I took my five year old to see Wonder Woman the day it opened.
She talked through most of it. She asked, many times, if it was over yet. She walked down two steps in the aisle, then back up those same steps. She sat on the edge of her seat. Then got back down. She put her feet up on the arm. She leaned on me. She kissed me.
She was, in short, a five year old in a theater watching a grown up movie for two and a half hours.
And I was not surprised by any of this. I was not annoyed. I knew all of this would happen.
And I brought her anyway.
Because when the music rose, when Diana appeared, larger than life, in full Wonder Woman regalia, when she flew into the air, into the fray, when she brought her bracelets together to ward off attackers, when she slid across the floor with her sword through a crowd of enemies, when she spread her arms, bold and brave and saved the world, my daughter stood up in front of her seat, puffed out her chest with her arms at her sides, and stared, fixated, riveted.
Because of Wonder Woman, my daughter can imagine herself as a superhero. My daughter can imagine herself saving the world.
The big, bold, heroic scenes captivated my little girl and the sad, war torn, bleak scenes will stay with her, I hope, for years to come.
I wondered, for a brief moment, if it would be too much for her, if seeing wounded soldiers and a mother holding her baby crying, starving would damage my child in some way. Would it steal her innocence?
And then I remembered that there are children all over the world who are actually suffering through fates worse than those depicted on the screen. There are actual babies in actual mothers' arms who are actually starving, homeless, enslaved as I write in this moment. And that they are that way, they live that life, and die those tragic deaths, because of us, because of the world of men.
No. I do not for a second regret taking my child to see Wonder Woman and letting her see those angst ridden scenes. I am glad the movie depicted them the way it did, the same way it dealt with the love scene between Diana and Steve, tasteful and from a distance, so the audience gets the message without explicit scenes or, in the case of the war, gore.
I am often reminded as I watch my child growing each day of a quote I came across some time ago that has stuck with me ever since: "We are not raising children. They are children. We are raising adults."
I do not want to shelter my child from the realities of the world, especially this world, as it stands today. I do not hope to extend her childhood into her teen years and beyond. I want to raise a fully aware, fully cognizant, fully functioning adult, with compassion, kindness, and generosity in her heart. And I want to provide her with examples, real and imagined, of the best among men and women because she will certainly, without a doubt, be faced with the worst.
Princess Diana of Themyscera embodies the best. There are so many parallels between what we could do with our children, what I hope to do with mine, and Diana's storyline. Diana has been told the stories of war and loss, of evil and violence, but she herself has never been subjected to them. She prepared to fight, to defend, to protect, to save the world, her mother and her aunt hoping all the while that she would never have to use those finely honed skills. But, like all children, Diana ultimately has to grow up and face the real world.
Diana, from the start, has an unwavering sense of what is right and an unwavering sense of her obligation to seek justice. But this is not what makes her a superhero.
Bill Maher, on his show Real Time with Bill Maher, recently did an end piece on his distaste for the superhero genre of movies and television shows. He begins by talking about how the superhero genre creates a mentality of "waiting for one hero to save the day" instead of, as he says, what we should be doing, saving the day ourselves. I completely disagree with him.
Hero stories do not represent our need to wait for someone else to save us.
Just the opposite. Diana, and Thor, and Batman, and Superman, and Flash, and Arrow, and Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage, and, and, and, the list goes on, all inspire us to be heroes ourselves. The message in these stories is absolutely not that a hero will save you. On the contrary, the superheroes who have no super powers, like Bruce Wayne and Oliver Queen, inspire us to save our own cities, to become heroes ourselves. And the team that these millionaires put together to work with them quite often come from nothing, or very little, so we can't even use the excuse that we are not millionaires. And the superheroes who do have superpowers are quite often both flawed and conflicted about how best to use their powers, which acts as a metaphor for how each individual must use the talents we are given. For example, my super power is education and rhetoric. I am skilled at speaking to crowds, at changing minds, and making people think about things in new ways. I use my super power in the best way I can to save the world, based on my sense of what is right and what is just.
As Bill ends the piece and he expresses his frustration at how Donald Trump came to power precisely because of people waiting for one person to tell them "I alone can fix this problem. I alone can make America great again," I understand where Bill is coming from. This hero complex is quite similar to the way dictators and authoritarians rise to power. People are hurting, desperate, hungry, watching their children suffer, and from the ashes rises what seems to be a hero to save the day. This so far, is an accurate parallel to the superhero genre. But Bill believes that the plethora of hero movies and shows creates this mentality and that it is what leads to the Donald Trumps of the world.
I disagree. And here is why: the rise of dictators came long before the dissemination of superhero stories. Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, and even Hitler came to power before people were told by comic books that a hero would save the day. I would argue that systems within countries work to make people subjects to a higher power, and then that higher power becomes an absolute power and, as we all know, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I would argue that the greatest weapons The United States has against the rise of a fascist dictator are our foundation of independence, our individual protections from our government, and our system of checks and balances as represented by our three branches of government and our federalist system (shared power among the federal government and the states). The ultimate weapon we have is us, the people. We have a government run for the people, by the people, and made up of the people. We created a country with a government in this fashion on purpose. Placing the power in the hands of the people was an intentional act of the founding fathers. I would argue that while we have come as close to having a corrupt dictator as we possible can at this point in history, we will not fall precisely because of these greatest weapons.
I would further argue that Diana, along with her many counterparts in the many, many superhero movies and shows that surrounds us, reminds us of those weapons. She reminds us that she is in us all. I would even go so far as to say that Diana, as a woman, reminds us of this better than the men who have come before her and those who will come after her.
Diana, innocent, naive, and, until she meets Steve Trevor, still a maiden, nevertheless comes to represent a mother figure. Not a mother figure in the way that would make us all her children, but in a way that embodies the ideals we imagine in the best mothers, nurturing, caring, empathetic, compassionate, and, above all, blindly, unconditionally loving. This is not to say that men cannot embody all of these qualities. It is to say that as a society, when we think of these qualities, we typically think of women, and specifically, mothers.
The very end of the movie shows Diana as a fully developed Wonder Woman. Up to this point she has shown her strength, her compassion, her empathy, her wit, her intelligence, but her naïveté has kept her from the complete superhero she is destined to become. It is only as her eyes are opened to the true evils of the world, and all of the complexity that those evils involve, as she discovers that the world is not black and white, simply good and simply evil, and finally as she accepts the world as it is, that she embraces the world of men and her place in it that the Amazonian Princess Demigoddess Diana can evolve into Wonder Woman.
This last heroic scene leaves us with the best counterargument to Maher's misunderstanding of the symbol of superheroes.
Diana is given a choice between killing the god of war or joining him, between embracing a seriously flawed humanity or working toward its destruction.
She has seen the worst of humanity. She understands now that all the blame for our war and strife does not rest on a war god, that humans ourselves are flawed.
Ares implores her to join him, telling her, "they do not deserve you, Diana."
And she responds: "It is not about deserve. It is about what you believe. And I believe in love."
As superheroes and what they stand for go, this representation is by far the best. And as superheroes go, only Diana could deliver this line believably. It is not corny, as it could easily have been had it been delivered by Clark or Barry, two very good, very sweet male superheroes. From Diana, it is only inspiring.
And it is something we can all aspire to. We can all choose to embrace instead of reject, to give instead of take, to help instead of hurt, to run toward instead of run away, and to love instead of hate.
But in the end it is not to save us that we need Diana, nor is it why we need any other superhero. We don't need them to rescue us from ourselves or from each other.
We need them to inspire us to be our best selves.
And Diana does this brilliantly.
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