The Neo-Cons hijacked Wonder Woman!

I have to admit, I am a little concerned. It's not just a matter of resisting the re-writing of a character who I consider to be pop culture's most important female role model. It's not just a matter of resisting change as such. Heck, when they showed photos of model-come-actress Adrianne Palicki in the newly styled Wonder Woman latex costume I kinda thought it was hot.

At least it was an improvement on the attempts to re-vamp the comic book character's outift a couple of years ago, when she looked like a 1990's fashion victim (see left)....

No, my concern goes deeper. Having just watched the 2011 pilot of the NBC Wonder Woman series, I am convinced that some neo-con lawyers were heavily involved in the script-writing. I know it sounds funny, but I am serious - there is some uncomfortable political agenda behind much of the script. And the consistent "evil-eye" hard face worn by Palicki throughout the pilot episode did nothing to soften the blow of references to torture as evidence gathering, manipulating the legal advisory department to sidestep the law, and use of the PATRIOT Act to justify some highly questionable behaviour.

Wonder Woman's character was invented by a psychologist during the second world war when DC Comics approached him to create a new patriotic hero. He was an adamant feminist and created the first female superhero, whose powers were bestowed upon her by the (Greek) gods and goddesses. Her task was to bring the lessons of peace, love and justice to a world that was warring. She was given a lasso of truth and bracelets to deflect bullets. Wonder Woman never attacked, she only ever defended....

70 years later, in the umpteenth attempt to bring Wonder Woman back into mainstream popularity, Palicki lashes out with her golden lasso and strangles people to unconsciousness, she threatens wounded bad guys and jabs them with needles to get blood samples. In fact she silently admits to using torture to elicit evidence from one man. Her detective ally refuses to let her make a move based on this evidence gained as "poisonous fruit" but she remains righteous - apparently if many lives are at risk, it's ok to torture the bad guy.

Wait a minute. I'm sorry WHAT???? Does this not sound reminiscent of the Bush

administration's justification of the use of torture to elicit evidence from detainees in Guantanamo Bay and hundreds of other locations around the world where the CIA sent their "extraordinary renditions"?

Any international lawyer will tell you that the prohibition of torture is one of the few absolute pre-emptory norms which exist in concrete terms. Despite what the neo-con lawyers were advising the Bush administration in the torture memos.

It went further in this disturbing pilot episode. At one point, a character who is Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee confronts Wonder Woman, accusing her of such disgusting behaviour that "not even the most liberal reading of the PATRIOT Act would justify what you did". The USA PATRIOT Act - in full, the "Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" Act, introduced in 2001 - was a bill passed in response to the Sept 11 attacks. It removed numerous procedural restrictions on police, FBI and CIA actions, leading to indeterminate detentions, huge invasions of privacy, a veritable roll-back of civil rights in the US and a discriminatory focus on immigrants. It was also was part of the neo-conservative lawyers' justification for the use of torture.

So what is one to think of the fact that the woman whose original task was to teach the ways of truth, peace, justice and sexual equality, has now been reinvented as a unilateral crime-fighting

machine who goes above and beyond the law, ever scowling at both her enemies and her allies, threatening and in fact using force, justifying torture to elicit evidence?

Her "don't mess with me, I'm a hard bitch" face seemed to portray this deep shift in political paradigm. (I'm serious, she only smiled once in the whole episode, when she spoke to the victim around whose plight the episode centred, and of whom she made a point of informing everyone at her press conference that he was a black teenager from the ghetto. I was a bit confused until her new right wing stance started to become evident, and my only conclusion was that this was an attempt to show she really does care about the underdog. Kind of like Bush flying over New Orleans a few days after Hurricane Katrina, to show he really cared, too.)

Perhaps this 21st Century Wonder Woman is after all completely in line with what happened to the national identity of the country for whom she was invented 70 years ago. Then it really was about bringing ideals as a leader to a new world order. In recent decades it has rather appeared to be about imposing ideals as a unilateral world police force down the barrel of a weapon of mass destruction. Perhaps I shouldn't be so disturbed that my long-time heroine is once again speaking the truth, I should just accept that the truth is a little uglier. Perhaps I should accept her ever angry face as the replacement of the one that was created of the earth and bestowed with Aphrodite's beauty and Athena's wisdom, just as the face of US foreign policy has lost its beauty in the decades since the second world war.

Still I am disturbed, and it's because of the very reason I love (the original) Wonder Woman so much (see my previous blog posts). She is a pop culture role model. If she is now the voice of the 21st Century America, it disturbs me that this might be internalised by the next generation of world leaders.

And I am disturbed as to what happened to her feminist ideals as well. She used to be a champion of sexual equality, (apart from demonstrating that women can be both strong and vulnerable, in one comic book adventure rather than act from pure hatred or righteousness, she

convinced a female member of the Nazi regime to return to her humanity and abandon the Nazi project) now she is spitting hatred at the sight of another powerful, beautiful woman and threatening to kill the female villain played by Elizabeth Hurley (shown left in character).

And although Palicki's Wonder Woman makes a point about dolls being made in her likeness with impossible breasts, she admits that she needs to sell them in order to fund her crime-fighting, and she even uses her latex-packaged breasts to sexually intimidate men: "Like my outfit officer? This outfit opens doors for me. It's gonna open that one, isn't it?!"

I'm not sure this was what Wonder Woman's original creator had in mind when he published in The American Scholar in 1941:

"Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman."

I breathed a sigh of relief to read that NBC has already axed this failed pilot. And I have to re-iterate, it's not because I'm opposed to an update of Wonder Woman. It's because her core values had been hijacked for disturbing political ends. It's not the fate we should wish upon any super hero!