Ronald Tiersky
July 2017
“Wonder Woman on Third Ave. & 60th -- across from Bloomingdale’s”
Ronald Tiersky, July 12, 2017. 2hrs. 21 mins. Category: fantasy
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As ever trying to keep up with the culture, I saw the new movie, “Wonder Woman,” at the Cinema 123 in Manhattan, which is, at Third Ave. & 60th, indeed across the street from Bloomingdale’s.
The metaphor is simultaneously ridiculous and sublime.
Ridiculous: a lightning-fast super hero caught for a few hours in the Upper East Side human condition.
Why Bloomingdale’s? The sublime: When Wonder Woman first arrives in WWI London from her secret Amazon-ruled island homeland in the Mediterranean, she’s taken shopping (at Harrods?) for chic clothes so she’ll ‘blend in’. She tried on, says a secretary, ‘about twenty outfits,’ exiting the emporium like a dark-haired Catherine Deneuve in that famous photo where the French actress wears a flat gypsy riding hat.
Wonder Woman (WW) is played by an Israeli actress, Gal Gadot. From the looks of her she’s a sabra, a descendent of the first Israeli generations born on the kibbutz in the 1940s-1950s. Word to the wise: you don’t want to mess with sabras. Ditto Wonder Woman.
There’s a bit of controversy about an Israeli playing a beloved American cartoon character. But Gadot does a credible impersonation of a Real American Woman. (She had an earlier role in “Superman vs. Batman”.) Her English is slightly accented American-cosmopolitan, with a bit of exasperated Valley Girl intonation, viz., ‘Why don’t they understand that war is evil?!’ Cosmopolitanism is further emphasized in that she looks like a combination of Melania Trump and Ashley Judd. WW is not only camp but Trump camp.
In an ideal world, if the character Wonder Woman needed an Israeli actress it might have been Golda Meir. Meir was an Israeli war prime minister (1969-74), foreign minister during the 1967 War and in charge during the 1973 war. “Golda” was feared by most she met—men especially—the “iron lady” of Israeli politics.
Meir was born in Kiev, her early years spent in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where her family had arrived in 1904, before Golda then re-emigrated with her husband to Israel in 1921. In other words, a certain kind of cosmopolitanism personified. But Meir, a warrior queen if ever there was one, would have failed Hollywood’s fantastic looks criterion. She could care less. So Gadot it is.
“Wonder Woman” is a pastiche of clichés. The enemy is the Germans, as it was in the 1950s comic book stories. There is an evil Aries, God of War, named Ludendorff. WW believes, naively, that if she kills Ludendorff, the God of War, World War I and its senseless slaughter will suddenly stop. She does but it doesn’t.
A second cliché is WW’s romantic war-fighting pilot, Colonel Steve Trevor. He’s played by Chris Pine doing a mild impersonation of Harrison Ford who would have been perfect for the part in his Indiana Jones hat and his look of either heartburn or cocky half-grin. But Ford himself has become too old for Indy epics.
Trevor gets Wonder Woman into the fight against the Germans when, in the opening scene, he crash lands on the Amazon’s island and she pulls him out of the water. Her curiosity is piqued. Is this what is called a “man”? Amazon society has no men, the women are created by dangerous liaisons of women and pagan gods.
There’s a lot of Indy banter thrown in, especially sexual innuendo. The second scene finds WW coming upon the back-on-his-feet Steve stepping naked out of his bath. She looks at him (again, with curiosity), asking whether men are all like him. He replies, looking a bit sheepish, that he’s a little larger than most.
There’s also some pretty wonderful Woody Allen/Diane Keaton psycho-babble. In the small-sized Viking style boat they’re sailing from the hidden island to London (how far could it be?), the issue is whether Steve/Indy/Woody ought—is it ethically justifiable?—sleep next to her. Steve/Indy/Woody says that, outside the marriage bond it’s probably a no-no. But she lures him in anyway. Then, after some gentle teasing, turns on her side and nods off all modesty preserved. Steve is, as would have been Indy, or Bogey with Bacall, satisfactorily, smilingly perplexed.
