trap, for example) but nothing nearly as weird as Marston’s female-gorilla-turned-into-a-woman, or the cross-dressing transgendered wizard character. (Though perhaps Moore would have come up with something nuttier if he’d gotten to actually write the thing.)
As far as the bigger picture stuff goes, the same thing applies: Moore does understand where Marston is coming from…but only up to a point. He says that “Dr. Charles Moulton was a barely suppressed psycho-sexual lunatic who [wrote] Wonder Woman with one hand in his pocket…” and points out how bizarre it was to have all this bondage stuff in a comic that was supposedly “designed by experts especially for the young and impressionable female reader.”
However, what Moore doesn’t seem to quite grok is that Marston knew this as well as anyone. Better than anyone, probably. You can go online and find quote after quote with Marston talking about how much he likes seeing strong women bound, how much he likes to submit…and how all of this relates to his feminism. (The top of this recent post includes a few examples of Marston holding forth.) In other words, Marston isn’t some weird idiot savant who didn’t know what he was doing. He put the bondage in there because it tied in (as it were) in very specific ways with what he thought about gender relations and with his (perverted, but real) vision of feminism.
So Moore goes on to say that this weird supposedly-for-young-girls-but-actually-stroke-material vibe is “one of the only really interesting and unique things about the [Wonder Woman] comic book…we’d do well to create a similar coy but suggestive edifice for the new Glory”
I think there are a number of problems with that comment. First, to say that the bondage/feminism is “one of the only” interesting things about Marston’s run is really confused — that’s the only thing in Marston’s run, practically speaking! That’s what it’s about! That’s the whole kit and kaboodle! Marston examines it obsessively, from every level, and very self-consciously.
The point here is in that second bit, where Moore says that “we’d do well to create a similar coy but suggestive edifice for the new Glory.” Okay…but Marston wasn’t about being “coy but suggestive.” He was about expounding a feminist/utopian philosophy which he was invested in for erotic as well as philosophical reasons. Moore gets the exploitation, but misses the rest of it — and so what he comes up with is “coy but suggestive”, with some bondage elements and eroticism and a semi-closeted lesbian admirer/companion for Glory. In other words, he wants to do somewhat subtle PG-13 exploitation — which is fine, and could be very entertaining…but I’d argue (and have argued recently) that Marston was doing something different. Among other things that “something” involved his compromised, bizarre, but genuine commitment to a female readership — somthing that Moore’s proposal explicitly doesn’t have (Moore says he wants to “prime the story with plenty of open spaces for the readers’ filthy, disgusting thirteen year-old mind to inhabit” — and I don’t think the mind he’s thinking of belongs to a girl.)
None of which is to say that Glory wouldn’t have been fun to read. There are even a couple of points where Moore’s series might have improved on the original: Moore, for example, actually seems interested in Glory’s secret identity, and was eager to write stories about it, whereas Marston (at least as far as I’ve seen) seems to have included Diana Prince because, well, super-heroes have secret identities, and it’s not too much trouble to put her in a couple of panels per story.
Overall, though I seriously doubt that Glory would have been as loopy, as funny, or anywhere near as good as those old Marston comics. It’s not too hard to be more self-aware than Siegel and Shuster and Mort Weisinger, and craft a series of Supreme stories that are able to encompass the joy of the originals and add some more thoughtful reflections as well. Trying to do the same thing with Wonder Woman, though…well, it’s not at all clear to me that Moore is more self-aware than Marston, and it’s entirely clear to me that his grasp of the material is less thoughtful and less original. Moore has done some things I like probably as much as the old WW comics…but Supreme wasn’t one of those things, and reading this proposal, it’s very hard for me to see how Glory could have been either. (It might have been the best take on WW short of Marston, I suppose…but I’ve been arguing at some length that second best Wonder Woman is not an especially high bar.)
And you know what? Even if Moore did somehow manage to write as well as Marston, Harry Peter’s art would kick ass on any lame-ass nineties super-hero hack who Liefield dragged in. (There’s a faint suggestion in the proposal that Moore was thinking of bringing in Melinda Gebbie to do some work on the title; I suspect [Update: on the basis of no actual evidence, I should add] that she’s the “Peters stylist” he alludes to. And she would be better than a standard super-hero artist…but she’s nowhere near as good as Peter himself.)
