Wonder Woman is a superhero movie about a very attractive person who was fashioned out of clay. She resides on an island on which only women live. It is in the Mediterranean Sea but hidden behind a gigantic magical cloud. She leaves it and emerges into World War I-era Europe so that she can get into a big climactic fight with Ares, the Greek god of war.
In bygone days, such a plot would not be the cause of extended analysis and study, and the movie that contains it would be treated as it deserves to be treated—as a very watchable piece of junk. Wonder Woman is well-paced, well-done, and well-acted by its two ultraglam movie-star leads Gal Gadot and Chris Pine. Like all good superhero movies, Wonder Woman is best when it is funny and it’s worst when two supernatural beings are hurling Jeeps at each other’s indestructible magical bodies because they’ve evidently forgotten you can’t kill an immortal with a car.
But you see, we live in a time when our chattering classes have collectively decided it is their sacred duty to suck the life and fun and joy and diversion out of just about everything in the name of a greater ideological purpose. This lowbrow ideological didacticism is scarier than The Blair Witch Project, more stomach-churning than The Human Centipede, and more dispiriting than Crash. And it pervades.
In this case, because Wonder Woman is about a woman, it must be treated not as a diverting entertainment but rather a treatise on the place and role and status of women—and be judged on how it fares in the transmission of an appropriate message. Some speak of it as though it is the present-day pop-cultural equivalent of the 19th Amendment, a breakthrough in the never-ending quest for gender egalitarianism.
Others are expressing their profound disappointment with the film’s lack of ideological purpose.
Perhaps the most representative article to greet the film’s release came from Jill Lepore, a garlanded Harvard professor who wrote a book a few years ago about Wonder Woman because that is what Harvard professors do now: “A lot of viewers will come to this film, as I did, after the most ordinary of days,” she wrote, “punch-card-punching, office-meeting, kid-raising, news-watching days, days of seeing women being silenced, ignored, dismissed, threatened, undermined, underpaid, and underestimated, and, somehow, taking it.”
Wow. I had no idea that life as the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and contributing writer to the New Yorker could be so dreadful! The horror of Lepore’s day was brightened, in a somewhat shame-faced manner, by the film: “I am not proud that I found comfort in watching a woman in a golden tiara and thigh-high boots clobber hordes of terrible men. But I did.” Mazel tov!
Alas for Lepore, she wanted more from this film than the beatings: “The new ‘Wonder Woman’ is set in an extravagantly staged and costumed 1918, driven by an uninteresting plot about the Kaiser and chemical weapons; the film renders invisible—erases—the fights women waged a century ago for representation, contraception, and equality.”
Lepore must be fun at parties.
Not to be outdone in the hot-take department by liberals, conservatives have taken up the cudgels as well—one even going so far as to discern a pro-life message in the fact that Gal Gadot, the star of Wonder Woman, was pregnant at the time the movie was being filmed and didn’t have an abortion. I’d quote it but it wasn’t by a Harvard professor.
There’s an Adam Sandler movie called Billy Madison in which the title character is an aggressively uneducated man-boy forced to answer history questions in a game-show format. After one particularly boneheaded response, his poker-faced teacher (played by the great comedy writer James Downey) responds with a terrible calm born of the utmost despair: “What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. .  .  . May God have mercy on your soul.”
Wonder Woman is a $150 million production whose purpose is not to convey messages about feminism or abortion or the horrors of war. Its purpose is to earn a billion dollars and set up the next billion-dollar comic-book movie in its “universe” (that being Justice League, in which Wonder Woman will team up with Batman and Aquaman to fight alongside Juice-Cleanse Boy and Self-Righteous Harvard Professor Woman).
And that in turn will produce another dozen politicized takes, and those takes will render the people who write them, the people who read them, the people who argue over them, and the people who tweet about them less enlightened, less thoughtful, and considerably more stupid than they were before.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
