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ada_hoffmannThe buzz around “Wonder Woman” has been so exciting to me, but because I’ve been so busy this spring, I had to wait a month before I saw it in the theatre. For the most part, it lived up to the hype. Wonder Woman is an amazing character, the movie on a craft level is beautiful and compelling, and so much of what it’s doing is empowering and good.
The Wonder Woman movie falls down, though, when it comes to disability. Dr. Poison is a villain who could have been complex and intriguing, and a foil against Wonder Woman’s goodness. Elena Anaya’s acting is vulnerable and on-edge in a way that consistently suggests there is more to the character than we see. But instead of actually developing that character, the movie relies on her facial disfigurement as a shorthand for both her evil and her pitiability.
Better minds than me have already explained why this is a problem. If you want some explanation in that vein, I would recommend this Teen Vogue article (which also shouts out to several other movie villains).
But I decided that I wasn’t content just to call out the problem – I wanted to talk about how the problem could be fixed.
One option, of course, would be to make Dr. Poison non-disabled. (A quick check in the Wikipedia suggests that her comics incarnation is not disabled, and wears a mask for other reasons.) This is a totally valid option and would definitely make the movie less problematic. But it also feels to me like a lazy fix. Once a movie is out where the character is disabled, asking to make her non-disabled feels tantamount to saying that you can never have a disabled villain. (Or, worse, that you shouldn’t try to write disabled characters at all, lest something like this be read into them.) I don’t quite believe that; what I believe is more nuanced.
(Full disclosure: my novel draft contains a hero and a villain who are both #ownvoices disabled. I have some skin in this game.)
So, if someone gave me a magic pen that could magically make any edits to this movie that I wanted, here’s how I would fix the disability representation in Wonder Woman.
Needless to say, there are some MAJOR WONDER WOMAN SPOILERS below the cut.
1. Make some of the good guys visibly, physically disabled. Not just pitiable veterans returning from the front, which we do see in a scene or two, but the kind of heroes whose actions have a direct impact on the plot. When heroes and villains are disabled in similar ways, it becomes much harder to read the villain’s disability as inherently evil.
Luckily, there are a lot of WWI veterans in this cast, so making some of them disabled is child’s play. We already have Charlie the Scottish sniper, who is disabled by PTSD. I was really happy with how he was portrayed. But that’s a psychological disability, not a physical one.
Steve, when we first see him, is in a plane crash that he barely survives. It would be easy to have him be maimed as a result of the plane crash. The healing waters of Themyscira might be able to heal him to an extent, but not all the way, especially for an injury as large as, say, a missing limb.
This could also add an extra depth to Steve’s character arc. The higher-ups in London don’t want him going on his mission, not just because they are preparing for armistice, but also because as a disabled soldier he should be honourably discharged. He worries that, due to his injury, he is no longer “above average”. Diana furrows her brow at him and asks why that would make a difference.
A potential drawback of making Steve disabled is that he dies, sacrificing himself for the other characters, at the end. So if he is disabled, it’s important that he and Dr. Poison not be the only two disabled characters, lest we fall into a whole other set of problematic tropes. At least one more minor character needs to be a disabled hero who lives.
It would be nice to see disabled women in Themyscira, too. Not everyone on the island appears to be an Amazon warrior, or at least not one who’s actively training; or there could even be warriors who have a disfigurement and are still able to fight. Queen Hippolyta fought in a war long ago and hates the topic of war now; a disabling injury could easily be part of her backstory.
If you don’t like these specific choices, you can pick different characters – there are a literally endless number of ways to make characters disabled.
2. Give Dr. Poison a little more dialogue to flesh out her character. It doesn’t matter who she talks to. It could be General Ludendorff or other German soldiers. It could be Diana, Steve, or one of their allies. It could even be one of her test subjects. We don’t need to know her entire life story, but we do need to get a coherent idea of her worldview, why she is here, the things that she tells herself about the work she is doing.
The Wikipedia says that, according to the actress, Dr. Poison’s disfigurement is a result of testing her poisons deliberately on herself. This would have been a great thing to see discussed onscreen.
The point of this is twofold. First, disability issues aside, the character isn’t developed nearly as much as she deserves. Second, if we learn how she thinks, we can avoid the default of “I hate everybody because I am disabled.” (I’m assuming this isn’t her actual deal.)
3. Let Dr. Poison be competent in an actual fight scene. Really, super-powered people fighting each other is this genre’s bread and butter. Dr. Poison is a horribly dangerous person who is great at science and who kills thousands of people from afar, but if she’s in a superhero movie and is not in a fight scene, then she isn’t a credible threat to the heroes – something that all the other villains, however briefly, get to be.
She doesn’t look like she could trade punches with Diana or Steve. But she doesn’t need to. Let her use her poisons, and the terrain, to her advantage. She can wait for the heroes to be in an enclosed space and throw poison in after them. She can run around cracking her super-strength vials open under German soldiers’ noses so that they form a line of defense too powerful for Steve and company to deal with quickly. She can basically be the equivalent of a battlefield controller from an RPG, except with powers that are based on WWI-era chemical weapons. (If she inhales her own super-strength gas at some point, that would also be fine – although I’m guessing the fact that she made it “for” Ludendorff, and not for herself, is supposed to tell us something about her.)
