#thoughtfulfangirlingcommentary

So does that mean we should think the ending is a false one? That Amphibian Man got to be free but Elisa succumbed to her wounds and this is why Giles never saw her again? The scars were just that after all. It was clearly too obvious that this is truly how the movie is intended to end.

But this isn't just a story. Del Toro & Company punctures this whimsical romance with some harsh realism. This isn't like our traditional gruesome fairytales, where things go from dark to grim. It's just... life. Elisa lives a simple, unfulfilling life. She has good friends and isn't necessarily unhappy, but it's not enough. She isn't the sexless, passive woman of many of those stories. She's real and complex and multidimensional.   We have Strickland being the epitome of 1960's toxic masculinity, chalk full of sexism, racism, and ableism. The people around him can see he is gross but they pretend everything is okay because they feel helpless or that the error is actually in themselves. Amphibian Man is ethereal, godlike, and fantastical, but he's also scared, brutal, and lonely. He's vulnerable and yet loving.

All these things and more, throughout the movie, point to a harsh realism, and I think this is an intentional contrast. These elements are intended to be side by side. I seem to recall Del Toro saying that he wanted to make this movie as a sort of ode to cinema and the stories they tell. I find it then, most likely that this story within a story is intentional on his part. He doesn't want us to watch the movie once, go 'oh that was a good twist' and set it aside again. He wants us to to be particpants. With this story format, we get to ponder it, engage with it, and make it our own.

Personally, I choose to believe that Elisa got her happy ending. Given everything I've said above and more I can't articulate, I think Gile's story is happening side by side the actual story, and they twine together at times, and diverge at others. Does Giles know that Elisa masturbated in her tub while she cooked him eggs every morning? Are we supposed to think that he supposes that's so? Did he suspect that Elisa sat on the bus, painting her finger against the window pane of a bus, and making water follow the motions of her fingertip? It's not unreasonable, but also not necessary. And again, it's up for each and every one of us to decide.

At the end of the day though, I don't think the question was ever meant to be 'why did you make this so obvious,' but rather, 'do you really think that's how it ends' and what does it reveal to you about the way you interpret that. What does it say about the things you enjoy, the messages you think the movie is trying to convey, what you'll accept as reality vs stories, your own preconceptions, and a whole host of other questions.

So if you love this movie but are annoyed at this element, let me suggest analyzing instead what you think of the ending. Was it real? Is the movie really a beautiful love story if it's not real? Does it makes sense that we begin and end the story with Giles's narration and the twist isn't that Elisa might not have made it? How important is it that a movie surprises us?

The writers could have written Strickland making the mental jump to Elisa. She, afterall, was the one who stood before him, a look of defiance on her face after questioning, and signed something he could not understand at him. It would make sense. The writers chose that, for whatever reason—be it his desire not to believe it was his crush or his inability to lay such agency at the feet of a disabled, petite little white girl and/or consequently his likely inclination to see a black woman as more the villain—Zelda would come to his mind first as the likely culprit. He arrives at her home more unhinged than ever.

As I watched this scene in the theater, I got really tense. I didn't want to see another black woman killed on screen. Another black man. For surely he was unhinged enough that he would rain his wrath down upon Zelda's whole family, especially after his story about Delilah and the destruction of all those people during Samson's last act of strength. At this point, I imagined the creators had written themselves into a corner. It seemed wholly inconceivable that this clearly racist, obviously sexist, power hungry, despicable man would be utterly incapable of walking away from a black woman who had known about the "theft" of all of his control without killing her.

If it had happened, people would say 'it's the only thing that made sense' and that this is where the plot was inevitably going to go. But don't forget, he could have just as easily been written to go directly to Elisa's. Elisa could have headed out—as she was determined (though admittedly reluctant) to do—before he arrived. She could have seen him pull up and Giles could have distracted him. There are a dozen different ways that scenario could have been handled. But writers wrote Strickland going to Zelda's.

However, the writers of this movie are not to be trifled with. Zelda's husband, Brewster, interjects through Strickland’s intimidation. Despite Zelda's efforts to protect Elisa and our beloved fishman, he reveals that he'd overheard Zelda's affairs and knew Elisa had 'The Asset’. Brewster, who upon Strickland's entrance, was (understandably) cowed by our unhinged antagonist and did nothing to stop him threatening his wife, speaks over his wife’s wishes and cedes to Strickland's authority and domination. Given the set of prejudices and ways of thinking of our antagonist, this was the perfect—perhaps the only—conceivable way that Strickland was to be gratified into 'bestowing mercy,' as I can't help but imagine he feels in that moment.

