Now it’s official: Wonder Woman will be introduced in the Man of Steel sequel, alongside Ben Affleck’s Batman. And I stand by what I said before: Zack Snyder getting to be the one to introduce Wonder Woman on the big screen is a terrible idea.
https://gizmodo.com/gal-gadot-cast-as-wonder-woman-in-batman-vs-superman-1476488178
I just don’t think Snyder can
make Wonder Woman the compelling hero she needs to be. And here’s why.
Who is Wonder Woman?
In
a lot of ways, Wonder Woman has the same problem as Superman. She’s a
product of a much simpler time in comics storytelling, with some
internal contradictions that are harder to ignore now.
In the case
of Superman, he’s an alien visitor to our planet, with near-godlike
powers and a mission to save and inspire humans. His presence ought to
freak us out, and maybe in real life everyone would agree with Lex
Luthor that he’s a scary alien. The Man of Steel spends a lot of its running time grappling with this conundrum, before handwaving it away.
In
the case of Wonder Woman, it’s even worse, though — she’s an Amazon
warrior, trained to kill. But she’s been sent to the outside world,
where men are still in charge, to teach us about love and peace. She
ought to have a lot more problems adjusting to a world of male authority
figures, and people might be kind of terrified of a mythological
warrior woman on the rampage.
Lots of people have tried to translate Wonder Woman to live-action,
and the only time it’s worked was with Lynda Carter’s sublimely campy
1970s version. Even Joss Whedon’s Angelina Jolie-inspired version doesn’t sound like it would have been that great.
There have been two scrapped TV pilots — David E. Kelley’s revoltingly convoluted version, and Amazon, the Allen Heinberg pilot where she eats ice cream and makes orgasmic noises.
People seem to have a hard time getting their heads around this
character, and boiling her down to a simple idea — Heinberg’s version
was a lot closer to the classic character, in spite of the weird “fish
out of water” comedy elements.
There are basically two ways to go with Wonder Woman:
1) You can embrace the fact that she’s an Amazon and tell mythological stories about Greek Gods and monsters.
This is the approach that Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang have mostly
taken in her solo comic since the New 52 continuity started up, and it’s
been well-received and has boosted the character’s popularity. The
trouble is, this approach probably doesn’t work as well in a
shared-universe context where she’s sharing the screen with Batman and
Superman — which is why Azzarello’s Wonder Woman seems so different from the version appearing concurrently in the Justice League comic.
2) You can handwave the “Amazon” thing away and go with “generic female badass whose origin is told in one scene.” This
is probably what’ll happen, realistically, when Wonder Woman is
introduced as a supporting character in Batman Vs. Superman. We’ll be told she’s an Amazon from an island of women
warriors, or we’ll glimpse it in a flashback, but there won’t be time to
dwell on what this means. Or we’ll fall back on the idea that Wonder
Woman’s mission is to spread love and truth, making her the “nice”
character — or the superego, in contrast to Batman’s id and Superman’s
ego.
(Or she’ll just become Superman’s love interest on screen. Which, luckily, they already have Lois Lane for that.)
The
big problem, though, is what motivates Wonder Woman? Why does she want
to leave her perfect island in the first place, and what makes her want
to spend her time fighting Darkseid or other villains? Why does she want
to hang out with Superman and Batman? What are her goals, and how does
this superhero stuff help her reach them? I never really liked her
becoming an “ambassador” who gives speeches and writes self-help books,
because I never understood why a trained warrior was doing that.
As
hard as it is to give Wonder Woman an origin that makes sense to modern
readers, it’s even harder to show her as part of a shared universe,
without turning her into a one-dimensional character who’s either “a
warrior woman,” or “sweetness and light.”
The Zack Snyder Problem
And that’s why Zack Snyder taking on Wonder Woman — or, more broadly, anyone recreating Wonder Woman in the same style as Man of Steel — is potentially a nightmare.
After watching 300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch and Man of Steel,
there’s plenty that I admire about Snyder’s film-making. He’s great at
creating arresting visuals, and he has a deep appreciation for the
grammar of comic-book storytelling, creating splash pages on the screen.