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I was hoping to talk about Promethea here as well, but this post is long enough already, so I’ll probably save that for tomorrow…or possibly next week, depending on how things go….
In my last post on the Wonder Woman animated movie, I talked a little about how I felt the film wasn’t very comfortable with femininity. I was thinking about that a bit more, and it struck me again how very few female characters WW meets, and how much that tilts the movie. Basically, WW runs into a little girl who is being prevented from playing pirates, and the sexed up Etta Candy who is ickily dependent on men and on her own sex-kittenish charm. Neither of those two characters is on screen for any time at all, really. So what you’re left with is Amazons (who are tough and manly for the most part) and guys like Steve Trevor and Ares representing man’s world.
As I suggested in my earlier post, this isn’t the way things worked in Marston, where WW was always surrounded by female characters, both Amazon and human. But it also wasn’t true in what I think was probably the (distant) second best take on the WW character; Geoge Perez’s run on the series. I talked about some of my problems with that run here. But the one thing Perez really did right was to have lots of female characters. Etta Candy as a loyal, courageous, slightly older and still chunky military career woman; Julia, a late fiftiesish Greek scholar; her (Kitty Pryde-influenced) teenaged daughter Vanessa; Myra, the quite-but-not-entirely head of an advertising agency…they were all interesting, well-developed characers, with distinct personalities and (even more rarely for super-hero comics) body types.
What was especially nicely done was that Diana was, if anything, *more* interested in these woman than she was in Steve, or in men in general. And she found them interesting not only because they were sisters, or similar to her, but because they were *different.* There’s one line where she comments that Etta is as thick as two of her…but it’s not a dis, she’s fascinated. Perez doesn’t make Diana actually fall in love with any of the women (or with anybody, for that matter), but the excitement at strangeness she feels is a close analog, I think, to romantic excitement — the sense of difference, or unknowability, which is part of what makes love exciting.
You get just a touch of this in the movie, when Diana first sees the crying child and starts to talk about how there are no children on Paradise Island. But it’s pretty much dropped to focus instead on her relationship with Steve — indeed, the whole interaction with the girl seems more about getting Steve a couple of good quips and developing the Diana-is-disillusioned-with-man’s-world meme than it is about exploring Diana’s relationship with kids. Whereas, in Perez, Diana’s relationship with the teenaged Vanessa is a big part of the series — much bigger than her relationship with Steve Trevor, who is more of a marginal character.
Perez seems to have figured out something that the movie didn’t — which is that Wonder Woman goes to man’s world not for men, but for women. Steve Trevor always had a “well, there has to be a romantic interest” afterthought kind of feel; it was WW’s interactions with women that really had some oomph behind them for Marston.
Girls have needed, at least in their fantasy lives, a safe place to be with other girls, where they could express themselves without being threatened by boys. British girls’ magazines seem to have recognized this need. In my study of four British girls’ magazine annuals, from 1956, 1958, and 196325, I found comics in which the protagonists, usually students from all-girl schools, interacted with other girls, and any male in the stories is usually a villain. In a typical story from 1958, three school girls dress up as “The Silent Three,” in hooded robes and masks26, to help a younger girl whose dog has been stolen by a wicked man, who hopes to use the dog to retrieve a hidden paper that will lead to treasure.
In “Staunch Allies of the Swiss Skater,” from 1956, two British schoolgirls, vacationing in Switzerland, befriend a young Swiss ice skater, buying her a dress to wear for a skating contest. When the girl’s cruel uncle locks her up, forbidding her to enter the contest, they free the girl and find a paper proving he is an impostor, masquerading as her dead uncle “to steal the legacy her mother left her!” One of the contest judges knew the real uncle and would have recognized him. In the end, a British girl hugs the skater and says, “Your troubles are over, Odette dear. You’re free – free to skate!”
American girls’ comics from that period are very different. Instead of the sisterhood themes of the British comics, the American comic stories usually revolve around the theme of the eternal triangle — two girls, one of which is the protagonist, fighting over the Token Boyfriend. Patsy Walker and Hedy Wolfe fight over Buzz Baxter, Betty and Veronica fight over Archie Andrews, and so on. In the women’s community of Paradise Island, girls did not have to have boyfriends; they could be “free – free to skate!”, or free to be themselves and to interact with other girls.