With Brewster's obeisance, Strickland's world falls back into place. A man, in deference to him, put his wife 'in her place' and for that pleasing (to Strickland) behavior, so will he ‘reward’ them. He didn't have to. What Zelda and Elisa did was against the law, almost certainly traitorous. He'd already linked them with a Russian spy (Dimitri), and he was willing to shoot Elisa when it came down to it. It would have been evil for him to kill them, but he would not have been punished. Zelda and Brewster were not safe from him until that moment, until Brewster gratified his ego and thus assured him that the world was, in fact, as it should be (according to The Book of Strickland ( •́ ⍨ •̀)) . And the writers did not have to do it that way. If they hadn't, many would have defended the decision of the killing as having made sense from the Watsonian (Strickland's) point of view. But the writers (Doylist) decided that's not how they wanted their film to play out. Theirs was a story of romance and triumph/hope for those society deemed unworthy (lower class, disabled, black, gay, etc).

As I watched this scene though, I was simply struck at how this is such a clear cut example of how you cannot give a story a pass for something horrible happening just because it 'made sense' for that story/character or the world that story was set in. Creators still choose the world they set their stories in, still write the characters into these scenarios. It is a choice, and whether that choice is good or bad does not remove the responsibility of telling that story from the creators' shoulders.

And likewise, we can enjoy a story for it's consistency of character (Watsonian perspective) and world and the ways the protagonists overcome or engage in those narratives while simultaneously being critical of the choice by the writers (Doylist) to put these characters into these settings and these scenarios where they continue a harmful trend of killing off their black and/or queer characters.

And yet, when Diana arrives in England, she sees men talking over pleas for peace. She asks Steve why they won’t let Sir Patrick talk when he’s discussing peace. I wish they would have followed up on that better, because despite it, the next time they’re in conference with the heads of the army, they refuse Steve when he asks to go in and take out Ludendorff’s new weapon on account of the peace talks. Steve presses the need to do this or else “hundreds of thousands will die on both sides.” The fact that he includes ‘on both sides’ to a room full of men who almost certainly don’t care about the Germans is an interesting piece of dialogue to include… an important one. Steve may have oversimplified: “me good; germans bad” at the beginning, but this expresses a belief he holds—one I suspect he develops over the course of the movie until he asks if he is just as much at fault. That sounds like another meta though.

The general replies to Steve’s plea: “They are soldiers; it’s what they’re supposed to do.” [die] This is coming from one of the supposedly ‘good guys.’ Fortunate for us, Diana is having none of it. She calls him out, telling him that he’s a bad man if he sits and does nothing while thousands die. And I think the fact that we, as the audience, don’t see this general’s statements as actually 'evil’ is our own perception of what becomes necessary in war—something Wonder Woman would clearly, adamantly, disagree with us about.

On a somewhat side note: he asks who this woman is and dismisses her berating of him on account of it and has, so far in the movie, repeatedly shown her nothing but contempt; something we only see from the English side of this war interestingly enough. Diana, Princess of Themyscira, has her presence repeatedly questioned because she is a woman, but Dr. Maru exists in Germany with seemingly no issues surrounding her gender.

But Diana and Steve are going to save those hundreds of thousands anyway. He takes her to collect 'backup,’ and they pick up Charlie and Sammy, two men she initially dislikes for being a liar and a murderer. She immediately questions their goodness, which I think was an important step for this movie. For this to be their message, she had to have allies that even she doubted. She does seem to accept it quickly enough though despite neither of them proving for quite time yet that they are, in fact, good people.

She’s starting to learn. People are complicated. The good guys are leaving their own to die. The good guys won’t stop Ares. The good guys dismiss her because she is not a man. So… what are the bad guys like anyway?