But he has a problem with capturing real emotions, as opposed to surfaces, something the cold and depthless Man of Steel
confirms. And he especially has a problem with female characters,
because his love for pulp imagery leads him to explore women as fetish
objects. It almost doesn’t matter if, as some have discussed, Snyder is
trying to turn this fetishization on its head or show how it’s harmful
— it still tends to dominate.
Take Watchmen
— arguably the reason why Snyder’s film fails to come together as a
story isn’t because he’s lacking the graphic novel’s ending, and he
doesn’t have anything strong enough to replace it. The real problem
comes earlier: the crux of the story, in many ways, is the moment when
Laurie Juspeczyk realizes the Comedian is her father. Which in turn
convinces Dr. Manhattan to return to Earth from Mars.
This moment
should be powerful and emotional, and tie together all of the
complicated plot threads and themes about these characters and their
histories that we’ve spent so much time learning about. Instead, in
Snyder’s film, it doesn’t really work because we don’t care that much
about Laurie, and she doesn’t have enough agency as a character.
Over in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, there’s a pretty great explanation
of how the movie version of Laurie is a weaker character than the
graphic novel version, in large part due to the drive to fetishize her
instead of understanding her. A couple of choice quotes:
Snyder
uses frequent cuts and tracking shots during the sex scene to highlight
and fetishize Laurie’s body, destabilizing her erotic power, which
should be present in the scene, and instead favoring empty titillation.
Laurie’s thigh-high boots are given extensive coverage by the camera as
it tracks up her leg, all but conferring more attention on her costume
than on her actual body. She does not wield the erotic power; only her
costume wields it…
Although both [version] show how Laurie
learns the truth about her father, the Comedian, while with Jon on Mars,
Jon becomes the expository mouthpiece in the film, telling her about
the familial connections rather than letting her come to them via
epiphany, as Moore and Gibbons construct the scene.
In Man of Steel,
meanwhile, Lois Lane actually comes off pretty well in the first hour
when she’s hunting Superman — it’s only after she meets up with Supes
that she starts to lose a lot of her agency and becomes coded as his
sidekick/love interest. Even then, she gets to help move the plot
forward and plays a key role in the resolution.
On the other hand, though, Man of Steel’s
other major female character is Faora, who’s very much a one-note “sexy
badass” character whose main affect is smirking and talking smack.
She’s basically Zod’s right-hand henchwoman, but most of her screentime
is spent dwelling on the unveiling of her face, over and over, as her
cool helmet turns transparent to reveal her weirdly seductive smile.
And then there’s Sucker Punch. After years of exploitation films, I have no problem with watching women in schoolgirl outfits fight dragons and zombies. But Sucker Punch’s asylum-dwellers/strippers/superheroes are — like Laurie in Watchmen and Clark in Man of Steel —
all surface. There’s no way to root for them, and it’s hard to care
what happens to them beyond feeling a vague sense of excitement that
monsters are being fought. And the movie’s structure turns everything
into a metaphor for a metaphor for a metaphor, increasing our sense of
distance from the actual narrative, which is largely about
victimization. (Yes, I know one of them gets away.)
For what it’s worth, my personal objection to Sucker Punch was never political — it’s more that Sucker Punch is a boring film, because it’s slow and I don’t care about any of the characters.
Snyder was clearly keeping a lot of his stylistic tics in check for Man of Steel,
but now that he’s got a huge success under his belt, I worry that he’s
going to take that as license to go nuts the next time around.
We need to root for Wonder Woman
In any case, Wonder Woman is a character who has a
complicated problem — she’s a Golden Age character whose origins
barely make sense today, and it’s hard to identify with her motivations
for traveling amongst us and fighting our battles for us.
And
there’s a simple solution: make her a character that we naturally root
for. Show her caring about stuff, so we care about her. Show us how she
struggles to do the right thing, and why. Give her a heart and soul,
that audiences can latch on to. Unfortunately, these are exactly the
things Zack Snyder seems to have had the hardest time doing.
Given
how important Wonder Woman is, I don’t think we’re going to see Zack
Snyder turning her into a stripper. He’s going to be under a lot of
pressure to make her into someone who can sell action figures. But I
also don’t think he’s going to be able to give her what she really
needs: a new lease on life.
This io9 flashback originally appeared, in slightly different form, back in June.
