How to Make a Wonder Woman Movie

Gal Gadot

 
I’m tired of reading excuses from Warner Bros. and DC about how hard it is to adapt Wonder Woman to screen. Now that Gal Gadot has been cast to play the character in the 2015 Batman vs. Superman movie, surely her own feature is in the works? It’s not a hard movie to make. Here’s how you do it.

The first obstacle is generic. Most superhero movies are two stories: the origin and a monster-of-the-week. The hero completes his identity arc with the arrival of a new menace in act two, and so defeating the menace in act three completes that act two plot while ignoring act one. What, for example, does a lizard-man menacing New York have to do with a radioactive spider bite? Batman Begins solves the problem by linking the defeat of the act three menace to the act one origin: Liam Neeson trains and then battles Christian Bale.

This challenge is bigger for Wonder Woman because the origin and the menace are already linked. Nazi Germany is her reason to be, but punching out Adolf in his act three bunker is a lousy ending. Her American flag of a costume deepens the World War II link, making an origin update clumsy. And yet you need her in our current time period by the end of the film or no Justice League tie-in. Captain America presented the same problem, so Marvel threw in a suspended animation twist in the framing scenes. They also replaced Adolf with the Red Skull and inserted him into the origin story as a fellow super soldier, solving the monster-of-the-week problem too.

Wonder Woman needs to land in the 21st century as well, but better to make that leap a plot point rather than an epilogue. That means the origin-triggering menace needs to time travel too. That would be hard except that Wonder Woman’s Amazonian home provides the ready-made solution. Paradise Island is hidden in the Bermuda Triangle, a location legendary for such unexplained phenomenon as disappearances and time anomalies.

I recommend a plane carrying a German A-bomb.

Begin with Wonder Woman’s future love interest, Captain Steve Trevor, stowed inside one of two Nazi bombers on their way to incinerate New York. Steve overpowers the crew, seizes control of the plane, and exchanges fire with the other bomber, sending both tailspinning into the mysterious storm clouds of the Bermuda Triangle. When he comes to, he’s on Paradise Island—where he spends the rest of act one until he and Wonder Woman fly off in her magic plane (it starts out a as chariot and winged horses before taking the form of the downed bomber). Meanwhile, modern day scuba divers discover the remains of the second bomber and the still functional A-bomb inside. As a result, when Wonder Woman and Steve emerge from the protective clouds surrounding Paradise Island, they’re not in 1944 anymore. The Triangle (or possibly unseen Hera?) has flung them forward in time to continue Steve’s mission—because the terrorists of your choice (I’m picturing an American-grown Aryan militia) now has its hands on that A-bomb.

But back to the problematic Wonder Woman costume. Why exactly is an Amazonian princess of Greek antiquity dolled up in the American flag? That’s easy. Back in scene one, after a pan of the menacing A-bomb inside the first plane, a German soldier pauses to look down at something he’s stepped on: an American girlie magazine open to a centerfold. As he picks it up and rotates the page, Trevor clocks him over the head from behind, step one in his seizing the plane. It’s a quick gag that will appear to stand-alone—until the Amazonian Queen produces the magazine after agreeing to aid him. They have studied it in order to tailor an outfit that will allow Wonder Woman to blend. In she steps wearing the pin-up girl’s bustier, micro-skirt, and stiletto boots—only in the colors of the flag Steve said represented his cherished homeland. (His subsequent protests go unheeded.)

I’m skipping over much of the fun of act one (Steve among those wacky Amazons), as well as act two (Wonder Woman and Steve among those wacky 21st century Americans), to focus on a bigger problem. Wonder Woman is aloof and off-putting. No other superhero is quite so alien. Not only is she an immortal demigoddess princess, but her mother sculpted her out of magic clay. Even Superman, an actual alien, is a homegrown farm boy at heart. Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker, Tony Stark, they all have flavors of relatable humanness. Thor is the closest equivalent, but he’s male. A majority of the superhero ticket-buying demographic already think women are alien. Wonder Woman is alien squared.

