Cover photo from The Direct.
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.
The movie effectively begins with Pedro Pascal’s Maxwell Lord introducing his audience—Americans of his time and moviegoers of ours—to the fundamental premise of this movie: “Life is good, but it can be better.” His promise, as we soon discover, is a lie. Lord is but a slick con artist disguised as an all-knowing business mogul; his empire, ironically called Black Gold Cooperative, is built on nothing but faith and fiction. Upon acquiring the Dreamstone (a magical relic which grants its users one wish) and using his wish to become “the Dreamstone itself,” he sheds the slough of a snake-oil salesman and becomes Capital par excellence. By granting his interlocutors’ wishes at a price, he quickly amasses untold riches, power, and authority. Were it not for Diana’s tearful moral appeal and the abrupt (and unexplained) stirring of his conscience, Lord’s desire for absolute power would have been realized, inadvertently bringing about a nuclear apocalypse. In typical Hollywood fashion, Lord’s defeat—denoted by the mere utterance “I renounce my wish”—miraculously annuls the seemingly unstoppable catastrophe, enabling an immediate return to “the way things were.”
That the film is bookended by moralizing pontifications about the value and necessity of truth suggests that the conflict between Diana and Maxwell is intended to symbolize a clash between truth and lies, reality and fantasy. Lord epitomizes the allure of capitalist excess, promising his audience that to “have it all, you just have to want it.” Diana, on the other hand, proclaims the gospel of austerity and self-abnegation: “This world was a beautiful place just as it was, and you cannot have it all. You can only have the truth. And, the truth is enough. The truth is beautiful. So look at this world… and look at what your wish is costing it. You must be the hero… Renounce your wish if you want to save this world.” The power to “save this world” is in our hands, but we may only do so if we learn to distrust our desires and concede that the status quo is best left untouched.
Where other superhero flicks conclude in VFX-heavy battles where the villainous Id is clubbed into submission by the heroic superego, WW84 demonstrates the unassailable virtue of the superego by making Lord yield to Diana’s moral suasion. Lecturing us on the inherent self-destructiveness of our desires and the necessity of accepting the status quo, Wonder Woman exemplifies Yale anthropologist David Graeber’s “purely reactionary” superhero—not only does she appear in response to specific threats, her moral vision for the future is also insipid and vacuous, insofar as it entails an indiscriminate “appreciation” for the present and admits no room for even the slightest adjustment.
Sure, the wishes Lord grants are dreams of excess and extravagance: riches, fame, fast cars, nuclear weapons, sex appeal, and even the restoration of a bygone kingdom. But the movie does not denigrate “excessive desires” as much as it assails desire tout court. Recall that the movie does not distinguish “acceptable” desires from their “illicit” or “excessive” counterparts and that it demands the collective renunciation of all wishes. The existing social order, it warns us, is so fragile that even the granting of a few wishes initiates the countdown on total civilization meltdown and brings about riots and looting (the perennial bourgeois fear).
The movie thus presents the threat of dystopia as being always already at hand, ready to rear its head should we ever desire, whatever our desires may be. This is not to say that the film is urging us to detach ourselves from earthly attachments or to seek the golden mean, for such a message of ascetic modesty or anti-consumerist moderation threatens the raison d’être of capital. We are to continue consuming, as the dazzling exuberance of ’84 assumes unbridled production and consumption as its “factory-default setting,” the prelapsarian state of being. Even Diana, the resident pseudo-ascetic, marvels at the beauty of material abundance towards the end of the movie: “So many things. So, so many things.” Desire is not needed for consumption, as the film redraws the boundaries of what ought and ought not be considered under the banner of “desire.” That which we might ordinarily construe as desire—the desires that fuel consumption (or consumerism)—is redefined as not desire at all but a brute fact necessarily inhering in the social and moral fiber of our existence. What the film represents as “desire” is instead an undisciplined surplus energy that seeks to break out of “the System,” the capitalist pneumatic network of channels and outlets that demands but frustrates our libidinal investments. In other words, the castigation the film levels towards desires—nominally all desires—is in fact solely aimed at those which are detrimental to the hegemonic capitalist system. Those desires which the system depends upon are instead recast as articles of fact, beyond the realm of choice or question.
The issue that drives the plot of the film, therefore, is that individuals are seeking more than the “more” offered by capitalism, a “more” that breaks the form and structure of the capitalist machinery, dissolves the rigidities of social hierarchy, and short-circuits a regime which guarantees only perpetual dissatisfaction. This, in turn, provides a partial explanation for why the film construes Diana’s wish (to bring Steve, her boyfriend, back to life), however seemingly innocuous, as equally blameworthy in contributing to social dissolution—all desires lead to catastrophe, because all such desires threaten to undermine the smooth functioning of the capitalist world-reason. (One should note too that upon her reunion with Steve, she instantly forgets about her mission to locate the Dreamstone, and goes for a romantic late-night stroll with her boyfriend along the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Later, with Steve lying next to her in bed, she even considers hanging up her boots, which means nothing less than a rejection of society and a repudiation of the superhero genre itself.)
It is this particular configuration of desire that the movie seeks to contain and neutralize, especially since such desiring, we are told, is irrational, short-sighted, and egocentric. Not a single character in the movie displayed the perceptiveness to realize the gravity of the situation and to use their one wish to imagine a better, fairer world for everyone. Even the brilliant Dr. Barbara Minerva, having been a “friendless, sorry loser” for much of her life, wishes to “be like Diana,” and uses the stone to give herself a makeover, thereby reinscribing on her body societal standards of attractiveness, rather than rewriting these social codes or reconfiguring structures of gender relations. As far as Hollywood’s concerned, nothing screams “feminism” like an old-fashioned ass-whooping of creeps and baddies (all males, of course).
