It might not seem like defending James Cameron’s statements about Wonder Woman would be the wise thing to do, but here it goes anyway since the women that think that men can’t understand women are kind of missing the point. At this time we’ve all made the realization that women in film are starting to come out in a big way and assume leadership roles that have been taken by men throughout the years on a regular basis. That’s great, that’s wonderful, James isn’t railing against this, but he is railing against the fact that it’s not all that groundbreaking.
And he’s right.
In the late 1960’s there was another female-led movie called Barbarella that had this same effect, and throughout the years there have still been dozens of female-led movies that have shown strong, independent women, and all that have come out before Wonder Woman. The Help, Brave, The Craft, Matilda, Tomb Raider, Mulan, Frozen, Alien, do I need to go on?
The independent woman role is not a new idea and was well-played before Wonder Woman came along. Independent women are nothing new in Hollywood and the idea of ‘letting’ a woman direct this film is kind of ludicrous since Patty Jenkins earned her spot. She’s right that Cameron doesn’t understand what it’s like to be a woman, just as women don’t understand what it’s like to be men. That argument goes both ways whether people like it or not. The truth though is that for as independent as it is and great as the movie was the role of the lead female was still highly sexualized and given about as much depth as any other female lead in a similar role.
Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft was given such a look as well, as were the girls in The Craft. Such movies tend to cater to adolescent boys and young men by giving them a good look at young women that are scantily clad but are somehow completely independent and so overbearing that their force of will is what drives the film. One very notable difference however is that Wonder Woman is so terribly naive that her decisions are based upon pure emotion and very little of the cerebral intellect that she’s displayed in the comics. In other words, she became a pretty face with a lot of brawn but not all that much going on upstairs. While we all got the point that she was highly intelligent she was so ignorant of the world outside her home that she might have been lost if not for the man that was helping to guide her.
She is an independent woman and a very powerful character, but the manner in which Jenkins presented her, and the other Amazons, was to show as much skin as was possible and make them all as appealing as they could possibly be. A warrior culture like theirs would undoubtedly be undeniably fit and extraordinarily tough, but would they really need to keep themselves so open by wearing so little? It’s not a critique so much as it is common sense. Plus, if they wanted their home to remain hidden, wouldn’t it have paid to keep a patrol to make sure no one bothered them? It might be a big world, but every now and again someone’s bound to bump into that place.
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