So embrace that weirdness. Make it her character arc. She starts out a bit like Data on Stark Trek—powerful, brilliant, yet oddly clueless too. She’d never seen a man before, and now that she has, she’s not particularly impressed. But she’s curious and comically off-putting in her attempts to interact—all obstacles to overcome in the inevitable marriage plot of act two. Once thrown into the mutually alien territory of 21st century America, she and Steve only have each other. By the time they’ve thwarted the A-bombing Aryans in act three, they’ll have earned their falling action kiss, possibly more.

The story is her growing humanity. Maybe some of that aloofness was an act. She’s seen men before. And her mother didn’t really mold her from magic clay—her mother escaped pregnant from the war lord who enslaved her. As far as that island of theirs, it’s not Paradise. It’s just the one rock on the planet where no woman has ever been raped. Of course she was aloof. And that makes her closure of her own marriage plot all the more pleasurable.

The magic lasso has potential too. If Wonder Woman ties Steve up to test the truth of his plea for aid in act one, reverse the situation in act three (a trick James Cameron pulled in both True Lies and The Abyss). But please no bondage references. She strings the lasso around herself to prove a point, to answer a question Steve would never have asked on his own. (Does she love him? She says no. But, he wonders afterwards, does the lasso even work on her?)

There’s tons more, but those are the basics. Plus one warning: Do NOT begin with a voiced-over montage of Amazonian history. It’s boring and distracts from the real story. Anything important we have to pick up with Steve on the island.

Diane Nelson, president of DC Comics, said back in July that Wonder Woman “has been, since I started, one of the top three priorities for DC and for Warner Bros. We are still trying right now, but she’s tricky.” Greg Silverman, Warner Bros.’ president of creative development and worldwide production, was even more vague in October, boldly declaring that “We have been doing a lot of thinking for years” and “everything that has been speculated are things that we’ve thought about.”

With Gadot officially cast, let’s hope they can move past all the tricky speculations and make an actual movie now.

WW logo

45 thoughts on “How to Make a Wonder Woman Movie

  1. The humor here isn’t lost on me, but I think it’s still really insightful that a Wonder Woman movie would need to be entirely framed by the perspective of a male character, a Steve at best, in order to be made.

  2. This kind of underlines why I don’t really want to see a WW movie. I’m pretty certain you’re take is going to be more thoughtful than whoever does the actual script – and yet you still basically have it set up so that women/Wonder Woman are alien others who need to be taught how to be human by men. The Wonder Woman animated film did that; I talk about it’s problems (including a good dollop of misogyny) here.

    Given that they’re not going to go back to the Marston/Peter comics and have giant intersteallar kangaroo rides and a lasso of submission, I think they’d be best off getting as far from the original as possible. Radical costume redesign, forget the WW2 setting, quite possibly forget Steve Trevor. Maybe do a Percy Jackson thing; make her the daughter of Aphrodite (not of Zeus as in the stupid current series.) They’ve basically had 70 years to prove that no one writes Marston like Marston, so just give up and try something different.

  3. Captain America’s suspended animation twist wasn’t a twist at all, it was an invention for the comics decades ago to bring a popular war-era character back. Hardly a movie moment of genius.

    DC will never do a decent WW movie, because there is only one plot for action heroines. “They took it all from her, now she is out for revenge.”

  4. I think the WW2 setting makes sense. You could basically just have the nazis get super magic or technology like in the Cap movie and only Wonder Woman can stop it. Men could be shocked and her nonconforming to gender roles and she could be shock at what brutes the leaders of man’s world are.

    Instead of making her aloof I’d make her pretty pure and heroic and horrified at man’s world.

    That said I don’t really care about hollywood movies. I’d rather see cute, tween shoujo version of Wonder Woman. A cartoonist did a cool pitch for a shoujo Wonder Woman years ago you can see here:

    http://web.archive.org/web/20080704063753/http://mentacle.rusticeye.com/PAGES/WONDERWOMAN_PITCH_COMICS.html

  5. Kailyn and Noah, you’re right,this take puts too much emphasis on a transformative heterosexual marriage plot, but I think if handled well it could be an effective trade-off allowing WW to be powerful too. Of course Hollywood, as Erica rightly notes, can screw up anything and WW’s mission doesn’t conform with the wronged-mother formula.

