KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (19)

By: Kio Stark
June 3, 2022

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite TV shows of the Seventies (1974–1983).

WONDER WOMAN | 1975–1979

The New, Original Wonder Woman (1976) is about a lot of things, the most satisfying, least complex of which, looking back on it, is that it’s about punching Nazis. It is campy, silly, and sturdily constructed of both jingoism Cold-War style and misogyny as, well, business as usual.

Chances are you know the basic shape. Hidden world of Amazons who frolic in negligées, glory in sisterhood, and live in peace but are nonetheless highly trained for battle. Onto the beach of Paradise Island crashes a WW2 hero, Steve. He is nursed back to health by Lynda Carter as Princess Diana (not that one), who becomes pretty keen on this whole “men” thing, now that she sees one in the flesh.

Queen Hippolyta warns her about men and “their wars, their greed, their hostilities, their barbaric masculine behavior.” Diana protests that it’s been thousands of years of the no-men paradise. Maybe they’ve changed?

Diana whisks Steve back to his right world, drops him off at the hospital, cheerfully kicks some bank robber butt. She sees that the security of her paradise depends on protecting the freedom and democracy of this world from enslavement by evil totalitarian Nazis. She takes up the cause, often by saving Steve’s sorry, overconfident ass so he can live to punch more Nazis. After fist-fighting Steve’s secretary/love-interest, revealed to be a Nazi spy, Diana declares, “the Nazis don’t care about their women. Any civilization that does not recognize the female is doomed to destruction. Women are the wave of the future, and sisterhood is stronger than anything.”

Eventually, Diana’s little sister Drusilla (young Debra Winger) shows up, a force of unbridled teenage id who eats ice cream with displaced lust. When Diana explains her “dowdy” military uniform as necessary so she can secretly work for Steve and help win the war, Drusilla’s chin drops. “You work for a man? He tells you what to do and you do it?” Breathlessly, Drusilla asks what men are like. “Oh, they’re like children, they’re like gods, they’re like geniuses, and fools. They are all things.”

For a little cis girl in the 1970s, it was a strange and confusing lesson in femininity and feminism. It’s all sisterhood and demanding respect, except with a busty bustier and a general tendency to choose deference — as if choosing it makes it ok — to all men who aren’t Nazis. I playacted the superstrength and bullet dodging. I wanted the bust and the bustier. I understood that her body was her weapon, and a powerful body had to have “a figure like that.” I was surely, sadly, absorbing the rhaphsodic enchantment with “men.” The only simple part was knowing who to punch.

And now. Now it is 2016, it is 2017, it is 2018. It is 2019, it is 2020, it is 2021. It is 2022, I am writing in the early spring in a creeping-toward-authoritarian racist country at home, with an imperialistic authoritarian war abroad. For fuck’s sake, go punch some Nazis.

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KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (19)

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