Wonder Woman (aka Diana Prince, under her civilian guise), the protagonist of William Moulton Marston’s comic books, has a backstory that is eccentric and interesting at the very least, starting from a premise that is manifestly feminist (as Marson himself was an outspoken feminist, who had polyamorous outlooks, and so on): a half-goddess, formed out of clay by Zeus himself, born on an amazon island which is exclusively populated by women, where no man has ever set foot. Despite her mother’s efforts to rein in her powers, Diana discovers them by training alongside the amazons for a presumptive war with Ares, the god of war. In contrast to the eroticized and playful comic books, where Wonder Woman travels to all sorts of bizarre realms (for example, one of them is Grown-Down Land, where children are taking care of the adult, making sure that they’re taking pills that keep them small and obedient), her portrayal in the DC movies (where she is performed by Gal Gadot) is much milder and boringly calculated; in Zack Snyder’s features (Justice League and Batman vs Superman), her episodic appearances lacked a narrative arch which wouldn’t umbilically connect her to some male presence or sheer muscle power. This void was to be partially filled in by a trilogy directed by Patty Jenkins (the filmmaker behind Monster, 2003, in which a transmogrified Charlize Theron changes into a female predator to be able to support her girlfriend): Wonder Woman (2017) and Wonder Woman 1984 (2021), with the last title to follow next year. Anyway, the promise to make away with the standard narrative of male superhero movies isn’t fulfilled due to various reasons (despite the rarity of chances one has to see blockbusters that are directed by women since it’s a product that passed through a male-centric bureaucratic process). There are moments both in Wonder Woman (2017) and WW 1984 where Jenkins allows herself to be scathing – for example, despite Diana Prince’s naivete in the human world (which appears as a cloudy universe ruled by men), she claims that males are requisite to procreation, but not for female pleasure. On other occasions, as I will discuss here, all of these intentions end up as simple false-positive, superfluous declarations, which pale in the face of a convoluted narrative, where it is still the male characters which end up as seeming more glorious.

Georgiana Mușat

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Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.

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