Zack Snyder's Wonder Woman - The Measured Response

Jaime Alexander as Lady Sif
Thor: The Dark Side of the World

This morning, before Zack Snyder tweeted the Wonder Woman photo, Rose Moore wrote an indignant Movie Pilot article about the heroine's costume titled WHAT? Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman is Wearing a SKIRT in Dawn of Justice!?. She is reacting to a "scoop" released earlier this week by JoBlo.com which offers details on Wonder Woman's appearance in the new film: a blue leather skirt, silver bracers, a tiara, and multiple weapons. Moore gets hung up on the idea of the skirt right from the get-go, quoting Michael Wilkinson on character history and design intention and responding with, "What we have instead seems to me a poor excuse to make a female character's costume 'feminine', and to try and emulate the looks of other popular 'warrior women' in film and tv". This is followed by photos of Xena and Sif, and then, "We get it, we get it. Putting a woman in a leather skirt and gauntlets and giving her some weapons means that she is a 'strong woman'. God forbid you dig a little deeper."

Lucy Lawless as Xena
Xena: Warrior Princess

God forbid, I'm going to dig a little deeper.

I've read a lot of material in the past months about the much-lauded Strong Female Character. From the now classic Sophia McDougall article, "I Hate Strong Female Characters", to Tasha Robinson's "Trinity Syndrome" a couple weeks back, many good points have been made about plot relevance, screen time, emotional complexity, and clothing choices. My friend Andrew Dyce wrote a great piece for Screen Rant a few weeks back looking specifically at women in superhero blockbusters, wondering when the makers of these movies are going to stop giving the gals defensive, support-oriented powers that stem from some esoteric energy source, mental instability, or nature, and lamenting the bent in screen adaptation to portray female heroes as burdened and/or corrupted by their power. Jean Grey loses control, becomes the villain. Rogue can no longer have personal contact with loved ones. Mystique suffers from something of an identity crisis. And there's Sif, who may be the only on-screen heroine in this 21st century string of superhero films allowed to revel in her power, even if that power comes de facto with being born Asgardian, but in Moore's books she's just another "popular 'warrior woman'", and cannot be upheld as a point of reference. Neither can Xena, whose television reign was more than a little revolutionary in the area of female characters who could hold their own, alongside shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These characters are improper role models because of their...skirts? Is that all it takes?

Do we consider a female character to be a poor example when they exhibit femininity by design?

The history of Wonder Woman has been beaten to death in the course of Strong Female Character debate. She was written by William Moulton Marston in the 1940s. Marston was a psychologist, the inventor of the polygraph test. He was also fond of bondage, and shared a female lover with his wife. All of this made its way into the character we know as Wonder Woman, an icon of feminine strength and liberty who will tie you to a chair and make you tell the truth. Remove femininity from that equation and you gut the character.

A long list of Strong Female Characters was shared with me a little while ago, and it prompted a lot of sound discussion. A friend of mine chimed in with a thought about much she appreciates the character of Isabelle from the Mortal Instruments books, a character who is deadly when she needs to be, girlish when she wants to be, and loves it all equally. It got me thinking about Buffy, slaying demons in and around her love life, always well-dressed and quippy, and about how often resistance of that girlish nature is used in action cinema as a critical plot point. Hanna tries so hard to relax and be a girl (Hanna), but her training ends up being stronger than that desire. Merida's entire shtick is how much she disdains her role as princess (Brave), similar to our introduction to Arya Stark (Game of Thrones). Hit Girl (Kick Ass) and Buffy may be closest to Isabelle, both very much girlish though maybe not finding their strength in that. Now we have potentially the greatest heroine to grace the silver screen, a woman who stands as an equal among the greatest male figures in her stories, whose power is rooted in her femininity. I refuse to believe that whether she wears a skirt is going to make or break that power.

