"Amazon. Princess. Goddess."
I recently had the privilege of being given the opportunity to see a documentary called WONDER WOMEN! THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICA'S SUPERHEROINES. Before anything else, I want to take a moment to thank the people who created the movie for giving me the opportunity to review it for FOUR-COLOR PRINCESSES.
WONDER WOMEN analyzes the role women have played in heroic media from the first appearance of WONDER WOMAN through to the present day, using a combination of historical details and personal anecdotal stories, animated comic book imagery and film clips, comic shop environments and on-the-street interviews.
What emerges is a portrait that shows how far the image of the heroic woman has come in American media, and how little progress has still been achieved - and, sadly, how far those original heroic characters have fallen and how little has been done to lift them back to their prior positions of prominence, and how the hyper-sexualized imagery of the female hero has been resurrected over and over by male-dominated Hollywood.
I have to say I've rarely seen a documentary that made me smile and then gave me a stress headache in the span of a single minute. In one scene, I felt an incredible surge of emotion as I listened to a young girl describe what Wonder Woman and heroism mean to her - an eternal strength that comes in the form of a total refusal to surrender oneself to opposing forces that want to destroy you.
Later, I cringe as I listen to an adult man dressed in a STAR WARS Stormtrooper costume remark that the purpose of Wonder Woman isn't for women at all, but rather for young men going through puberty.
It's a callous moment that's jarring in its total ignorance and outright insensitivity to what the character means, but it does remind us as viewers of an important fact that's not dwelt upon in the film but is still important: every single empowering image of women that exists anywhere will be viewed at some point by some man as an image of sexual titillation.
It's an ugly, repulsive thought, of course.
It's ugly not just because it illustrates the total dismissal of everything WONDER WOMAN stands for in fighting against the masculine quest for dominance; it also shows that the masculine voices closest to the material see her as material to power their fantasies of conquest rather than to consider what the character actually means to people who actually care about the character, or any woman who's also a hero to them.
It shows, as does the documentary as a whole, that the greatest women can achieve the greatest goals and a man will still look them up and down and remark "Hot."
Listening to interviews with some remarkable women, including Gloria Steinem, what emerges to me as an individual viewer is a portrait that the men who control the power of the media machine see women's mere existence as an annoyance they'd prefer not to have to "deal" with in the long run. Ms. Steinem tells a very brief anecdote in the film about talking to the powers-that-be at DC COMICS.
Wonder Woman had been denigrated to the point of being unrecognizable to her fans by the publisher and Steinem and others had rallied to return the character to her empowered, feminist roots.
What Ms. Steinem expresses so simply through this anecdote is, to me, the principle message of the entire film's first half, which illustrates how little regard male minds hold a figure that was - and for some, still is - a hugely radical and empowering image.
Even Lynda Carter, who starred in the highly-succesful WONDER WOMAN television show, reveals through her interviews the chauvinistic attitudes held by the male-controlled television industry in the time. In the hindsight of a world that's given us BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS, the remarks she discusses may seem a little absurd - especially given what we know about how vocal and enthusiastic the fans of those later shows have proved to be - but they illustrate the outright dismissive attitudes of men toward women and that uch an attitude has often been, can still be and will sadly continue to be.
That dismissive attitude is shown to be so prevalent in the way it appears again and again, below the surface of the main narrative of the documentary, to the point where you realize how little the men of media want to even see women in any light other than as a sexual object or the victim of violence.
It's as troubling as it is obvious, but the documentary handles this topic in such a way as to illustrate it even to people who might not be aware of it while carefully avoiding the pedantic language that bogs down most documentaries as having some kind of vast agenda.
And the film does have an agenda, to be sure.
And it's certainly one that will be seen as insidious to some.
My interpretation of that agenda is that the film is encouraging girls to do some pretty radical things: read, make music, make movies, participate in sports, write, draw, think, create, be brave, be courageous, find heroes.
I loved the way the film animated brief moments from the oldest WONDER WOMAN comic books, with people vocalizing the dialogue. The reason
I loved it was because the film showed these images of incredibly powerful Amazon warriors, but used the voices of younger girls to read the dialogue.
As these children read these words while images of broken bonds and obstacles overcome appear onscreen, the agenda of the film is encapsulated - the film is telling its audience that the girls of today are the women of tomorrow who could be Wonder Women, themselves, but who will have to face incredible uphill battles to achieve even rights we take for granted today, because that's how the cycle has worked in the past.
But the film doesn't so much encourage people to fight this as to leave it in the dust. The second half of the film carefully utilizes clips from more modern material to illustrate that the agenda of the film is to suggest women leave men to this cycle of their endless work to dismiss women, and in so doing find their own outlets for legitimate empowerment.
The film rightly observes that any efforts by women to gain strength will be attacked or co-opted by men if men are heavily involved in the process, so it suggests women create their own path. I admired this tactic of the film's second half because it follows my own line of reasoning on this matter, but at the same time this caused me to view it all-the-more critically, to ensure my personal bias wasn't bringing me to enjoy the film more than I might as a less-affected observer might be.
Were these stories of women profoundly changed and affected by Wonder Woman as a character - and a concept - more enjoyable to me because of my own story? Ultimately, it was a short vignette with a woman named Carmela Lane, shown in the image directly below this paragraph, who helped me realize a crucial point about this.
What Carmela's segment made me realize is that the joy we all get out of this character - or the dismissive annoyance, for some - is ultimately what the film's unified theory is: strong women affect us all, whether we want to see them and whether we don't, and those effects are why these women need to continue to appear - to inspire, to enrage, to demand change, to be seen as an enemy.
These characters mark us, the way Carmela's tattoo does. No matter how trivial or unimportant they seem, they're burned into the American culture, even if they're sometimes covered up. Some see them as artistic, while others see them the way they'd see a scar. But they're still there, waiting to be uncovered for those with the courage to wear them proudly - to wear the marks of what it means to seek feminine justice, to wear them as either tattoos or scars, proudly displayed or shamefully hidden. Ultimately, the decision of how these images emerge IS up to US, so it's not a bias to feel that pride, myself, because that's what those images mean to me. I think that's the point of the whole movie.
This is a film every woman who's ever looked out the window and thought about being a superhero should see. It's a film I want to make every man who bemoans the existence of superheroic women at my local comic shop. It's a film that I think is especially important for a younger audience, because it serves as an excellent primer about the struggles women have had in the media without being dry or overstated. I think it should be on kids' channels like Nickelodeon in the later hours meant for the 11-16 audience. I think it should be shown to people who commit violence against women.
I think those who understand what it means to be a woman and crave heroes will feel a sense of camaraderie for the profiled individuals and the stories told. I think those who don't understand may possibly get the beginning of an idea of what we're going through with this film.
I know that men don't often feel the same connection we feel toward our heroes, because we have to search for those marks on culture. Male society works very hard to cover them up, to demand they hide themselves or to burn them off the face of history. So, when we find our heroic women, they become a part of us, in the same way as is discussed in a clip from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER in the film that hits a major issue in what I believe is the future for the feminist movement, that it's time to stop fighting the battles established as acceptablefor us to fight by men and find our own tattoos to mark the symbols of what we believe to be important, discover our own symbols, our own scars that we can hold up to the light and say that this is who we are and we get to decide what fight we're willing to fight for.
When we all actually do that, we're all Wonder Women.
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