  6. That’s pretty good, Chris, how about skipping the Nazi tie-in and make WW fighting the Arab subjection of women? Sure, America is patriarchal, but it’s not that patriarchal. She wears a skimpy flag uniform to show she’s comfortable with her body and to make her foes uncomfortable. If the potential xenophobia is a problem, then make Steve an agent of the CIA (maybe mindcontrolled) to fool WW (who’s been sheltered from man’s political world) into pursuing our own imperialist agenda. Her freeing him of the control can show how powerful she is against the status quo masculinist ideology.

  7. I think a take on Darwin Cooper’s version of the WW costume (from Noah’s favorite, New Frontiers) with more of a blue and gold, Roman armored skirt and the eagle motiff would work best in a live action context – I love Lynda Carter, but the bloomers look really uncomfortable.

    Anyway, I think Chris’s pitch is pretty good, but I would 1) make Steve Trevor a very minor character (leave him behind in the past) and scrap the whole alien awkward thing – have HER teach the silly men how to grasp their humanity – or even better, have her focus on how the actions of men have denied women their full humanity and give her a female sidekick to develop a relationship (platonic, or is it?) with, like an updated version of Etta Candy.

  8. Noah, don’t forget Zack Snyder’s going to be involved. But part of the story is that WW realizes she’s been duped and she sticks around to correct the problems of America (in a loving, non-fascist, anti-imperialist way, of course). Steve is freed of America’s patriarchal control, convinced of WW’s absolute correctness on everything and begins to follow her.

  9. First third:
    How about Wonder Woman emerging from another dimension in some sort of Manhattan Project tom-foolery. She defeats Hitler, and she’s ready to compel a Japanese surrender, but we go ahead and bomb Hiroshima anyway (hell, let’s swap Trevor for Tibbets). Anyway, she’s disgusted and bails to the Amazon where she sets up a proper Matriarchy.
    Second third:
    Flash forward to now… Some peppy third wave feminist writes her dissertation on the Wonder Woman project/conspiracy (Diana is now something of an urban legend). Cue an extinction level event (make it nuclear maybe?) and enter Wonder Woman. She hasn’t aged on account of her being from another dimension and all. Problem is, she’s got what amounts to an army of super pissed off women, which doesn’t sit well with the US military (Mahendra’s least favorite plot device).
    Third-third
    They see her as threat. Last third of the movie has them fighting each other, and then joining up to stave off another threat.
    Easy.
    Only problem is we’re still lacking lassos of truth and space kangaroos.

  10. It should be a lasso of control. Control, not truth. Control is actually a useful weapon; truth is stupid.

    I kind of like the idea of a student studying WW and becoming her. Sort of Promethea-like.

  11. Noah, Noah, Noah…would William Moulton Marston, co-inventor of the polygraph, have said truth is stupid? I think not.

    Props to Chris for having the chutzpah to write about what somebody ought to do with WW on Noah’s site. That’s like going to a party at Stephen Ambrose’s house for a dinner party and holding court on what people really ought to know about the war in Europe.

  12. But the one flows from the other.

    If I can magically force your submission to my will, I can make you tell me the truth, right?

  13. I think you’re right AB, at least where the WW stories I’ver read are concerned. But the submission thing gives her powers broader scope.

  14. Jumping from misogyny to misandry is not a reasonable solution, in my opinion. Why alienate half one’s audience.

    Personally, I don’t think would be hard to do a Wonder Woman for either the WW-II era or today. And screw all of the PC and philosophical bullshit. Just make her heroic on her own terms, and make sure it’s a decent action film.

    If I want to be lectured, I’ll go to a socio-political symposium.

  15. Wonder Woman was intended as propaganda in the first place. So feminism is pretty central to the character. Deliberately ignoring that is betraying the original creators pretty directly.

    Not sure what “on her own terms” would mean. Her own terms are feminism. And, in any case, showing a heroic woman is going to make some portion of the audience start to cry about misandry. That’s what happens in a culture that’s still misogynist, unfortunately.

  16. Noah — Not sure what you mean by “deliberately ignoring.” Feminism means different things to different people. Some people are so uptight about the issue, they see misogyny where it doesn’t exist, or they don’t really want equality, they want a total reversal of pre-Suffrage male/female relationship, but with women in the dominant role, rather than men.