The other question to emerge from that discussion was the matter of violence. Do Strong Female Characters have to be violent, physically capable women? When Man of Steel came out there was a tendency in online response to cite General Zod's ruthless and beautiful right hand, Faora, as a breath of fresh air for female characters, due to the sheer number of times she was able to punch Superman. Kudos. If combat and aggression have become prerequisites for character strength, then it's worth asking: are we defining strong women by traditional forms of masculine expression? It comes full circle, in a way. When femininity by design is frowned upon, perhaps as sexualized but possibly also as simply "weak", then we turn in the other direction and masculinize our female characters. Add to that the fact that most weaponry through history can be interpreted as phallic: swords, spears, guns, and Buffy's stake "Mr. Pointy", which Joss was sure to get full comedic mileage out of. With all of this comes language of rigidity, pointing, penetration, and the rest. It's a mess of double-entendre which some characters have been able to escape. Xena's signature weapon is a circle; Wonder Woman uses, well, rope and the truth. One way this new Wonder Woman may be able to move us towards a true modern superheroine is by presenting a woman who sees the damage humanity does through violence, and exhibits strength and power along an alternative, constructive path.

I should, I suppose, touch on one last thing, a design element I neglected in my previous piece: the heels. Where, many people are asking, is the pragmatism in wearing high heels with armour? You can't fight in that. To which I feel compelled to respond: she's a demigod who deflects bullets, wielding a sword Hephaestus forged as a gift for her...

...who the f**k are you to tell her she can't wear heels?

Man of Steel was an Inherently Antisemitic Film...Yeah, You Heard Me

Have I got your attention? Excellent :)

Alright. I just finished the first chapter of Harry Brod's book Superman Is Jewish?, and it hit me like a punch. Most people who know anything about the history of comics know that the founders of superherodom, The Greats, were Jews. Lieber (Lee). Kurtzberg (Kirby). Schuster. Siegel. Liebowitz. Eisner...and the list goes on. For a long ways. These guys were geniuses of narrative, every one, and they were all pulling from the stories they'd grown up with. Brod focuses on that influence, particularly in the case of Superman (created by Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel). He wants to come to an understanding of which elements of Jewish culture made their way onto the pages of comics in the late '30s and onward.

The answer is, "Quite a lot of them".

The biggest blow in the first chapter, though, is the recognition of antisemitism in the comics industry. Let's get this straight: when I wrote "antisemitism", you thought "Nazi". Yup. The antisemitism we're addressing here is significantly milder, though no less a cultural crime. It's more akin to an iconoclasm than a holocaust. It's a whitewashing of Judaism and its influences to make this particular brand of media more palatable to North America at large, and it has changed our beloved characters over the decades to a point where are are almost unrecognizable as the heroes they once were coughnewfiftytwocough...sorry, where was I? Ah, right. I'm not complaining, I swear. I like these heroes. After all, their altered selves are the only ones I've ever known. I'm okay with the changes, but we need to recognize that those changes happened. These aren't my thoughts; I'm getting pretty much all of this from Brod, and passing it on to you, paraphrased. However, Zach Snyder hadn't just made a Superman blockbuster when Brod was writing, so...

Why was he created? Well, he was written by two slightly-built nerdy Jewish guys in New York in the 1930s. That should tell you everything right there. Two young men who are cultural outcasts by birth, who parents set out to escape persecution and find a promised land of sorts, who wound up working the runt-end of the New York publication industry. Awesome. These guys create a story about the man that every boy wishes he was: a moral straight-edge, powerful, handsome...and then they write a flipside for him. They stick themselves in there as an "alter ego", Clark Kent, the little guy. There's a lot to unpack there...but that's not what were here for.

