Abstract
We are in an oblong ballroom lit by candle and fire, where soldiers in grey uniforms mingle with colourful patches of evening-gowned ladies. One of the latter is dressed in an antique Greek-style turquoise piece that lets her move freely while her fine muscles, oily skin and mahogany hair attract all eyes, and the cameras too. The view from behind, of her advancing to meet a high-ranking military commander, is at once childishly funny and deeply reassuring: tucked in the deeply plunging backline of her gown the minutely carved hilt of a sword of considerable proportions becomes visible.
Diana Prince (played by Gal Gadot) might have been the actual name of a long forgotten female spy in the First World War, who preferred low-heeled shoes and large frocks, masquerading with spectacles if she needed to hide the exquisite beauty that overshadowed everyone when utilized as purposefully as in the described scene. This Diana Prince must have known numerous languages, including Ottoman and Sumerian, and definitely must have sympathized with the suffragettes to the degree that she even embarked on a demonstration armed with her decorated sword and matching shield. If someone had been there to film her proceeding through a revolving door she would definitely highlight the amusing contradictions between an athletic woman’s body characterized by unfaltering deportment, her highly symbolic, rather heavy armour and the constantly moving revolving door. As it happens, this is an actual scene in the 2017 film Wonder Woman, with the viewer aware that she watches several characters layered one over the other: the iconic and stereotypical figure of early 20th-century feminism – the woman yearning for emancipation who must face (un)imaginable obstacles if she persists; the possible yet fictional historical character of Diana Prince, the successful First World War spy; and finally Diana, Princess of Themyscira (the island of the Amazons), who has arrived in London to exterminate Ares, the ancient Greek God of War.
A famous predecessor to Diana Prince advancing through the revolving door is the title character of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 Ninotchka, a Soviet spy and a suffragette embodied by Greta Garbo. In a story also set largely around the First World War, Ninotchka hybridized the already popular and influential, thus iconic, first-wave feminist woman, in its hard-line Soviet variant, with the historically accurate, yet not actual Soviet/enemy female spy. These political connotations achieve hilarious effects. In film (genre) historical terms the continuities between Ninotchka and Diana Prince are self-evident: their naive, idealistic worldview(s) based on rigid principles are subject to humorous treatment by the realistic diegetic outside world. In Patty Jenkins’s direction this is most palpable in the budding love story between Diana, the Amazon and Steve Trevor, the American spy (Chris Pine). Their iconographies are also highly similar, dependent on regulated beauty presented in comfortable clothing, but also hampered by objects such as a heavy portable typewriter for Ninotchka and the shield and sword armour for Diana Prince. Yet Ninotchka does not have a third facet added to the feminist icon and the historically possible character of a female spy, 1 while Diana Prince is also an Amazon warrior with supernatural qualities who goes by the name of Wonder Woman.
Thus one could argue that the Lubitsch creative team placed their bets on the magical powers of a hitherto pathetic, melancholic and elevated Greta Garbo in a first (and last) comical role to generate the pool of energies that the character of Ninotchka needs to feed on in order to acquire mythical, larger-than-actual comedy proportions. In Wonder Woman Gal Gadot evidently cannot rely on the long string of memorable roles that coalesce into a living, pounding star image, so perhaps it is even un-sportswomanlike to relate the power(s) of her performance to the power that Garbo’s Ninotchka acquires from Garbo’s 1931 Mata Hari, 1933 Queen Christina, or 1935 Anna Karenina. However, Gal Gadot has other assets: she is a 2004 Miss Israel winner who added to her repertoire a long list of martial arts skills (Kung Fu, kickboxing, Brazilian Capoeira, Jiu-Jitsu, along with swordsmanship) and blends these into two extended (transmedial) narrative universes as a female action hero. She performed as Gisele in three of the Fast & Furious films (2009, 2011, 2013), perhaps the most popular non-superhero, non-comic book action series made for the movie theatres in the 2000s, and transitioned seamlessly to the DC movie universe in the 2017 superhero team-up Justice League and Wonder Woman, in both films as Wonder Woman. 2