Obviously, and as Robbins notes too, there are lesbian implications here if you want them. But whether or no, the decision in the movie was to make Diana’s most important relationship be with Steve — and Hippolyta’s most important relationship be with Ares actually — it’s because she is spurned by Ares in particular that she closes the Amazon’s off from men for 100s of years, as opposed to other versions of the story, where the personal betrayal (by Hercules, not Ares) is much less emphasized. Men just take up a lot more emotional space than seems warranted in a Wonder Woman story, basically. Perez figured out a better balance.
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Before I leave the wonder woman animated movie forever, I wanted to acknowledge this post at Comic Fodder. Ryan has a couple of thoughtful comments.
Noah Berlatsky live blogged his viewing of the Wonder Woman movie, which I think is kind of a bad idea. Going MST3K on any movie is pretty easy and gets you in the mode of “what can I make fun of” rather than any actual critical analysis of the darn thing. And in your riffing, you can wind up saying really stupid things about how people from the South must hate Abraham Lincoln.
After live blogging, he did post a fairly strong rebuttal to the movie, which i found far more readable, even if I don’t necessarily agree. But he DOES offer up a thoughtful sort of challenge to the filmmakers as per how they could have handled some of the sequences. I’m not sure he noted that the film was actually directed by, voice directed by (and had input from Simone)… all women. That’s not to say women can’t fall into the same traps as male directors, but it does make one pause when considering some of the accusations lobbed the way of the movie.
As far as the Steve Trevor thing: Overall, and on reflection, I think it was actually a nice move by the movie to have the main character be a southerner and not comment on it overtly. So…not my best moment. Apologies.
As far as the movie being made by women…I didn’t look up the creators names, though I assumed it might be a possibility. Obviously, it’s somewhat problematic for a guy to go around telling women they’re not sufficiently feminist. But then, to go back and say “oh, it’s all right now that I know they’re women!” would be pretty condescending. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t…so I might as well just stick with my original assessment: it still seems like a movie that raises its feminism mostly to cut it down, which is way too kind to its frat boy main character, which generally is dumb and even dishonest about gender issues, and which is quite uncomfortable with femininity.
I just liveblogged my way through the WW animated film. If you want to see my thoughts as I went along, here’s the Update: First thread,second thread,third thread.
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Well, overall, the movie was about the level of bad I expected, I guess. I pretty much agree with everything in Chris’s review. The violence and sex seems calculated to go just so far and not farther in a way that ends up reading as smarmy and not much else. Exploitation can be fun if it’s either explored or used to push stories in odd directions. Here, though, it’s all controlled without much curiosity; the exploitation elements seem ladled out with a spoon, and the rest of the story doesn’t have enough thematic coherence or adventurousness to go anywhere. The twin goals (tell a typical Wonder Woman story; throw in (limited) gore and (limited) sex)) lead to paralysis rather than energetic frisson. As just a for instance, if you’re going to do WW exploitation, it seems like one of the more interesting ways would be to explore lesbian themes — but that would be R, and besides we’re not really willing to do that with a DC property — and so the only lesbian suggestion is done in the most banal way possible; set up as a sexual fantasy for Steve (who sees some Amazons cavorting in a pool) rather than as a real possible female alternative to dealing with man’s world. Thus, the only real love is love between men and women, which philosophically stacks the cards against Paradise Island as a viable community. The “moral” of the movie ends up being that Hippolyta must learn reach out to men in order to learn to love. In this (as in just about every other) way, the film is less adventurous than the source material; Marston did suggest implicit lesbianism in various ways, and while he had Diana fall in love with Steve, I don’t think he suggested that that love vitiated the Amazon’s community.
Indeed, when William Moulton Marston created WW, the whole point of the Amazons was that they were going to teach man’s world love — not vice versa. This, I think, points to the film’s central failure of imagination. The filmmakers just can’t figure out a way to admire femininity. They can admire women — but pretty much only insofar as the women are tough, violent, self-sufficient — masculine, in other words. You see this again and again throughout the film; the librarian is mocked for not being tough enough in the opening battle scene; then she gets brutally offed, essentially because she’s too girly to live. Wonder Woman herself taunts femininity at various points, mocking Ares for getting beaten by a girl, or teasing Steve for expressing his emotions like a girl. The end tries to walk this back a little, with Hippolyta rebuked for rejecting children and love — hallmarks of femininity. But the only way to get those back is supposed to be by opening themselves up to men.