In short, that the characters of WW84 possess the means to play God but use those powers to enrich themselves only reifies the insuperability of the prevailing socio-moral order, thus reaffirming the hegemonic values of the existing moral regime as self-evident. The film’s silence on the possibility of reimagining human relations is thus symptomatic of what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. John Hunt Publishing, 2009.
At no point does the film present any potential of solidarity, equality, or freedom from the shackles of the patriarchy, capitalism, and state oppression. Instead, its heady journey into the depths of the human soul reaffirms the existing social order as immutable and ultimately desirable. The final scene, set in a “winter wonderland” of a Christmas marketplace that disavows any aesthetic reference to the eighties, satisfies the audience’s wistful longing of life as it was and always has been, the restored Edenic idyll, and muses, “So many things. So, so many things.” 1984 – paradise lost and regained.
What the film obscures is that the status quo is not in fact paradise—or at least not paradise for most. The systematic erosion of social security and the resurgence of Cold War tensions under Reagan, coupled with the turbulence brought about by energy and financial crises, meant that the 80s were not at all as rosy as this nostalgia trip has led us to believe. But that is precisely Hollywood’s mojo: the resurrection of the no-longer as a dreamy utopia, the presentation of commodified images as a source of re-enchantment, overcoming the depthlessness of contemporary culture and society with a retrospective hyperreality. It is appropriately anachronistic that the defeat of Lord defuses once and for all the threat of a nuclear apocalypse and the (nominal) otherness of the Soviets. The triumph of American capitalism and the implosion of the Soviet Union would therefore appear not as historical contingencies but teleological certainties, prematurely and erroneously declared in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. The ideological bipolarity of the 80s thus becomes a relic of an aestheticized “history,” a peculiarity to which we relate in a “detached spectatorialism,”Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. John Hunt Publishing, 2009. and against which “today’s society must appear post-ideological.”Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1989.
One might say that WW84 achieves nothing—its conclusion is a reinstatement of the status quo, and its events are inconsequential in relation to the DC cinematic universe—but that is precisely the point: nothing prevails. The defeat of Lord and the elimination of the nuclear threat metonymize the foreclosure of radical otherness, stamping out what-ifs and why-nots with a label of illegitimacy. Taken as a whole, the film is not, as Fredric Jameson argues, “empty distraction or ‘mere’ false consciousness, but rather (it stands) as a transformational work on social and political anxieties and fantasies.”Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and utopia in mass culture.” Social text 1 (1979): 130-148. The drama of WW84 gratifies our “sinful” desire for change by expressing and projecting it on the screen, but in the same gesture, it conceals the fact that expressivity has served as a convenient vehicle for misdirection and neutralization. Exemplifying what Robert Pfaller calls “interpassivity”, the film first enacts on our behalf the pleasures of disrupting the economy of toil and rewards, giving form to fantasies of power, recognition, and wholeness. But, like the Dreamstone, it then performs a sleight of hand: by projecting an illusory resolution upon a falsely simulated predicament, it manages and pacifies the “frightening and potentially damaging eruption of powerful archaic desires and wish-material.”Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and utopia in mass culture.” Social text 1 (1979): 130-148. That nothing prevails is thus desirable; anything else would cost us the world.
In short, that the characters of WW84 possess the means to play God but use those powers to enrich themselves only reifies the insuperability of the prevailing socio-moral order, thus reaffirming the hegemonic values of the existing moral regime as self-evident. The film’s silence on the possibility of reimagining human relations is thus symptomatic of what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”
But this kernel of “truth,” as the movie intends for its audience, is as true then (in a fictional 1984) as it is today, in our time and reality. So why situate this drama in the 80s? What does the periodization accomplish? Does it indicate, as Simon Reynolds postulates, that “our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times?”Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. Macmillan, 2011. This shameless recycling and continual citation of the eighties in contemporary film, music, television, and fashion, Fisher notes, lends credence to Jameson’s concept of the “nostalgia mode,” “a formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms adequate to contemporary experience.”Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. John Hunt Publishing, 2014.
One might suggest that the resurgence of the past as commodified images betokens a cultural sensibility which recognizes or senses that there is nothing here in the present that provides our reality—thus evacuated of “ideology,” “belief,” and “metanarratives”—with meaning, significance, or coherence. Under the rubric of capitalist realism, there is only ennui, fatigue, a cruising consciousness that is resigned to deriving pleasure from “the little things in life” as it stumbles from one project to another, and a profound but unarticulated anxiety about being confronted with the challenge of authenticity. The irony here is that in its shameless reproduction of retro-aesthetics, WW84 creates a fictional past that is essentially undifferentiated from and indifferent to the real present—the Otherness of past-ness is de-sublimated into an uninspiring “eternal eighties,” illuminating the edges of the one-dimensional temporality of capitalist realism. One should query why 1984 was the year of choice, forging an instant connection to Orwell but doing nothing with this (apparent) intertextuality—is it arbitrary? Is its arbitrariness a sign that the year is as insignificant as the period? 1984, the eighties, and the present are conjoined at the hip, fixed on the plane of sameness, as the alterity of the past is neutered by pastiche.
Deprived of affective sensitivity and starved of a critical vocabulary, we may only accept the present as eternal, convince ourselves (or have someone or something tell us so) that it is desirable, yet experience in our bones the gnawing discomfort that something is amiss. We occupy a dispirited, demoralized temporality, a weightless purgatory that could not penetrate the fog of the present, and may thus only seek to resuscitate the long-gone and no-longer in order to mourn our “lost futures,” relying on pastiche to relieve our felt need for new horizons and new worlds, to get a feeling of “presence” in the present. In the meantime, we may only make do with “the truth that we have”: that even “pure escapism”—a commodity of the culture industry—is frustrated by the capitalist-realist enclosure of time and imagination.