Where does this sketchy comparison lead us? Garbo’s Ninotchka and Gadot’s Diana Prince as Wonder Woman, though of the same sort of active, determined and highly successful – thus ‘feminist’ – character-type, acquire their powers from different imaginary universes. Yet Euro-American film history’s star powers – as concentrated in this case in Garbo’s still influential performance of/as Ninotchka – and global action and fantasy universes’ transmedial powers – as embodied by/in Gadot’s Wonder Woman – are both capable of generating the female and feminist affirmative hero. Still, there is a huge price that must be paid for updating the feminist (and) female affirmative hero for the digital 21st century, 3 and this goes far beyond the simple cultural and geographical othering of Ninotchka as a Russian ice princess wuthering from doctrinal Soviet Union to cosy and sexy Paris. Diana Prince/Wonder Woman/Princess of Themyscira is not simply a creature foreign to us, the audience hidden in the dark, whom we gradually grow to know and then befriend, as was the case with Ninotchka. Wonder Woman is made of clay and brought to life. She is the daughter of Zeus, and she can fly and destroy machine guns with her bare hands, survive mustard gas – leaving behind the feminist utopia and the death of a human lover. In other words, feminism à la Ninotchka is strange, yet compelling, feminism à la Wonder Woman is not of this world, a dream that remains a dream.
Wonder Woman’s most interesting feature is definitely her utter anachronism that is organically blended with her supernatural powers, a constellation that Patty Jenkins’s direction exploits to its maximum. Anachronism and the supernatural are highly dependent upon a strong sense of chronology and the intimacy of what comes as natural. The 2017 Wonder Woman produced by Warner Brothers might have had such an instant success within its global target market avid for female superheroes on screen precisely because it developed this idea in a very consequent manner. Casting Gal Gadot in the title role brought the actuality of a trained soldier to the diegetic world and the experiences of a woman who has been born and is living in a highly tense region where personal and collective losses are internalized components of everyday identities. The role of Ares as performed by British actor David Thewlis – perhaps forever identified with the cynical, self-sufficient male lead of Mike Leigh’s 1993’s Naked – or the role of Antiope, the chief Amazon commander played by Robin Wright – integrate seamlessly within Wonder Woman’s ars poetica of naturally grounded anachronisms. One could cite further acting performances from the film in this respect. These masterful anachronisms are core to the high number of actual locations where the film was shot, including Campania or Salerno standing for the beaches of Themyscira, the Amazon paradise. This is also the case for the material being filmed on 35 mm film and transferred to 2K digital intermediate, while also conforming to the Technicolor colour palette, the most ‘natural’ of cinematic worlds in colour. The production design (headed by Aline Bonetto) that carefully (re)created Amazon sandals and early 20th-century British secretaries’ blouse prints along with worse-than-devil female antagonist Isabel Maru’s hauntingly Eva Braun-like small hat, is always coupled with a historically self-reflexive mode of performance and, consequently, mode of direction. Thus the lower-middle class secretary Etta Candy’s (Lucy Davis) speech style mimics (for example) Emma Thompson’s performance of Australian writer Pamela Travers, as the writer animates the character of her world-famous Mary Poppins in the 2013 film production biopic Saving Mr. Banks (dir. John Lee Hancock), while Isabel Maru’s face mask that hides her cheekbones burnt by acid is less threatening that the actress’s (Elena Anaya) throat-deep mode of whispering her replies.
Even if summarizing the above components of Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman might come across as accidental, they possibly are sufficient to demonstrate that this superhero comic book universe meant for the cinematic screen is multiply anchored to actual geographical, historical, technical and bodily realities. Together with the numerous references to well-known filmic traditions, Wonder Woman is an amazing structure and process that aims at naturalizing its own inherently imaginary nature. Whether we are prone to overlook the stages, sutures and joints that such a procedure rests upon is an altogether different matter. After all, the world-saving, Ares-defeating mission of Wonder Woman is coordinated by jovial Etta Candy who nearly drops the much mentioned sword and shield when she first has to look after it, reminding us that feminism is hard work in the field and on the front.