[Although Black Panther has already busted just
about every conceivable block, Memorial Day launches the summer blockbuster
season. So this week I wanted to return
to some BlockbusterStudying, focusing especially on big hits from last
year. Add your BlockbusterStudying thoughts, please!]
On the
historical women who would especially appreciate this wondrous one.
I wasn’t quite
as enamored of Wonder Woman (2017)
as most viewers—this isn’t a non-favorite series, so I won’t go into all those
details, but overall I would say it was a pretty conventional superhero origin
story, if with of course an important gender
reversal. But one thing that did really affect and impress me about the
film was its emphasis on philosophical
and historical pacifism. The entire reason Diana (Gal Gadot) leaves her
island paradise in the first place is because she learns about the ongoing
horrors of the Great War and becomes determined to stop them; granted she does
so because she believes correctly that her people’s longstanding enemy Ares the God of War has
returned and is behind the war (this is a comic book superhero film, after all),
but it’s perfectly easy and appropriate to see that character as also a
metaphor for the forces that drive nations to war and of its accompanying
horrors and destructions. In any case, Wonder Woman’s central motivation and
goal is profoundly pacifist, no small thing in a blockbuster action film.
No small
historical thing either, of course, but in that sense Wonder Woman is part of a
large and existing community and historical trend: the link between women’s
rights activists and anti-war efforts. Forgive me for quoting myself, but these
two paragraphs from this
prior post on anti-war suffrage activists highlight these historical women
who I’m pretty sure would be first in line to support this film:
“Such dismissals
of anti-war protesters were nothing new in American society, of course. Whereas
the Vietnam War became so broadly unpopular that its
anti-war movement garnered as much support as it did critique (although the
aforementioned stereotyping of the protesters still occurred to be sure),
the World
War II and World War I anti-war movements were far more nationally
unpopular and subject to the same kind of attacks. During both wars, many of the most
prominent pacificists, both in America and around the world, were also
women’s rights activists; a trend exemplified by Jeanette Rankin, the first
woman elected to Congress, who opposed both world wars and who represented the
sole Congressional “no” vote against declaring war on Japan on December 8th,
1941. Rankin’s political career survived her World War I pacifism, but her
opposition to World War II proved not only politically
costly but personally destructive, both in media coverage and in threats on
her life. (She did not run for reelection, but did live to lead an
anti-Vietnam War campaign in 1968!)
The virulent
opposition to Rankin and her pacifist colleagues could be attributed solely to
pro-war agitation and fever, and certainly that’s been a consistent part of
such wartime historical moments and narratives. But I think it would also need
to be analyzed in conjunction with the
equally virulent and too-often forgotten opposition faced by suffragists
and other women’s rights leaders. In that linked post I highlighted the
shockingly nasty children’s book Ten Little Suffergets (c.1910),
which offers a particularly vivid but far from isolated illustration (literally
and figuratively) of such anti-women’s rights attitudes. If we have largely
forgotten this kind of widespread anti-suffragist vitriol, one clear reason
would be our collective recognition of just how fully those women’s rights
activists were on the right side of history—a lesson that we perhaps have yet
to learn when it comes to our anti-war movements, contemporary and historical.”
Next blockbuster
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other blockbusters you’d highlight and analyze?
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