    I’m pro-equality, not “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

    Depicting WW as a smart, strong-willed, heroic character who hails from a place where women rule is part of her origin, and I’m not suggesting that change.

  17. What I mean is, the original Wonder Woman comics are really deliberately ideologically feminist. They advocate for female communities; they suggest that masculinity is responsible for war and violence, they present femininity and women as the solution to the world’s ills. They think that to get rid of the old boss you need to rethink gender roles pretty thoroughly; simply saying, we’re all equal in the society we’ve got isn’t sufficient.

    The point being, WW’s feminism has nothing to do with people adding in political correctness. It’s the point of the original comics and of the character. That’s why Charles doesn’t like Marston/Peter.

  18. “Feminism means different things to different people.”

    Actually feminism means equal rights and opportunities for men and women. That’s it. Look it up in your dictionary of choice. Anyone who believes women are better than or should be in any sense above men is not a feminist. Suggesting that there are feminists who advocate matriarchy is a strawman argument. If you are pro-equality, then you’re a feminist.

  19. Chris — Those “non-feminists” would no doubt disagree with you. If I had a buck every time I heard matriarchy advocated by self-proclaimed feminist advocates, I’d be writing this from my own island in the Caribbean.

  20. Yeah, the original WW both proves Chris wrong in assuming all feminism is simply egalitarian and that Russ hasn’t read it if he thinks it’s not misandrous and matriarchal. It’s authoritarian propaganda, pure and simple.

  21. There are feminists who are matriarchal, to one degree or another. Mary Daly for example. It’s a pretty marginal position at this point, but I don’t think it quite works to try to define it away.

    I don’t agree with Charles that WW is authoritarian propaganda, pure and simple — it’s not especially simple, for one thing, and I think you have to willfully ignore a lot of that complexity to get to a place where it’s solely authoritarian or misandrous (though there are certainly authoritarian and misandrous strands in there.)

    Among other things, WW is very queer friendly, which means that gendered positions and traits get switched around with a will. Hating men and masculinity in any consistent way is tricky when the terms are so enthusiastically shuffled amongst differently gendered bodies.

    Sort of tempting to just copy the entire book chapter I was just working on into the comment thread, but Rutgers UP would probably frown on that.

  22. I sensed even as a teen that the original WW was unlike most other comics in a number of complex ways.

  23. Wow, Noah and Chris truly are pathetic.

    First off, EQUAL RIGHTS means equal rights. No thanks to a literally gender-specific term that supposed to represent the end all, be all of equality. It’s hypocritical.

    And yes, Wonder Woman’s background IS misnadrist. Maybe Wonder Woman herself is all about equality, but her amazons sure as hell are not. For one, how about actually looking up who the amazons were. They killed innocent men after seducing them and then killed their babies if they were male.

    Sure, Marston changed the story of the amazons. But it is still sexist, because it implies a female-dominated society is somehow superior because they are women. Since, you know, only women can be gentle and compassionate. That’s a load of crap and it’s sexist. It’s amazing how you feminists are in denial about this.

  24. Jason, seriously, look up the word. Yes, feminism is a gender-specific term, which you can attribute to the fact that we are in a patriarchal society. If we were in a matriarchal society, the path to gender equality would be called masculinism.

  25. Chris, egalitarian feminism is generally frowned upon by the radical feminists and around these parts. It might be the dictionary definition, but it’s not the reason that 60% of women refuse to identify as “feminist.” Goofy views like Marston’s are clearly not egalitarian. He was a misandrist, as are many radical feminists.

  26. Most people who “refuse” to identify as feminists never heard the definition of the word. Because instead we hear strawman (forgive the pun) arguments about man-hating radical feminists (I think Limbaugh prefers the term “Fem-Nazis”). But “Radical feminism” is the not-particularly-radical recognition that patriarchies oppress women. It, like feminism in general, is not premised on hating men. If your point, however, is that some feminists hate women, then, yeah, sure.

  27. “It might be the dictionary definition, but it’s not the reason that 60% of women refuse to identify as “feminist.””

    Most people in the US don’t know where Ukraine is. Adjudicating the worth of fairly complex ideologies and movements through reference to the wisdom of crowds isn’t especially helpful, I don’t think.

