A Film Of Her Own (Part 2)

The Wonder Woman movie (Warner Brothers) met my expectations and then some. It also satisfied my hope that this character would receive respectful treatment. Among those who should receive credit for this, I think Patty Jenkins, the director, should obviously be mentioned.

Another of my suspicions was confirmed, as well. I already felt that Gal Gadot had good screen presence, but given a decent script, she can also act. Allen Heinberg wrote the screenplay of the story by Zack Snyder, and the script enabled Gadot to show some emotional range as well as wry humor. She also did her own stunts, and was credible in the action sequences. While her physique was not considered by some fans to be muscular enough for this role, I found it interesting that her body type actually wasn’t very far off from that of the original comic book character. I know I held the following panel up as a sexist stereotype last week, but I think it helps to confirm the point I just made.

Additionally, DC Comics seems to have followed the lead of Marvel Comics by redesigning the look of a superhero to resemble the cinematic imagery.

A number of characters paid homage to the Golden Age version of Wonder Woman. Chris Pine did a typically good turn as Steve Trevor…

… and Lucy Davis was cast in a more dignified portrayal of Etta Candy.

As Sir Patrick Morgan, David Thewlis was excellent, and I enjoyed seeing him in the role of a more mature character.

Overall, I thought the movie passed the villain test. Elena Anaya was suitably creepy as Dr. Poison. While a little more one-dimensionally written, the German officer, Lundendorff, was well-acted by Danny Huston. The sequence when he dances with a disguised (well, sort of) Diana Prince is palpably threatening.

Queen Hippolyta is played by Connie Nielsen, and her warrior sister, Antiope, is played by Robin Wright.

Said Taghmaoui, Eugene Brave Rock, and Ewen Bremner (pictured left to right on either side of Chris Pine and Gal Gadot, below) constituted an admirable and rag tag support crew whose characters were surprisingly well-developed for the amount of screen time they were given.

The cast was impressive, and the script and acting were good. Okay, this is fun, so I’ll drag it out for another week.

 

Ancient To Modern: The Strong Man (1)

There is a recurring theme in multiple mythologies. It is that of a man endowed with incredible strength. I’m sorry, ladies, but this concept emerged from male-dominated societies. I’m not talking about what should be – just what was. The nature of the strong man is varied. To explain this, let us examine some examples (sorry for the bizarre alliteration…).

Heracles

 This is his name in Greek mythology (Hercules in Roman mythology; you may have gathered by now that the Romans were borrowers). He is a demigod, the son of Zeus and a mortal woman named Alcmene. His prowess is therefore in between that of a god and a man. Below, he is shown as a child strangling a serpent that was sent to kill him.

Roman marble (2nd Century, A. D.)

But he got bigger…

Farnese Hercules (216 A.D.), Roman copy of an original sculpture by Lysippos.

and did stuff…

Hercules fighting the Nemean lion by Peter Paul Rubens.

… sometimes very bad stuff, sometimes heroic stuff, sometimes a bit of both. He has been shamelessly ripped off by Marvel Comics…

Credit: Marvel Comics

and by DC Comics.

Credit: DC Comics

Just when I thought I was researching a fairly safe topic, I found out that things turned ugly in the DC Universe in the 1980s when he was portrayed as subduing and raping Queen Hippolyta of the Amazons, the mother of Wonder Woman. In this story, the Amazons in general were drugged and sexually assaulted by his men during a banquet of friendship (an attempt at peacemaking) hosted by the gracious Amazons after they had foiled a first attempt at conquest.

I found this out when I was looking for images to include in this post. I stumbled across a rather offensive and salacious illustration which I decided not to use. Why not? Because it’s my site, and I don’t want to. It was glossed-over, sugar-coated violence against women. Such subject matter began to be covered for purposes of realism, but the imagery and plot are unrealistic treatments. The ugly simply isn’t ugly enough. I have issued this warning before about comics and animation being used in this way. This example underscores the concerns I raised in my post, Graphic Mythology: A False Feminism.

Anyway, I read a synopsis or two of the story and looked into its historical background. It was released during an allegedly feminist period in the development of the Wonder Woman series – ironically, a time when artist and writer George Perez was consulting with Gloria Steinem. The extended story line involves revenge, punishment imposed by the gods, repentance, and forgiveness. That’s supposed to be a good turn of events, right? And then there was this…

Hippolyta has a brief romance with her reformed rapist. DC also did this in their critically acclaimed Watchmen in the sequence when Sally Jupiter willingly had a child by the Comedian some time after his unsuccessful attempt at assaulting her. My concern is that the above imagery and plot device (intentionally or not) reinforce the destructive falsehood that women actually like being sexually mistreated by men. Despite their sensationalism and controversy, these are examples of what has become a tired convention. Better stories are out there, waiting to be discovered/imagined.

The DC story I have been picking on from the Wonder Woman series is a very distorted version of the original myth concerning the ninth labor of Heracles in which he was told to take the belt of Hippolyte, which had been given to her by Ares, the god of war. Perhaps this is how the comic version got away with it. If you’ve read much about him, then you also know that Heracles was no Boy Scout.

Though western civilization is derived primarily from a combination of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman influences, the ancient Greeks clearly did not have politically correct morals and ethics when it came to the treatment of women. But I want to emphasize that we are not the ancient Greeks and that we should aspire to something better.

(to be continued…)

Graphic Mythology: Wonder Woman

It’s time to come full-circle.  Since I started this series, enough time has elapsed for me to do some background research on Wonder Woman, a character that I read about only a little when I was a boy. I will date myself by mentioning that I remember the Silver Age of comics when each issue cost only ten cents. That was also my weekly allowance, and I would walk two blocks to Sullivan’s drugstore on the north side of Indianapolis to purchase the latest issue of Superman. Not much of a surprise there, but Wonder Woman was neglected.

There is more material about her than I originally thought. I mentioned in the first post of this series the original date of her release, and I honestly didn’t realize how long she had been around (since 1941). So let’s do the obvious first by going over her backstory. It is based in part on some concepts from Greek mythology.

Wonder Woman by Alex Ross

In 1200 B. C. the Amazons were supposedly created by Greek goddesses as the reincarnated souls of women who had been murdered by men. One soul (the unborn daughter of the first of these women) was “saved back” to be “born”. This happened in the 20th Century when her mother, Queen Hippolyta, was told to mold clay from Paradise Island into the likeness of a baby girl. The daughter, Princess Diana of Themyscira, was endowed by the gods with various powers and traits.

Demeter gives her strength, Athena wisdom (not always evident in later portrayals) and courage, Artemis a hunter’s heart and communion with animals, Aphrodite beauty and a loving heart, Hiesta “sisterhood with fire” (not quite sure exactly what that one means), and Hermes speed and the ability to fly. She is later sent from Paradise Island and into the world as an emissary to mankind. Her secret identity is Diana Prince.

She is allegedly a feminist superhero, but her real world creation is a nuanced story. There is a backstory to the backstory. More next week.