4. Dr. Poison’s final scene, in which Ares invites Diana to kill her and the rest of humanity, can stay where it is. We can assume that she ran out of poison, or that Ares has her magically immobilized, or whatever. That’s fine. Ares does not, however, have to tear off Dr. Poison’s mask and expose her disfigured face as if it is meant to be shocking. Because that is 100% irrelevant to what this scene is actually about.
Why does Ares bring out Dr. Poison as an example of the evil of humanity? Because she’s an evil person who is responsible for the horrible deaths of thousands. This is an argument that holds up equally well regardless of what her face looks like.
Why does Diana refuse to kill Dr. Poison? There are probably a lot of reasons, but her face isn’t one. Maybe something from 2 convinced Diana that something about Dr. Poison is still good and redeemable. But it’s much more likely that Diana’s decision isn’t about Dr. Poison at all. It’s about Steve having just sacrificed himself and restored her belief that humans can act out of selfless love. It’s about him specifically, and about humanity in general. And it’s also probably to do with the fact that Diana is the godkiller. She’s here to fight Ares, not to kill a bunch of other, non-god people.
None of this has anything to Dr. Poison’s disability, and there’s no reason to dramatically expose hidden parts of her body in order to make any of these points.
Instead, Diana refuses to kill Dr. Poison, and Dr. Poison flees. She makes it as far as the edge of the battlefield before she’s brought down by some of the guys from Team Steve. They capture her alive, and promise to put her on trial for her war crimes.
*
Like any fix-it plan, this probably has holes that you can poke in it, or parts that other disabled authors would do differently. I also don’t want to overstate my problem with Wonder Woman. I really enjoyed the movie, and I’m thrilled at what it’s doing for women and girls. I just wish that disabled girls were able to watch the movie with the same joy as everyone else.
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Date: 2017-07-09 01:01 am (UTC)That is definitely something that should not have been left on the page! Even in passing, it tells you a lot about the character: what she values, what she's willing to risk, what she views as important about herself and her relationship to her work; if nothing else, it absolutely kills even the implication that she embarked on her course of supervillainy in consequence of her disability, rather than incurring it willingly along the way—which would become a lot more neutral in a film in which the heroes had also willingly taken damage for their countries.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-09 06:05 pm (UTC)Yes, exactly! All of that. Yes.
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Date: 2017-07-11 01:18 pm (UTC)Second, I have seen so many people talk about her as bad representation of a disabled character. I haven't seen nearly as many long, in-depth think pieces from people like me who strongly, strongly related to her in a positive way, and that just makes me so sad. Like, I understand why elements of her character are a little thoughtless and could have been handled better. I get that.
But I haven't worked out how to express that more eloquently than, "DAMMIT, just let me keep my badass genius lady mad scientist who is good at killing things and gets to LIIIIIVE!"
I also think people are putting way too much pressure on this one movie. We have a whole one film with a huge box office take, a female super hero, a female writing team, and a female director. ONE. It is flawed because all things made by humans always are. I don't want to tell anyone to stop calling out the places were it could be improved. But fucking hell, please let's not use it as a scapegoat for everything wrong with representation in all movies everywhere. Stick that shit to something that deserves it.
To be clear, I'm not directing this frustration at you specifically. I'm only saying it here because this feels like one of very few places I can and not be grossly misunderstood. If it's too much, just let me know and I'll delete/edit this.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-11 07:01 pm (UTC)TBH, my initial reaction to Dr. Poison in the movie was "What is this lady's deal? SHE LOOKS INTERESTING. I WANT TO KNOW THIS LADY'S DEAL." I felt like the movie didn't quite deliver on whatever it was that set that off for me, but I'm not sure I can articulate that with anything other than what I already said here.
When I went back online I saw that some of my friends with visible physical disabilities were more upset, some even viscerally upset, so I modified my opinion accordingly. Not everyone has to do that.
For full disclosure - the villain in my novel draft is an autistic woman who is more or less the mad scientist type, and who unleashes effects (not poison) on large areas with civilian populations in them. I love her, and I've spent a long time thinking about how to write her in a way that isn't total fail. So after watching and talking about Dr. Poison, the recognition was strong enough that some of those same thinky gears went compulsively back into motion. I didn't compose this post out of righteous indignation; I literally composed it in my head the night after seeing Wonder Woman because my disabled supervillain thinky gears would not shut up.
And you're right about pressure. When there's only one of a given thing and it's a badly needed social justice thing, pressure gets put on it to be everything to everyone. This is why I'm trying to be careful to always mention what I liked about the movie - I definitely liked it much more than I disliked it. At the same time, in a situation where all things made by humans are flawed, I think it can be worthwhile to have a reasoned discussion about what we've learned from the flaws of each one to carry forward with us.
If you can ever manage to articulate more of your Dr. Poison love, I would be interested to read about it <3
no subject
Date: 2017-07-12 01:26 pm (UTC)I feel you on "disabled supervillain thinky gears," by the way. I got home and immediately started writing a more science-y retelling of M. R. James's "The Ash Tree" with a female protagonist. I just want so much more from this character. There's something so compelling about her, and the little we know about her. When Chris Pine started talking to her about entropy, that clinched it. I feel so bad for her, because you can see that she started thinking someone FINALLY understood her, and then it just turns out to be a trick.
I have something half-written, but like you, I have to modify it based on the reactions I've seen from other people I really care about. It's tricky, and I might not finish it, depending on the other projects I've committed to blog-wise. If it goes up one day, I'll let you know.