Not the hero feminism merits

First, a truth about storytelling that begs repetition: true character is revealed by choices made in stressful situations. The more insurmountable the stress, the more the choices made in those moments reveal character.

And it is on this elemental premise that Wonder Woman fails.

Because in this film, Wonder Woman (Diana Prince for the moment) doesn’t have a lot of informed choice-making to do. She barely knows anything at all — who she is fighting, or whom she is fighting for. She doesn’t know the extent of her powers. And, on all three counts, she doesn’t bother to find out.

She’s too happy fighting to care.

Armed with fighting skills, a garbled half-story about her purpose and a long sequence of good fortune, she manages to do what she set out to do. Stumbling and happenstancing to victory.

I pointed this out to a fellow-feminist on Facebook, suggesting that Prince didn’t have as much agency as she deserved. That she was steered from one event to another by other characters. That she didn’t deliberate for a moment. Choose. Think. Decide. Or seek to know.

This fellow-feminist was appalled. She questioned my motivations. Someone else interjected by questioning my feminism.

It was as if thinking lesser of the film was antithetical to feminism. So this time I will proceed cautiously. Present my argument more systematically. Starting from the beginning, and work my way to the end.

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As a child, Prince lives among her mother’s all-female tribe of fighters — the Amazons. And it is the duty of the Amazons to destroy the god of war, Ares. This purpose is accorded by her father, Zeus.

It is only at this time — as a child — that Prince displays real agency. Despite her mother’s unhappiness, she chooses to learn to fight. She chooses as her mentor Antiope, general of the Amazons.

Years later, when she’s all grown-up, a World War I British spy Steve Trevor finds himself on the island of the Amazons. There is an attack by German soldiers. And in her last, dying moments, Antiope tells Prince she must leave — it is now time to fulfil her destiny. To destroy Ares. So she does.

Prince sets out with Trevor. First she goes to a London besieged by war (because that’s where Trevor needs to be). There, she is distressed at the sight of wounded soldiers. She begins to see that war is evil. But, for less than intelligible reasons, she also believes that Ares must be at the warfront. So she asks Trevor to take her there (it works out because, by miraculous star alignment, that’s also where Trevor needs to be).

Predictably, Ares is not at the front. Instead, Prince has mistakenly killed all troops of a German stronghold, thinking them to be Ares.

Does she care that she’s needlessly killed soldiers not unlike those she saw in London?

Nope. All equivalents of ‘war is evil’ have left her mind. She’s quite pleased with herself.

A little further along the plot there is another case of mistaken-Ares. Prince kills the wrong person again. Does she care? Nope.

Till the very end, she never does find Ares. It is Ares who finds her. And she is almost destroyed. Were it not for Trevor, who, in an act of considered bravery, unleashes in Prince a power she did not even know she possessed.

Trevor also saves the world. He also teaches Prince that humanity is capable of good. Thus, having walked the length of the narrative blinkered by a preordained destiny accorded to her by a man, then handheld by another man, Prince becomes Wonder Woman.

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There’s another female character in the film who had tremendous potential — Dr Maru. She is an evil scientist for the German military. Her speciality is chemical warfare. And she has the genius to win the Germans the War. A female scientist who could single-handedly alter the fate of the world? Yes please!

Except, in a turn of events best left for the writers to explain, we are told at the very end it was never her genius in the first place. It was actually a man’s.

But of course.

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It would be a stretch to describe the film as un-feminist. It is not.

As my feminist friend pointed out, it is littered with tributes to the first wave of feminism. A moment when Prince wonders how women can fight in cumbersome eveningwear. Another when Trevor thinks she is examining his privates but in fact she is interested in his watch. (Women need men for procreation, not pleasure, she tells him later).

The writers do also tacitly address the male gaze. Trevor describes ephemeral beauty as “distracting” on numerous occasions. In an attempt to remedy the problem, he forces spectacles on her — so she may be rendered less attractive and less distracting to his efforts.

The spectacles don’t work. She’s still just as beautiful. His secretary shakes her head and tells him to get on with it. It is his problem, not hers.

But those moments are feminist garnish to a story that never feels entirely Prince’s own. It isn’t empowering. We never see her as she gathers herself despite the odds (the odds are sequentially stacked in her favour). Instead, she pummels through obstacles with one fist of brute force and the other of ignorance.

A hero that stumbles into confrontation, and then into winning, just isn’t one that feminism deserves.

(Watch Jessica Jones instead).

Sneha Vakharia is a Bengaluru-based freelance writer

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