  28. Noah,

    I’m not sure what point you think you’re scoring there. You’re agreeing with me.

    Chris,

    Yeah, those surveyed aren’t likely thinking of the dictionary definition, but neither do radical feminists, since they are not the same as egalitarian feminists. The radical would say something like equality under capitalism isn’t particularly meaningful, because capitalism is ‘masculine.’ Whereas the egalitarian would say women should have an equal shot regardless of ideology. However, accepting feminism will solve nothing but the problem of sexism (this is closer to the dictionary definition).

    Was it a typo about you thinking I said some feminists hate women? That’s likely true, but wasn’t my point. I was saying that egalitarian feminism is not a popular form of feminism. I identify as a feminist, but I’m definitely on the egalitarian/individualist/anarchic side, which isn’t exactly abundantly represented in the women’s studies section at bookstores. Why? Because it doesn’t promise any utopian solutions with the end of sexism. Women should have an equal shot at being dictators, but dictatorships still suck.

    Matriarchal utopians are sexists. And when you start to see evil equated with features that are essentialized/encoded as masculine, that is a form of misandry — at least, if you accept that coding bad things as feminine is misogyny.

    The (disingenuous?) surprise that most women don’t identify as feminist popped up in a collection of feminist comics that I read last year (forgetting the title, but it wasn’t very good, so don’t bother). The strip said something like how could women and men not believe in equal rights for both sexes, as if that’s the idea being rejected along with the feminist label. This is fairly common evasion of what’s a real disagreement that isn’t reducible to right versus left or whatever. You might want to dismiss it as the power of Limbaugh to spread hatred for feminists even among left and liberal men and women,* but I’d suggest it’s more likely a lot of really stupid shit that’s said by self-proclaimed feminists in books, magazines, on TV and the Web (cf. treating Marston’s idiocy as a good example of feminism).

    So, I kind of agree with you that the way to convince everyone that feminism is good is to promote, in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, egalitarianism, not repressive ideas like, say, rationality should be rejected because it’s inherently patriarchal or that a matriarchy would fix all of our problems (which are “patriarchal” in essence). I just think you’re ignoring a good deal of what passes for feminism.

    *28% of Limbaugh’s audience is female according to this. Almost none of it is liberal. Maybe people don’t like Limbaugh because of liberal propaganda, or maybe it’s because he’s an idiot.

  29. “The radical would say something like equality under capitalism isn’t particularly meaningful, because capitalism is ‘masculine.’ Whereas the egalitarian would say women should have an equal shot regardless of ideology”

    Happily, I can pretty much agree with your rough definitions there, Charles.

    (And, yes, that was indeed a typo.)

    But to clarify further, no, radical feminism is not sexist.

    The term “masculine” refers to socially determined behaviors, as opposed to “male,” which would be innate. So calling capitalism, for example, masculine is not sexist, ie it’s not arguing that exploitive labor practices are an inherently male way of doing things. It’s saying that capitalism grew out of a patriarchic society, which it did.

    But, yes, a matriarchy would most definitely be sexist. But the idea that feminism or even so-called radical feminism is a call for matriarchy is inaccurate, and the idea usually comes from right wingers opposing egalitarian feminism (ie, equal pay for women, etc.). I, like you, am an egalitarian feminist. And so I object to anti-feminist rhetoric that distorts the actual aims of feminism, which is equality.

    Roughly speaking, what you’re calling radical feminism is what I would call socialist feminism, and what you’re calling egalitarian feminism is closer to capitalist feminism.

    British playwright Caryl Churchill is a good touch point. Her early 80s play Top Girls condemns capitalism (including women who successfully rise within capitalism, so what you would call egalitarian feminism), while promoting socialism as a better system for helping women and men overall. But the play is not anti-male.

    To be anti-male you would have to be promoting matriarchy and/or the belief that women are innately superior to men, an idea that runs against the ways feminism breaks down socially constructed gender.

    So while matriarchy would be as bad as patriarchy, discussing matriarchy (something that does not exist) undermines feminism (whether egalitarian, socialist, “radical,” etc.) by falsely linking it to anti-male beliefs. Technically I suppose someone who is pro-matriarchy could be called a feminist, but the conflation of terms and ideas is where your 60% stat comes from. Right wingers would like everyone to think that being a feminist requires you to be anti-male, because being anti-male is ridiculous and so an effortless target to attack.

