muse/ings — christina alexandra voros

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Van Horn TX - June 7, 2017

Wonder Woman

Yesterday I woke up like a kid on Christmas.

We were going to the movies, going to pile in the car and drive 100 sun scorched miles to El Paso for no good reason but to sit in the cool dark and watch a big movie on the big screen like it was the only way we knew how to do it. I was feeling pretty good about the idea as I stood in the kitchen making coffee and speaking to no one in particular. “I’ve been waiting... 35 years to see this movie," I said, surprised, and mostly to myself when Stetson, my stepson, rounded the corner stretching. "It's only been out a week" he said, earnest and groggy.

"I know kid, but I've been waiting for someone to make it since I was 4”.

And I had, since before the above picture was taken. I had remembered Wonder Woman as long as I had remembered the sea. I wanted that movie. And I wanted it to be spectacular. It wasn't a thought I had ever given voice to - never truly turned it around in my head - until then, coffee in hand, teenage boy looking at me with affection and a deepening suspicion that I may not be getting off the ranch often enough.

I had never consciously felt bereft in a world without female-superhero-box-office-blockbusters-directed-by-women, in the same way I had never consciously felt limited by my inability to breath under water. It was just how things had always been.

When I learned how to scuba dive, I was equal parts humbled by the vast world I suddenly had access to and empowered by my newfound ability to explore it. Perhaps most importantly, learning to dive made me feel like a badass who could do anything. As expected, watching Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman made me feel like a badass who could do anything too.

And then I burst into tears.

Yes, it made me cry. Not at the end. Not at the beginning. Not at the loss of innocence or the loss of love. Not at the brilliant inversion of Princess Buttercup turned fierce Amazon Warrior nor any other tired female tropes flipped defiantly on their head. It was no moment in particular but the gently growing weight of all of them, a mist coalescing into a downpour, the pricking realization that: "I needed this. My God. I have needed this."

The filmmaker in me, the little girl in me, the stepmother of a 16 year-old cowboy in me, all stepped back in wonderment of the realization that somehow they had collectively pretended away the need for this kind of empowering, mainstream mythological touchstone. And now, they, we, were struck by the question of how we had ever gotten this far without it.

I suppose for me, the answer had always been found in seeking the mythology closer to home, closer than Hollywood. Looking for my heroes in friends and matriarchs, paintings and books, in women who have risked and conquered, in my sisters in arms, in my mothers in arts, in all of those who have persisted.

Despite this, I spent many years answering questions about "being a female DP", about “being a female director” and "how it was different" or “exceptional” or “hard”. The stories I would tell - myself and others – as though willing them to be true - were about it not mattering, about not noticing a difference, about not feeling held back. Surrounded predominantly by men, I had grown so accustomed to the gymnastics of proving myself that my perspective had skewed. I remained unaware of any ceiling above me with the same beguiled ignorance that had once explained my lack of understanding of the universe below the sea.

Yesterday, in an instant, bathed in blue light of an epic battle on a 3D screen, I felt the illusion drop out from beneath me with a thud. I did not know there was a ceiling because I had never thought to look up. How had that happened? Was I simply grateful for the floor I had found myself standing above, or below? Did I think I had been looking up, when I was only looking forward? Perhaps it felt so different from looking down that I was certain I was getting somewhere. I felt no vertigo. It was sufficient. I was doing fine.

When along comes this battle cry bundled up in a DC comic movie, and in one blistering moment, one explosive wrist cross, (a gesture so often implied as a pose of restraint, an emblem of captivity and subjugation, now alchemically inverted like a spell reversed) I recognized that damn glass ceiling, because I heard it break. By the grace of those who have wielded that hammer, who have scythed the path to clear a way to the ladder itself, it was only here, standing at the head of that uncovered trail, that I realized the journey I was on could lead to a place with a view I could have never imagined. A view I had never asked to see. The credits rolled. I caught my breath, and looked up.

We stepped out of the theater into the blinding West Texas sun. “It was a pretty great,” said Stetson, smiling.

My mind raced. I considered the launch point coordinates into my imminent lecture, the historic implications of what we had just seen, what it meant and why it mattered and then - I looked up at this smiling kid, awash in the glow of a great movie and grinned right back at him. I sucked in a deep gasp of dry air and exhaled it out with gratitude, into a world where a woman can be a superhero, in a box office blockbuster, directed by a woman, who in her own right is a superhero, and in the life of this movie-loving-16-year-old kid, that’s not going to be a big deal anymore. For him it’s just the way it is. Because of films like this, directors like this, women like this, there’s a generation coming that will think this is just the way it’s always been. That will be a kind of mythology too, but damn if it isn’t a story I look forward to telling.