Wonder Woman’s important messages

It’s a great feminist film for children, but will need some decoding, Julie Anne Pattee says.

Wonder Woman is a great feminist film, no doubt about it. But if you’re taking kids to see it, there are a few things you’ll need to chat about if you really want to hammer home its message.

For the first three-quarters of the film, wonder woman, Diana of Thermyscira, is portrayed as naïve, innocent and childlike. She spends most of her onscreen time embodying one the most damaging female stereotypes.

There’s an explanation for this. Of course, it would be totally normal for an Amazon princess to be awestruck by England in 1917. Diana has grown up on an island created by the Greek gods, a paradise where men don’t exist. A handsome pilot leads her away from home and into the First World War, where the bulk of the film unfolds. Her wide-eyed innocence makes perfect sense.

The film’s best lines result from Diana’s bafflement over women’s place in society. At one point, the pilot’s frustrated secretary responds to her endless queries by explaining, “we’re just trying to get the vote.”

Diana is a grown woman, but she’s also a child seeing the world for the first time.

When she sets off on her adventure to the front lines, she dresses up in men’s clothing so she can better perform her balletic, slowmotion kicks in the air. The clothes are a bit too big for her. She resembles a little girl wearing dress-up clothes.

Like many films, Wonder Woman has one thing going on at the plot level and a whole other thing going on in its images. Plots are easily forgotten. But images linger in the backs of our minds and form meanings in our subconscious.

For the bulk of human history, women were seen as children.

Our gender, most feminist scholars now agree, has always been a performance; we act out what it is to be a woman or a man. Little

Wonder Woman is like any young girl today who leaves the safe spaces of home and childhood for the first time.

girls learn how to perform their gender by watching their female role models widen their eyes when they smile, and giggle girlishly when they laugh.

Some of the most iconic female characters of all time have charmed their way into our hearts with their winning combo of innocent naivete and a feisty spirit: Think Anne of Green Gables, Orphan Annie, Shirley Temple and more recently Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The ingenue is still one of the most popular filmic tropes.

For most of the film, Wonder Woman is an old-school heroine. She’s fiercely determined and defiant, like her predecessors. And just like them she’s also a deer caught in the headlights.

Wonder Woman’s bullet-dodging charges across no man’s land and her Matrix-style battle acrobatics probably won’t stick in kids’ minds. They’ve seen action scenes like these hundreds of times before, and they’ve seen female superheroes perform them.

Kids will remember what Diana said when she tasted ice cream for the first time (so cute!). Or what happens when she stupidly tried to do a karate-chop move in old-fashioned women’s clothing (so funny!).

But all is not lost. The film is using the ingenue trope to convey an important message: Wonder Woman doesn’t understand the world that men have created — because it’s not a woman’s world.

Wonder Woman is like any young girl today who leaves the safe spaces of home and childhood for the first time, and confronts customs and conventions that don’t make sense. It is a bewildering experience.

Diana manages to snap out of it. She decides the most important choice you can make is what you what you believe in. It’s a key feminist message; one that will, it is to be hoped, carve a place in children’s hearts.

But in order for it to truly resonate, Diana’s journey from ingenue to battling hero — the journey of the feminist movement itself — will need a bit of decoding.