  30. I think we’re pretty much aligned on this stuff. I’ll quibble that someone like Emma Goldman wouldn’t take too kindly to being called a capitalist, though. And I’ll slightly disagree, since I brought her up, that while saying other ideo-social systems are more conducive to equality isn’t sexist, reducing the ones you think are bad to masculine encoding is (e.g., Hillary Clinton isn’t an asshole because she’s acting like a man, but because she’s acting like a person in power). Anarchy and communism and socialism and other non-capitalisms were also chiefly shaped by men, so it doesn’t make sense to reduce those to a feminine encoding (nor are they ‘masculine,’ as Goldman demonstrates). Taking gender as the master signifier is where the problem starts, which goes beyond socialist and liberal feminists.

  31. “Taking gender as the master signifier is where the problem starts”

    Exactly. And how pleasant to come into alignment, Charles. I admit ignorance regarding Goldman, but your point about Hillary Clinton is the opinion Churchill expresses about Thatcher in Top Girls.

  32. The thing is, it’s not feminists who equate power and masculinity. That’s the way patriarchy works; it’s why “man up” makes sense and why it’s seen as weak or feminine to back down from a fight, or show mercy, or what have you.

    There isn’t anything innately masculine about wielding power. But ideologies around masculinity are very much linked to wielding of power. Feminism has pushed to get women into positions of power, like men. But it’s also worked to try to reveal the ways that ideologies around masculinity are linked to power, and to suggest alternatives — to violence, to hierarchy — that draw a good deal of their ideological support from misogynist ideologies around masculinity.

    So I would say that gender as a master signifier is a problem…but it’s not feminism that’s done that, anymore than it’s anti-racists who create racial difference. Don’t blame the victim, you know?

  33. So with Hillary Clinton; yes, of course, women can, and have always been, able to be assholes when in positions of power. But the particular way American presidents are assholes is often linked to notions of needing to project strength and a fear of weakness which are very much connected to ideologies around masculinity and the proper ways of performing power.

  34. I see the connection as contingent, not necessary. If Clinton becomes president, she too will attempt to project the same strength and fear of weakness. There’s nothing really masculine about it, except that men were the ones occupying such positions throughout history due to sexism (“ideologies around masculinity are linked to power”). Science isn’t inherently masculine, but women have been excluded from it. Thus it’s contingently “masculine,” but the mental tools it promotes are needed to dismiss the sexism that lead to the exclusion of women from its ranks in the first place (because sexism is irrational).

    And just because a Nation of Islam member was reacting to racism doesn’t mean his racism isn’t racism. Everyone (including white racists and misogynists) has some confluence of ideas, choices and upbringing that results in whatever bigotry they might express, but that doesn’t excuse the bigotry. Same goes with views that identify all the bad things with masculinity, such as rape culture theorists or (since it’s currently playing into a blog entry I’m writing) stereotypical explanations for serial killers (even though they constitute .00009 % of the population in the past decade).

    And I’ll have to check out that play, Chris. Thanks.

  35. Where exactly does the Nation of Islam come in? “Anti-racist” isn’t equivalent to “Nation of Islam”. I’m sure you know that.

    “There’s nothing really masculine about it, except that men were the ones occupying such positions throughout history due to sexism.”

    No, you’re being reductive. Militarism as an ideology, and the projection of strength and force as a virtue or a good, are in our society (and in many others) closely tied to ideologies of machismo. Saying there’s nothing really masculine about it naturalizes it; it tends to make violence and cruelty seem like the most natural stance for all humans, at all times.

    There can be other masculinities, and there’s nothing that makes people in male bodies by nature more violent than people with female bodies (I was just reading about the participation of women in the Rwandan genocide). But gendered ideologies, and particular constructions of masculinity, have historically and currently been very important to the way people justify and encourage violence.

  36. Oh; and making serial killers as such a small percentage of the population seems like it requires you to bracket off a phenomena that doesn’t necessarily seem all that bracketable. Killing large numbers of people has happened a lot in human history. Middle-class Americans killing large numbers of people in peacetime happens less…but is it really different in kind?

Comments are closed.