Watching Wonder Woman

This will be a short post.

One of the scenes in the new Wonder Woman movie jumped out at me, the one where Diana interrupts Steve Trevor while he’s in the Themysciran pool of water.  Steve covers his manhood.  Most online commentary I see on this scene focuses on the humor of Diana asking Steve whether he is a typical man, to which he answers that he’s above average.  However, what caught my attention is when she asks him what is that, and for a moment both Steve and the audience assume she’s referencing his manhood.  Then Steve and the audience realize she’s asking him about his watch.

The reason why the association of phallus and watch stands out for me is that it echoes a moment from Angela Carter’s short story, “The Company of Wolves,” wherein the phallus is associated with a compass:  “This young man had a remarkable object in his pocket.  It was a compass.  She looked at the little round glass face in the palm of his hand and watched the wavering needle with a vague wonder” (145).  In both cases, the female characters are presented as innocent and the watch or compass seems to reflect a different and new way of understanding or being in the world.  It’s as if narratively the feminine resides in a prelapsarian understanding of time and space.

Indeed, Themyscira the island seems to be a timeless space, and the intrusion of Steve and the Germans, all male, introduce a different kind of time, time as finite, resulting in the death of Antiope, as well as other Amazonians and the Germans.  Diana has spent her childhood here since the time of Zeus’ departure, and now that she’s a grown woman she feels compelled to move on.  The watch seems to represent a departure from feminine time/space and a movement into masculine time/space or a phallus defined world.  In both cases, that of Wonder Woman and the unnamed heroine of “The Company of Wolves,” survival seems to depend on not being defined and determined by that world.