Marston, on the other hand, had a vision of a femininity which was both strong and self-sufficient. For him, the Amazons weren’t unloving because they’d cut themselves off from men; on the contrary, cutting themselves off from the masculine was what made them embody love. In the film, being strong (masculine) precludes love (feminine); for Marston, being feminine is what creates strength (and submission and lots of bondage.)
The point here is that the movie’s vision of gender is just much, much more clearly designed of, by, and for men. The Amazons are essentially pictured *as* men. The reason their cool is their masculine attributes (kicking ass) and their problems are masculine problems — they’ve gone off into their cave, cutting themselves off from emotional attachments to be safe. The “message” could have been written by Robert Bly — trust your emotions! don’t be afraid to love! It’s focusing on male anxieties around castration and being tough and not wanting to be vulnerable.
In Marston, though, what’s glorified is not only strength, but female bonds…and, indeed, bonds in general. Marston’s emphasis on submission as a form of love and strength is decidedly kinky…but it also allows femininity to be something other than just opening yourself to a man. It can be opening yourself to a woman, for example. “Obedience to loving authority” (as he puts it) is, in Marston’s vision, not actually about patriarchy first, but about femininity first; after all, the loving authority doesn’t have to be male, and, in those old Wonder Woman comics, often isn’t. For Marston, femininity is an archetype that can exist entirely without reference to men.
A female community built around mutual submission and love is the ultimate source of strength in Marston’s world. For him, women are going to save man’s world. Whereas, for the filmmakers, the Amazons need men to save them.
Which is why the movie, with a kind of tedious inevitability, finds itself morphing into “Steve Trevor: The Animated Film.” Trevor gets a ton of screen time, and we actually learn more about his inner life than about Diana’s; it’s quite clear at the end why he kisses her, but it’s way less clear why she kisses him. The fact is, the filmmakers are more interested in the entirely pedestrian horniness and self-pity of this banal frat boy who find the girl of her dreams than they are in the journey of their putative star. In the end, her objections to man’s world are shown to be hollow feminist propaganda; all she really needs to cure her restlessness is a good man…or even a mediocre one.
Or, to put it more briefly: Marston’s Wonder Woman was a male fantasy that cared deeply about women and girls. And while that’s not ideal in every way, I would argue that this film is good evidence that a male fantasy which cares about women and girls is, overall, and in almost every way, better than a male fantasy that doesn’t.
So I’ve been talking here and here about the first issue of Wonder Woman by her creators, Charles Moulton and Harry Peter. One of the (many) panels from that issue which made me laugh out loud was this one:
As you can see, this is the moment where Wonder Woman gets her magic lasso. In later iterations, this lasso forces you to tell the truth, right? But, as it turns out, that’s a later watering down of the lasso’s power. It’s actually…a mind control lasso! It forces anyone captured by it to obey.
Presumably the bondage/mind-control/erotic implications of this were a bit too (ahem) naked. But if later writers were embarrassed, you can bet that Moulton himself wasn’t. It’s only a panel or two later that we have this:
Yep, that’s Diana, our hero, mischievously misusing her power for cheap thrills.
That, of course, is not a characterization of WW that you see too much of anymore. Which is really a shame, because it’s probably the most enjoyable take on the character I’ve read. In the first WW story, Diana is portrayed as super-courageous, super-talented, super-smart, super-beautiful — and also as a typically bratty adolescent who runs around after boys and loves pretty dresses and is…well, check this out.
“I have to take him to my secret lab so that I can invent a ray to bring people back to life — but don’t tell Mom!”
Or there’s this, where WW tries the old, “everybody else is doing it!” gambit.
