Peter Debruge of Variety is exactly right: “Wonder Woman 1984 accomplishes what we look to Hollywood tentpoles to do: It whisks us away from our worries, erasing them with pure escapism.” Indeed, the comic banality of the eighties-chic—permed hair, baggy suits, and neon unitards—is a welcome distraction from the tedium of COVID fatigue, eco-anxieties, and other afflictions of the postmodern capitalist condition. But WW84’s campy portrayal of a past so bright and beautiful advances a sinister “truth”: that this mad world is all that we deserve, that the status quo should be the true object of our desires—a desire for non-desire. …
“You Can Only Have the Truth”: Capitalist Realism Through Wonder Woman 1984