Gadot seems to have three looks in her acting repertoire. One is, head suddenly tilted, big eyes either quizzical or amused/bemused. (Perhaps she learned this one from Spock and/or Data on Star Trek). The second is innocent rising passion, eyes dewy, fixed fiercely on her human-man Steve. The third is the warrior’s bumble bee intensity heading into battle, leaping tall buildings at a single bound, wielding her shield, sword and golden lariat.
The Amazon women’s army, the home team, is a horseback horde that made me think of Alexander the Great’s Companions. When the Germans attack the island in an amphibious landing such as was made at Omaha Beach on D-Day, WW’s mother, the Queen Amazon, leads a fearsome bow-and-arrow-lance-sword-tiara charge against German guns. The Amazons win, though with heavy casualties. The battle has some of them flying off cliffs artistically on ropes, recalling the Woman Warriors in the renowned Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s recent flop, “The Great Wall”.
What else is worth saying about this film?
All the cliché conflicts are predictably resolved. The Germans are defeated. Aries/God of War/Ludendorff is killed by WW herself, sword planted firmly in his chest. Irony however: Ludendorff is not the real God of War. The real God of War turns out to be the British prime minister, whom WW had thought sincerely wanted an armistice. She blasts him off too.
The presumably evil German female scientist—most renowned inventor of chemical weapons gasses in the world, whose disfigured face is a replica of Phantom of the Opera—is granted mercy rather than killed by WW. The implication seems to be that, as in Phantom, a disfigured face can drive one to evil, especially women. This character is another cliché: it’s the Lotte Lenya character in the James Bond films.
The inevitable this-is-it-folks, the message, ends the movie. WW, dressed in civilian clothes, sitting at her desk, typing notes into her Notebook (did the story really jump 100 years?), reflecting on all that has happened. She comes to the implacable conclusion: ‘I finally learned that only love can conquer war.’ Q.E.D.
Now that she’s got this straight, she has her mission in life. She’ll not return to the Amazon Island but remain in regular human society ‘protecting those who cannot protect themselves’.
Thus, the inevitable sequels are prepared. A brand is born, just as the first Wonder Woman comic book prepared all those that followed, which almost all of us 1950s kids read so avidly. By comparison, Superwoman never had WW’s charisma. She was, so to speak, a mere cartoon character compared to Wonder Woman.
Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman. Who could have asked for anything more?
Truth be told, I squirmed all the way through after the first fifteen minutes. This movie is not aimed at my demographic. But it is aimed at many of even my age group who loved the original Wonder Woman, graduated to Playboy Magazine and maybe Penthouse, never got on the tamer track to Vanity Fair, The Economist and The New York Review of Books.
There’s a nagging soft porn quality to this movie. The buxom Lynda Carter first recreated the character as a TV series in the 1970s and all men were in admiration. Does Wonder Woman’s breast-plate really need to be so form-fitting? Well, it was drawn that way in the comics, in the fifties.
Wonder Woman had a huge first weekend box office. Since its release a few months ago it has earned over $3 billion on a $149 million budget. This is beyond even Goldman Sachs territory.
I wanted to escape the theater but couldn’t bear to abandon ship. Why? I kept thinking of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the movie a few years ago about a young woman’s bondage in which being held in thrall by a misguided, once-abused man becomes the dialectical recipe for her self-liberation. Bondage, properly resented, begets freedom. (My review of this film was titled, “Cinderella in whips and chains.” Anyone interested will find it on my website, www.ronaldtiersky.com.)
Here, a pure-bred Amazon chooses our world’s imperfections over the uncomplicated moral life of an all-female hidden island.
Wonder Woman thus has a Pinocchio quality. Just as Pinocchio becomes a real boy, WW the Amazon Princess becomes a semi-real regular human woman by remaining in human society, although she still has—thank God—superpowers. She’s discovered that Amazon morality is naive, that ending war permanently is an idealistic fantasy (like the movie as a whole), and that human character is fatally flawed, thus she embraces a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American Way.
She’s also discovered human men, which implicates her in the Book of Genesis.