Moulton’s WW, in other words, isn’t a goody two-shoes. She’s not all tragic and noble and self-sacrificing. She’s got desires, both serious (her love for Steve) and whimsical (wanting to see the doctor stand on her head.) Moreover, acting on those desires doesn’t end in disaster, or make her less of a hero. This is pretty standard for men, of course (for whom being rebellious and dangerous is part of being heroic — think Han Solo, or Wolverine, for that matter.) But women don’t usually get cut as much slack. They don’t get to revel in their power — and when they do have power, it’s as likely as not to be something saccharine like being super-truthful. Certainly, WW has, over the years, become a kind of tedious paragon — Spidey gets to crack jokes, Batman gets to be grim and vicious…but WW is always the adult, regretting the need for violence when she has any personality at all. You certainly don’t get to see her dressed in a masquerade outfit riding a kanga-horse while gratuitously and alliteratively mocking her opponents weight.
For Moulton, Wonder Woman’s the hero, which means she gets to act like a hero — and part of what it means to be a hero is that you get to be dashing and thoughtless and maybe even a little mean-spirited because you’re just that cool. And he ties that devil-may-care attitude into a rebellious girl adolescence (rather than the typical rebellious boy adolescence) in a way that’s both funny and, I think, extremely appealing. And he also does it while keeping Diane femme — usually, this sort of combination would end up as butch, or tomboyish, but Moulton (and Peter) always put Diana in frills and lace; in fact, in that panel above, her opponent is taunting her for being too femme, and she snaps right back by taunting her for being too butch. Obviously, you could find fault with this from a feminist standpoint in various ways: Moulton has strange issues with heavy women, it’s got to be said. But writing a story in which you have a feminine girl being strong, snotty, heroic, smart, and mean while staying femme and not being punished for any of it — that’s just not something you see that often in the oughts, much less 1942.
Hey girls! Disobey your Mom and you too can have new clothes and a ticker-tape parade!
And to show just how unlikely you are to see it in the oughts….I give you Greg Rucka’s Hiketeia. Moulton’s Diana is all about possibility; excitement and fun and adventure; she does what she wants, and is praised and admired for it. Rucka’s WW on the other hand, is all about duty and restriction. She doesn’t even get to defend the weak by choice. The Hiketeia is (in the comic at least) a Greek ritual in which a supplicant asks for protection. Some random girl (Danny) shows up on WW’s doorstep and invokes the ritual; WW accepts the supplication, which means that she is responsible for protecting the girl, no matter what, or the Furies will kill her. It turns out Danny has killed a bunch of bad men who raped and pimped out her sister; Batman is following her, so WW and Batman have to fight, and then there’s a much-foreshadowed tragic finish. Through it all, WW never gets to act or even think for herself; her initial moment of impulsive sisterly bonding and compassion trap her completely — “I have no choice” and “It doesn’t matter” are her mantras.
Danny talks about how much she wants to be like WW, but it’s hard to see why any girl would be especially inspired by this dour vision of toilsome female duty. In taking from Diana choice, he also takes away her heroism; she becomes a boring mother/victim, sacrificing herself not because she’s dashing or brave, but because that’s what moms do. Even her battles with Batman seem rote and, oddly, diminish her. She beats him easily — so easily that it seems less like two fierce competitors battling for glory than like a mother smacking down a wayward child. Batman’s effort to evoke the Hiketeia towards the end (which WW rejects) makes the masochistic mother-fetishization even more explicit. And then, of course, Danny kills herself — because she can’t bear coming between WW and Batman. So much for sisterhood.
Rucka is going for noir here, of course. Linking Greek tragedy with noir isn’t a bad idea; both forms are about the disaster caused by human weaknesses; tragic flaws leading noble, or charming, or compassionate people into death and defilement. There are two problems with this approach, though. First, noir gets across in large part on its stylish visuals, and while there are many adjectives one could use to describe J.G. Jones’ art (lumpy, muddy, cluttered, ugly), stylish isn’t really among them.
Second, noir requires a certain amount of bloody-mindedness. Rucka is willing to do depressing and he’s willing to do melodrama, but his stomach for gore and unpleasantness isn’t up to the story he’s written. Danny, for example, is a frustratingly blah character as well…frustrating because Rucka seems to go out of his way to make her as passive as possible. This is a naive, tiny woman who, supposedly, hunted down, outsmarted, outfought, and murdered a bunch of older, meaner, streetwise thugs. How’d she do it? How did she feel about it at the time? How did they feel about it? What happened? Rucka tells us none of that. The entire sequence is elided, barely shown even in flashback. The defilement of Danny’s sister is shown in at least passing detail, but the humiliation of the victimizers? Nada. Rucka has written a rape-revenge story — that’s the actual interesting part of the narrative, not the nonsense with the furies and Batman and Wonder Woman. But he won’t tell it, perhaps because he’s squeamish, and/or because imagining a woman as active and vicious, rather than as victim, doesn’t engage him.