They board a train and head for “the front.“ As they get off, we see a crowd of English soldiers, singing war songs, looking hopeful and ready for a fight. Feels a lot like naive Diana, but they don’t have the purpose she does, so instead, it comes off feeling far more like they’re experiencing a nationalistic fervor—a blind loyalty to stay on mission, follow orders… just like the soldiers in Veld later must have felt. And then Diana and co. continue on, and we see those who have already fought, and they are shell shocked and wounded and far from cheerful. It is an exchange much like you can’t help but imagine is happening in kind on the German lines. And each nation chooses to continue this exchange, sending more sheep in the place of those who come back wounded, unable to continue fighting.

And then we meet Chief. And Chief… he’s especially interesting. He does two things with this narrative. He is introduced as a smuggler: he provides goods to both the English and the Germans for profit. This means, he’s the closest we get to a POV from the enemy side that isn’t evil. And when she calls him on it—for aiding, even in a small fashion, the other side—he says it’s what he has left after his people were destroyed, and when she asks who destroyed them, he points to Steve.

Steve. The good guy The Englishmen. The English destroyed a people They are not paragons of perfection

The movie doesn’t linger on this or even have Diana question it, but she also doesn’t call Chief a liar. She seems unsettled, and she lets the subject go, and later, we observe Chief interact with Steve’s men in the trenches, and he is like a saving grace to them. Diana sees no evil in him despite what she is told he does/who he associates with.

And then we have Diana, talking to Sammy about Charlie, the man who kills without honor. She remarks on how he couldn’t do what he said he can, and Sammy replies that “Not everyone can be who we want to be all the time.” What a wonderful, beautiful, human line. I LOVE this line.

“Not everyone can be who we want to be all the time.”

And it’s so true. Interestingly, the way he responds to her question, it sounds on some semantic level like Charile wants to be the murder her claims, but that’s not what Diana sees. This reveals to her a man who never wanted this sort of life and who suffers because of it (his flashes of PTSD/nightmares), and she knows he isn’t evil. He’s… complicated. Yes she saw a darkness there, but now she sees a light.

Sammy reveals to her he always wanted to be an actor, but his 'skin is the wrong color.’ That has nothing to do with the war. The way she was treated as a woman had nothing to do with the war, nothing to do with Ares. This is complicated in a way she’s not prepared for and sowing the seeds of understanding later on. And the exchange ends with  Sammy telling her, “We’re all fighting our own battle Diana.” We all are.

BUT, the Germans we got to know are unquestionably evil. Only, there are some hints that perhaps Ludendorff and Maru do not represent all Germans. We get a scene where the Germans are revealed to be cold (huddling around trash fires) and starving and without sleep. The German man we see trying to defend his men and their plight to Ludendorff gets killed brutally and without warning by him. Ludendorff is evil, even to his own people.

And then we get to meet Germans arguing for the armistice. Sure, they appear to be doing it because they have nothing left to fight with, but even when Ludendorff insists there is, they refuse him. After all, we had plenty of Englishmen yelling at Sir Patrick, trying to drown out his talks for peace. But Ludendorff kills those Germans who would do the right things, viciously and brutally and with great pleasure.

And we have the gala. We have Steve and Diana in a position to take out the key players, and Diana insists on doing so… but Steve stops her. He lets Ludendorff get away and order the strike against Veld. If he hadn’t stopped Diana, an entire village would not have perished, because Ludendorff would be dead. Even though he wasn’t Ares, in the confusion and without a sadist at the helm, Veld would not have perished. This does not make Steve guilty of their slaughter, but it still stands that if he had acted differently, they would not have died, and Diana tells him as much. (I think this is the closest the movie was willing to get to make Steve culpable, so I find it important to read it as such. It was an attempt at showing one of the English, someone close and important to our protagonist, make a human error of destructive proportions. They didn’t want to make Steve look too bad and lose the audience’s sympathies though, so it was played down and maybe even lost some of it’s impact/purpose.) 

And then, then Ludendorff is dead, killed by Diana, but the war is not stopping. And Steve arrives and tells her he needs her help. She realizes, quite on her own, “It’s all of you. My mother was right, you do not deserve me.” Steve doesn’t contradict her statement that it’s not ‘all of you’ and instead, he seems to finally fully take it to heart. It is all of them. Humans. Perhaps… even, it’s him. He has reached a realization that there has been complicity on each side. He certainly has a certain weight on him after what happened to Veld. He asks her, “Don’t you think I wish I could tell you there’s one bad guy making this all happen? But what if it’s not? What if it’s us… Maybe it’s me.” And his guilt and this realization drives him. It drives him to beg Diana to see that although he has caused harm, his belief was in saving those people and his belief now is to save more and to end the war, that he’s going to back up those beliefs with action, and if that isn’t good for something, what is?

