The new “Wonder Woman” movie is earning raves for its portrayal of the warrior princess from the pages of DC Comics. The strong lead (played by Israeli actress Gal Gadot) has inspired many women and girls to celebrate the strength of the Amazonian superhero, who, as Jill Lepore has chronicled, was created to enshrine a standard “of strong, free, courageous womanhood.”
Still, the movie has come in for criticism as a piece of propaganda. Writing in The New Republic, Josephine Livingstone blasts the film for its gauzy portrayal of good and evil set during World War I, when Wonder Woman, Steve Trevor and a band of brothers fight the god of war.
“It’s a classical comic book interpretation of history, in which random fragments of the past are patched together to create a hero of perfect ideological specificity. Livingston writes. “It’s a movie for kids, a movie intended to teach them what it means to be an American hero.”
Delivering on our promise. https://t.co/WMo5kBKMU1
— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) June 8, 2017
If only.
As portrayed by Gadot, Wonder Woman seems beyond America, at least, that is, the America of Donald Trump. She speaks with an Israeli accent all the languages of humanity. In the final scene, she takes flight over Paris, a capital that has suffered a series of real-life attacks and yet rejected the appeals of the far-right. Her golden lasso elicits truth from whomever it corrals.
America has a leader who allegedly lies. He has refused to affirm the commitment to collective defense enshrined in NATO and turned his back on a global agreement to combat climate change that even Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips urged him to support.
He has left allies to chart a future without us. The president of France has invited American scientists to move to his country and compared Trump to the Russian president Putin and Turkish president Erdogan.
“Italy agrees that Europeans need to take the future into their own hands,” Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni told reporters recently, echoing comments by German Chancellor Angela Merkel after she met with Trump.
The U.S. “has come to question the very worth of its mantle of global leadership,” Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, recently told that country’s House of Commons. Canada must “set our own clear and sovereign course,” she said.
Wonder Woman may be a hero but not one that resembles America. Wonder Woman embodies tenderness, compassion, strength and intelligence. That is heroism America can only aspire to.