All of which just makes me appreciate rape-revenge exploitation movies that much more. In They Call Her One Eye, for example, Christina Lindberg doesn’t need her sister or Wonder Woman to come help her our when she’s raped and beaten; she sets out on a rigorous training regime (like Batman) and then she systematically and brutally just murders everyone who fucked with her (literally or figuratively.) I think in the denoument she buries her chief tormenter in filth, ties a rope to his neck, ties a horse to the rope, and then has the horse decapitate the baddy. I guess if Danny did stuff like that, you can see why Batman is upset. Maybe Rucka feels like we wouldn’t sympathize with her if we saw her wreaking havoc? If so, that’s a deep, deep misunderstanding of the way genre fiction and heroism work…. More likely he just wanted to focus on his boring, precious Wonder Woman.
The above is not nearly as gruesome as this movie gets. But it’s pretty gruesome, so be warned.
Which leads us to the third problem. Noir (and Greek tragedy for that matter) needs flawed characters. The flaws not only move the plot and create the tragedy; they also make the characters sympathetic and interesting. In that great Haney Batman/Deadman story I blogged about a while ago, for example, everybody involved in the story is shown to be a fool/cad/bounder; Batman’s a selfish grandstander; Deadman’s a whiny little loser so desperate for love that he commits murder; the main romantic interest is a cold thug. They’re selfish and dumb and they deserve what they get…which makes the story all the more poignant. They’re in control of their destinies — that’s the tragedy.
But this isn’t the case for Rucka’s WW. She’s not selfish or flawed. That means she isn’t a villain, but it also prevents her from being a hero. Even her initial moment of compassion she talks about as if it were out of her hands; something she had to do rather than a choice she made. She’s just this boring maternal paragon, who the Fates have decided to torment, perhaps because they find her insufferably tedious as well.
Rucka has talked in various places about how he wants to respect and honor the Wonder Woman character. And he does respect and honor her. He respects and honors her right onto a pedestal which, as feminists have argued for a while, is not an especially comfortable place to be. Heroes need flaws, or at least moxy. Moulton breathed life into Diana by making her impish and somewhat selfish and excited about her powers. Rucka, on the other hand, seems determined to turn her back into a lifeless figurine.
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As a somewhat final note: I’ve watched a couple of the old Lynda Carter Wonder Woman TV shows recently. I wouldn’t say they’re good exactly; the writing can be dreadful, and the plotting and pacing are leaden. And, of course, the outfit looks really, really silly on a real person. And Lynda Carter is in no way comfortable playing an action heroine; she always looks distinctly uncomfortable with the physical, ass-kicking portions of the show — like an embarrassed middle-schooler going through the motions in gym class.
Still, I can see why the show was popular. Better than maybe any comics adaptation I’ve seen, the show does capture the excitement of those early stories. Seventies camp isn’t exactly analogous to Moulton’s blend of zany innocence/kinkiness, but the two aren’t completely divorced either. Lynda Carter is a charismatic actor, and the show always takes care to make Wonder Woman the hero; the appeal to girls is pretty clear. Especially, I must say, in the transformation scenes. The spinning-change from Diana Prince to Wonder Woman is more Shazam than Moulton, but it has an exuberance and a visual punch that I think is very true to Moulton’s original conception. The sense that girls can vertiginously grasp hold of power, and that the results will be, not dangerous or horrible, but exciting, fun, and heroic….I don’t see how Moulton could have disapproved of that.
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And I do think that’ll end my Wonder Woman blogging for at least a bit; I’ve got some other projects I need to work on. But thanks to everyone who commented or stopped by. And I may pick it up again — I still want to check out Gail Simone’s work, and would like to read more of the O’Neill/Sekowsky run. So never say never!
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Update: This series is now continued with a post about the WW animated movie here
