With the intense hostility and urgent aggression being directed towards the all-women screenings of Wonder Woman in Alamo Drafthouses around the United States, you’d think the stakes of such a gathering were life-threatening. Perhaps these men knew that as all the women-identifying movie goers dressed in Her Universe gear and decked out with tiaras took their seats armed with a delicious boozy milkshake, we’d slowly remove our disguises to reveal our true faces like Roald Dahl’s The Witches.Â
After all, why would they choose this hill to die on without displaying the same contempt for the actual segregation going still going on in our schools, discriminatory practices in everything from prom to tech companies, and, well, literally anything else besides women enjoying a movie that’s already been out for a few days while there are other screenings happening literally in the next theater over?
It could only mean that in this huge room of aliens from Under the Skin we’d plot our uprising. Through drawing strength from our idols and rejecting the false ones of patriarchy, we would establish our own Themyscira. In the same way that my 4th grade teachers gathered the girls to have the “period talk” one day, telling the boys that we were watching The Matrix, this would be a secret operation that our male oppressors would be completely oblivious to. However, when I went to Alamo Drafthouse’s Brooklyn location at 3 P.M. on Sunday, imagine my surprise: there was no manpocalypse.
Rather, it was a room of enthusiastic movie goers who began with a chant of “I am Wonder Woman! Hear me roar!” and enjoyed Patty Jenkin’s amazing film, clapping and cheering through scenes of female empowerment without having to curb any of those reactions for the sake of preserving any dude’s feeling. It was laughing at the incredibly true scene when Hippolyta tells Diana the world of men doesn’t deserve her (we really don’t) and crying through the powerful No Man’s Land scene and tearing up at scenes that weren’t even sad, like seeing the first scenes of a young bloodthirsty Diana in a matriarchal paradise.
The only negativity present in the screening were murmurs of people in the lobby beforehand unhappy with the fact they couldn’t buy a ticket. Beyond that, the entire screening was about celebration for this film we’ve been waiting for forever and being able to support Planned Parenthood at the same time. We had a blast and as we left the theaters back into the world of men, we felt more ready, capable, and inspired to take on the world with empathy and perseverance. And guess what, no one died.
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