And it’s so… so fascinating that Diana’s arc includes her coming from a naive sense of nobody being evil unless corrupted, to seeing that no, there is evil within humanity, and then to return to something adjacent to her original conclusion but with more nuance and more accountability on those who fight those battles… it’s just… it truly is beautiful. The corruption isn’t just Ares, it’s inside them all along, and only they have the power to overcome that.

There are two things left—I know, this is getting so long—that tells me the movie was truly trying to convey that Germans weren’t just 'the bad guys.’ The first is that Ares turns out not to be a German at all, but English.

This is actually a bit strange, given that his origins do not make him English and it’s also undercut by the fact he isn’t a human. BUT!  He had a position of power and was allotted that power by the English. And it makes it all the more clear that he was influencing both sides of the war, a puppet master driving his dolls to destruction. He reveals that he didn’t make anyone do anything, merely gave them the thoughts and the knowledge and the power to do them. He kindled their darkness where Diana would have kindled their light.

But the final, and perhaps most obvious attempt at this, comes from the Germans, realizing their leaders were gone and their weapon destroyed, standing down. Taking off their gas masks, showing they are all but children, and showing utter relief that it’s over. Chief even grabs and hugs one of them. Remember, Chief smuggles for them too. He might actually know some of these kids.

So yes. I believe the movie in many, many ways did attempt to portray the Germans as not entirely evil and not entirely culpable. I’m just not sure they effectively managed to show us this.

I get the sense that the movie really, really wanted to surprise us with Sir Patrick. Wanted to surprise us with their message. We’re so inundated with imagery of the Evil German, that it was so easy to prey on this iconic representation of evil without question, that we would be unprepared for when they reveal that  no, this struggle of good and evil exits inside everyone, not just the Germans. In doing so, they gave us more than two full hours of confirming our long set bias in this matter and listening to the characters call the Germans bad, watching our heroes kill them, and being disgusted by Dr. Maru and Ludendorff’s sadism, that there simply needed to be MORE to provide a counterweight.

We needed something clearer.

We needed a German character to assist—perhaps one of those occupying Veld who switches sides and tells them he could get them into the gala to stop Ludendorff, because patriotism isn’t worth it when weapons like those are being created.  A German soldier switching sides upon learning a German commander would kill hundreds of his compatriots in order to obtain victory over their enemy.

We needed the English to have created an awful, terrible weapon they would threaten to use against the Germans if the armistice wasn’t signed. An English scientist eager to try out their invention. We needed, somehow, to see the English be an Active participant in the war and not just responding in defense of… what? 

We needed Diana telling someone that the Germans are truly good, just under the influence of Ares, and have someone ask her how it is then that she can fight and kill them so easily, without hesitation. What I wouldn’t have given to hear Wonder freaking Woman tell someone that stopping people from hurting others, despite what they might think their intentions are, is more important than letting them do so.

We needed clear cut articulation that there are bad (human) Englishmen (that don’t transform to goodness) and good Germans. We never really got 'good Germans.’ We just got 'Germans who are glad the fighting is over.’

Like yes, it’s poignant that the Germans we see at the end are practically children, but the scene passes so quickly and without even a line from Diana such as 'They’re children!“ to drive it home to the audience, that it doesn’t outweigh the two+ hours we got of seeing them be villains.

If the movie hadn’t tried to save the punchline of this message until that last moment, there truly was so much room in the narrative for it to have been obvious, and the message would have been cleaner, more poignant. As it stands, there’s a certain emptiness to the message unless you really look into the examples I mention above, and on a first watch, one where the movie likely successfully fools you with it’s 'Germans bad’ misdirect, it’s so easy to overlook the other examples as unintentional or having different implications.

I do think they were intentional though. I just believe that without presenting a good German character, one who battles their darkness and finds their light, there was no way for the movie to manage it. A message like the one the movie aims toward should not be subtle. It’s a message too important to let the audience walk out of unsure about.