The basics of the Superman story are this: the planet Krypton is about to be destroyed. An alien couple sends their only child off in a small vessel to save his life, and he grows up among a people not his own. He eventually becomes a champion of those people, but disguises himself as one of them so as to live in secret. That's it, in a nutshell. So...antisemitic? Yup. Let's take a quick look at the Bible, or Bibles: the Jewish and the Christian scriptures. Christian students are used to reading Bible stories about heroic figures, like David facing down Goliath, but Jewish students know better. Take the Book of Genesis, where it all starts. It's the multi-generational saga of a dysfunctional family struggling with rape, murder, incest, lies, and theft. And then there's the stuff they do to others. The Jews have no illusions about the flawed nature of their biblical forefathers. But centuries of Christian tradition have sanctified and sanitized those stories, and the characters are looked upon as saints and moral exemplars. Superman didn't start off as a goody two-shoes. He had a little bit of bad boy in him in the '30, threatening to drop people off buildings if they didn't answer his questions, flaunting his powers and operating entirely on his own authority. Nowadays he comes gift-wrapped in an American flag. When Siegel and Schuster were in charge it was clear that the real man in the story was Superman, and Clark Kent was a puny personification of the way he saw us. But now, well, watch the movies. Where does Superman get his moral code from? Martha and Jonathan Kent, his earth-parents. DC even created a heroic past for the family, an ancestry that had the Kents sheltering Harriet Tubman once upon a time. Clark was in good hands,good, all-American hands. I'll quote Brod on this next bit:

"With each wrapping of the flag, the Superman/Clark Kent character moved up a level in what medieval Christian thinkers called the Great Chain of Being, the hierarchical order of the cosmos. Over the years, as Superman's powers increased so that he came to achieve near divinity, Clark became more humanized, even allowed to be heroic in his own right, gaining greater humanity. Over the long term a Pinocchio-like transformation turned Clark from a wooden figure of ridicule into a "real boy"."(pg.15)

And so we ended up with shows like Smallville, made possible because Clark was now a real person. Crazy. But it doesn't end there. I'm going back to Brod for this next bit; I don't trust my paraphrasing.

"By the time we reached the 2006 Superman Returns film that brought Superman back to the big screen after a long hiatus, Superman's de-Jewification had proceeded so far that he was not only the ultimate all-American, he was even being claimed as a Christ figure. Another nice Jewish boy was being resurrected as a Christian god. The Warner Brothers/DC Comics publicity machine launched a two-pronged campaign before the film's release, one aimed at the usual action-adventure crowd, the other aimed at conservative Evangelical Christians and flying under the general cultural radar, specifically positioning Superman Returns as the next Christian blockbuster, hoping to cash in on the trend following The Passion of the Christ and The Chronicles of Narnia." (Pg.17)

So, that got crazy. I didn't know about that ad campaign until I read this two days ago, and I can't help but think that Schuster and Siegel must have rolled in their graves. You've probably all seen that 2006 Superman film. It has this "father becomes the son and son becomes father" motif running through it, and then Supes gets stabbed in a very iconic location...not coincidence. Also note, Superman's trip from Krytpon to Earth was originally a story about an infant being saved fro his dying world. It has become, in both the 2006 movie and now in 2013's Man of Steel, a tale of a father sending his son to save us. We have a messiah, the writers tell us, and his name is Superman. And now, in conclusion, let's return to that opening statement.

I say again: Man of Steel was an inherently antisemitic film. You've read the history, brief and drastically abridged but accurate, of the character's development. Snyder made a movie tailored to a modern audience, building on the character as we now know it and therefore the character as it has been Americanized. Half the movie was conversation between Jonathan and Clark about how to live a moral life with great power under your belt, with Kevin Costner playing a flawless all-American dad. I loved that movie. It felt like someone had finally got Superman right, and I watched it twice in theatres. But let us face the truth here. Man of Steel was the single thickest coat of whitewash yet applied to the Jewish immigrant's fantasy that was Superman. We have all but lost sight of the original character under layers of antisemitic sanitization that we didn't even know were there. So, there. That's my spiel. Superman was never meant to be Jesus.

He was meant to be Moses.