Amazons And The Fight For History And Memory

Initially, I was working on research for a post about how Wonder Woman plays into the historical narrative of the First World War.  When I saw the film, I was instantly reminded of the works of historian Jay Winter and the things that he suggested about how we produce memory and history.  Winter argued that there exists a multi-tiered system to remembering the First World War that changes with the historical distance from the subject.  Essentially modern treatments of the First World War are “public history,” the products of film and museum, “outside the academy.”  The historical realities of events are no longer predictors of the memory of the event.  The danger here is that historical reality may become the servant of memory, either how we choose to remember an event, or how we want to remember an event. 

The most savage example of the contemporary fight between history and memory, at least in terms of the United States, is the Vietnam War.  Take Ken Burns’ recent 17 ¼ hour documentary titled The Vietnam War.  By hour 16 the viewer feels like they are relentlessly picking a vast and horrible emotional scab.  I met Ken Burns once.  One of my fellow graduate students challenged him on his academic qualification to produce history outside of the academy, and if it would be better to leave history to academic historians.  Without missing a beat, he responded that his work will reach millions of people where an academic historian will only reach a dense specialty – maybe, ten or twenty people.  Burns is not completely wrong and I have remained transfixed by the idea of history as a public possession and how we create memory as a product of history from that moment on.

Wonder Woman was created as the character that we all know and love in 1941, right at the precipice of American entry into the Second World War.  She was the first female super hero to have her own comic book and straight from the beginning she meant serious business.  One of her earliest fights was with a monstrous incarnation of Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo.  Many of the ideas present in Wonder Woman’s early “Fight for Womanhood” appear directly in the movie.  When Trevor’s secretary tells Diana that her job requires her to “go where he tells me to go, and do what he tells me to do.”  Diana, responds “Where I’m from that is called slavery.”  This entire idea is lifted straight from a single panel in the “Fight for Womanhood” storyline published in the 1943.  Historically speaking, Wonder Woman is the intellectual offspring of 1900s suffrage, and Rosie the Riveter.

It is therefore ironic that Wonder Woman would first appear in the First World War, fighting Imperial German troops.  As I watched the savage beating those Germans were taking it dawned on me that this artistic choice was telling us more about the present than secretary slavery in the 1940s.  Think about where Diana confronts the Germans – she is standing in No Man’s Land.  No Man’s land was the thin strip of land between the trenches of the Allies, and the Central Powers.  The very name of the place is a play on words because the action of crossing fields of machine gun fire, and overhead artillery meant no man could physically exist there without being killed.  

Typically, I would decry the throw away German soldier/boogey man as the worst kind of intellectual low hanging fruit.  This is clearly a time saving device for film makers.  We don't have to spend effort demonstrating that they are the bad guys - why? - because they are Germans - oh, obviously.  It's exasperating.  Would Indian Jones, or Hellboy not be as heroic and entertaining if they were killing someone that isn't German?  Who knows.  In this instance I think we should forgive the film maker taking the easy way out.  World War II was a conflict of motion where armies swarmed over conquered areas two, three, or more times.  No Man's Land was part of the lexicon by the 1940s, but, it certainly didn't exist in any literal sense in the hideously stagnant and immobile way it did during World War I.  Having a woman break through No Man's Land is clever and worthy.  

What does this have to do with history, and memory?  Plenty, just not about World War I.  This entire episode with Diana in the trenches tells us more about contemporary ideas about women and their interaction with society.  Released in 2017, Wonder Woman followed closely the forceful arrival of the Me Too Movement.  The actual phrase dates to 2006 (the woman that coined the phrase is black - so naturally, nobody cared - until Italian model, and Miss Italy finalist began using it in 2015, but, that's a different argument.)  Through 2015, 2016, the Me Too Movement rightly picked up speed, volume, and attention as more and more women revealed the idiotic and criminal things that men in places of social, political, and financial power had done to them.  By 2017 there is simply no better place for Diana to assert her martial and moral superiority than fighting the massive industrialized inhuman war machine of imperial Germany.  Not only are the men surrounding her rightly and reasonably afraid, but, only move forward after Diana squashes the Germans like so many bugs.  Perception, history and memory bleed together in this special space creating a statement informed by the particulars of the present using the foil of the hyper masculine industrialized past.

 

No surprise some nations reacted so violently to the 2017 Wonder Woman film.  Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Qatar all banned the film.  Jordan attempted to ban it, but just gave up.  Don't forget that Ms. Gadot is Israeli, and was also a member of the storied Israeli Defense Force.  For the Jew-hating scum in these backwards corners of the world it is no doubt a Woman (and Israeli!) stomping hell out of Germans was simply too much for their misogynistic brains to handle.  The folks over at Lebanon's "Campaign to Boycott Supporters of Israel" must have had some kind of stroke because in a clear episode of masochism and intellectual self-harm they failed to have Ms. Gadot's film Fast & Furious banned also.  Oops!  You can draw your own conclusion about why there would be a difference in perception between sexy Gadot in the car movie, and Amazon Gadot in the Woman movie.  I'll wait.  VI.N4