When Patty Jenkins’ record-breaking movie Wonder Woman debuted in 2017, a friend and I had a disagreement. My friend thought Wonder Woman was a classic piece of national security state propaganda, a movie made with Pentagon interference to sway public opinion to pro-military stances. I disagreed; its depiction of war’s horrors, its bumbling generals leading from the rear, and a protagonist who strives to kill War, would convince very few people of war’s innate heroism.
Neither of us persuaded one another. Two years later, we probably never will. But when Jamie Woodcock’s book Marx at the Arcade appeared this summer, I found something buried midway through the volume that arguably supports my position. Author Jamie Woodcock describes Battlefield 1942, a first-person shooter videogame released in 2002. It’s a single-player game set during World War II, which retells common Allied myths about WWII as a Manichaean battle of good versus evil.
These myths are twaddle, but they persevere. Responsible historians have acknowledged that Allies did some pretty horrible things, including targeting civilians, pillaging, and rape. But WWII permits citizens of Allied countries, particularly Americans (who didn’t face actual fighting on the home front), that we fought a clearly moral fight against a clearly villainous enemy, and therefore war is heroic, soldiers are virtuous, and TAKE A BATH AND GET A JOB YOU SLOPPY HIPPY JESUS CHRIST!
Battlefield 1942 spawned a series of similarly themed games featuring you, the first-person protagonist, fighting various military conflicts throughout the Twentieth Century. But Woodcock expresses surprise at one series entry, Battlefield 1, set during World War I. Before this game, designers, like filmmakers, largely avoided WWI. We just don’t talk about the First World War, except in tones of regret and high-minded anomie. Unlike World War II, World War I is too awful for mythology.
Which is why Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman isn’t national security state propaganda. Because when William Moulton Marston created Wonder Woman, he deliberately set her into World War II. Dressed in stars-and-stripes pinup girl underwear, she trounced Nazis, deflected bullets, and generally participated in the war’s pro-American narrative. She was a GI’s dream. This Wonder Woman actually was wartime propaganda, and didn’t even pretend otherwise.
Jenkins subverts this by taking the story back one world war.
Movie makers have largely avoided World War I because, in our collective memories, it completely lacks any heroic through-line. When remembering personalities from that war, most people remember Alvin York and the Red Baron, and nobody else. Campaigns like Gallipoli, which was complete slaughter, or Verdun, which dragged for eleven months before anything happened, are the complete opposite of heroism. This war isn’t a triumph of national security state marketing, it’s a shared international disaster.
Like the Battlefield game designers, Patty Jenkins establishes the war’s persistent, nihilistic futility. Diana wanders the trenches of France, horror-stricken by the walking wounded and carts filled with corpses. Moved by a widow’s plight, she breaches the line and liberates a Belgian village; the people celebrate with wine and dancing. Then in the next scene, the germans destroy that village with mustard gas. Diana stands, powerless and numb, among the dead who celebrated her yesterday.
This isn’t a function of individual action. The movie takes pains to emphasize that no one person caused this war, and no one person will solve it. Diana enters the conflict with dreams of heroism at Troy or Thermopylae; she exits it acknowledging that she can only face the enemy before her. She’s a superhero, admittedly, but she cannot heroically alter the course of history. She can only know her own values and keep fighting.
Wonder Woman stands as the highest-grossing WWI movie ever made. But that doesn’t surprise me, since not many WWI movies have been made. Hollywood, and its satellites in places like London and Mumbai, love narratives of perfect moral symmetry, from Rambo to Casablanca, and World War I persistently refuses to reduce that way. Instead, before this one, the most successful screen WWI I’ve seen was Black Adder Goes Forth, drenched in claustrophobia and complete paralysis.
From Wilfred Owen’s poems to Pat Barker’s novels, World War I has provided some touching, substantive art. It hasn’t, however, jibed well with screen adaptations, which demand a morally neat universe. Wonder Woman succeeds because it forces its heroine to adjust her definition of victory, and us with her. It resists the military’s exhortations that whatever it does is, perforce, right. For that reason, I’m pretty sure the national security apparatus didn’t bankroll this production.
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