Wonder Woman, weaponised
THE hit movie Wonder Woman stages a clever sight gag when our heroine infiltrates a gala held by a hated villain while wearing an evening gown that exposes the hilt of the battle sword she carries on her back. Partygoers are oblivious to the weapon.
But those of us who were weaned on the comic books of the 1950s and ’60s recognised it right away as a sign that the filmmakers had discarded the original conception ofWonderWoman as an easygoing avenger who pledged not to kill even as she battled abject evil.
This weaponised posture brings a welcome edginess to a 75-year-old comic book idol who maintained a squeaky clean rectitude while trapped in a succession of conceptual cages that writers and editors fashioned for her. The mistreatment she experienced at the hands of the men who dominated the comic book business in the 1940s echoed the trials that real women endured as they struggled to find places in the world of work.
Wonder Woman’s creator, the psychologist William Moulton Marston, viewed her as a propaganda tool in the struggle for women’s rights. As the historian Jill Lepore explains in The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Marston drew heavily on the philosophies of the women’s suffrage and reproductive rights movements as he plotted out his story. He settled on an Amazon heroine who hails from an island where women had lived without men since ancient times. She moves to the United States to fight for peace, justice – and equal rights for women.
Marston appealed to young men by dressing Wonder Women as a 1940s pinup girl, with a red bustier, blue underwear and kinky, knee-high boots. He shaped her temperament to answer critics who were beginning to view comics as a source of violence, delinquency and moral rot. His Wonder Woman hated guns, and her battle gear consisted of golden bracelets that deflected bullets and a magical lariat that could force bad guys to tell the truth. WonderWoman
Marston was fixated on bondage. As the Lepore book points out, every comic book in which Wonder Woman appeared included scenes with her “chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered and manacled”. As a Wonder Woman editor noted, Marston’s conception of strong femininity encompassed the dissonant notion that women should revel in male domination.
Introduced in 1941, Wonder Woman became hugely popular very quickly. A year later, she became the first female superhero to get her own comic book title and crashed the Justice Society of America, a boys’ club that included Superman, Batman and Green Lantern. (Instead of becoming a full partner, she settled for the role of secretary.)
Celebrity made her an even bigger target for the zealots who viewed the comics industry as the fount of all evil. In the ’50s, for example, congressional hearings elevated the crackpot theories of the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who seemed especially vexed that comics publishers were allowing Wonder Woman to compete on an equal footing with men. The witch hunt against the comics coincided with the widespread expulsion of women from the postwar workforce and the persecution of gay people in federal government.
Fearing a backlash, publishers submitted voluntarily to a repressive code that ruled out pathbreaking content. Words like “horror”, “crime” and “terror” were limited, and plotlines had to promote “the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage”.
It was forbidden to even hint at illicit sexual relationships. Homosexuality was out of the question.
Even before the hearings, publishers had adopted policies that killed some superheros outright and bled the vitality out of others. The pressure to churn out plain vanilla characters and cornball moral rectitude was especially debilitating to franchise players like Superman and Batman. They were soon deemed square by younger, hipper readers, and they are still struggling to shake off that legacy. They were sitting ducks in the ’60s when the upstart Marvel Comics company started pumping out morally ambiguous heroes who embraced an inner nastiness and didn’t really give a damn what other characters thought.
Wonder Woman, too, had been softened and diminished in a number of ways. She had become by turns a fashion model, a baby sitter, an actress and a lonely hearts advice columnist. At one point, the publisher even ditched her trademark boots for shoes that resembled ballet slippers. The resurgent feminism of the late ’60s probably rescued Wonder Woman. DC Comics realised it needed a more modern character. Her love life became more interesting as did her fights (as when she punched out Batman), and over time she became the kick-ass figure we know today, growing fully into her legacy as the daughter of the Greek god Zeus.
The new film capitalises on this legacy, and strikes a cathartic note with female moviegoers in particular. What’s remarkable is that it took so long to create a bigbudget movie for one of the most popular comic book characters in the history of the medium.