Wonder Woman, Heroine of the Post-Truth Age
“You mean—you were lying?” Wonder Woman asks Steve Trevor, a hero and a spy, in the new film that takes her name. The Amazon takes a moment to register his deception; the princess of Themyscira, having come to the world of men from the idyllic Paradise Island, is not accustomed to such manipulation. She pauses. “How do I know you’re not lying to me right now?”
With that, the superhero removes a weapon from her belt: a shimmering rope, golden in color and liquid in movement. She tosses her Lasso of Truth around Steve. He is powerless against it. “I’m taking you to the front,” he admits, robotically. “We are probably going to die.”
is set at the height of World War I, but is otherwise a decidedly modern movie: It stars a woman (Gal Godot) and treats a man, Steve (Chris Pine), as its damsel-in-distress. It has managed, even before its release, to , which is . So Diana Prince, daughter of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons—a character who neatly combines the myths of ancient Greece with aspirations of contemporary America—is decidedly fit as a star for this moment of ever more normalized, and ever more commercialized, feminism.
