It should come as no surprise in these increasingly fractious times that the first female-fronted superhero movie in 12 years is being met with a fair share of controversy. Wonder Woman, the latest installment in the embattled Justice League franchise, may have scored glowing advance reviews, but the politicized debate over a handful of women-only screenings of the film has ensured that, like the all-female Ghostbusters before her, Wonder Woman will have to fight bad guys while also juggling a considerable amount of cultural baggage.
And like 2016’s Ghostbusters, the box-office receipts for Wonder Woman will carry an extra significance that will surely inform the ongoing debate over whether a summer blockbuster can be profitable without a man in the leading role. The Ghostbusters bottom line took an extra blow when it was banned in China for supernatural reasons and now Wonder Woman faces a challenge in an admittedly smaller foreign market. A Lebanese group is seeking to ban the film based on the politics of Israeli star Gal Gadot.
A group calling itself the Campaign to Boycott Supporters of Israel-Lebanon has cited Gadot’s association with the Israeli army—where she served a mandatory two years—as a reason to outlaw the film in Lebanon. As The Hollywood Reporter points out, “Lebanon is officially at war with Israel and has a decades-old law that boycotts Israeli products and bars Lebanese citizens from traveling to Israel or having contacts with Israelis.” Though Israel and Lebanon have clashed several times over the years, Gadot was serving during the especially devastating 2006 Israel–Hezbollah War. Gadot posed the following year for a Maxim magazine spread called “The Chosen Ones: Israeli Defense Forces” celebrating the beautiful women of the I.D.F.
In a series of Facebook posts, the Campaign to Boycott Supporters of Israel-Lebanon accused Gadot of boasting “about the army training her for Hollywood.” That’s almost a direct quote with Gadot telling Fashion magazine in 2015: “The army wasn’t that difficult for me. The military gave me good training for Hollywood.” The post also condemns Gadot for supporting the Israeli army’s controversial 2014 invasion of Gaza, which she did with a Facebook post of her own that read:
That show of support over a hotly debated military action stirred up an online tempest the day before Gadot was set to make her Comic-Con debut in her first official image as Wonder Woman. And the same campaign seeking to block Gadot’s solo outing also tried, and failed, to ban Lebanese screenings of 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice featuring Gadot as Wonder Woman.
Though Lebanon is not as stringent with censorship as some of its fellow Muslim-majority neighbors, there are still some harsh-yet-hazy regulations in place particularly when it comes to Israel, religion, and homosexuality. But even if the film is successfully banned, it may find itself later _un_banned, as was the case with Persepolis in 2008, or circulating underground, as happened with Waltz with Bashir in 2009. And while Wonder Woman is still on track to premiere in Beirut on Wednesday, the country’s interior minister could still ban the film at the last minute following a recommendation from the six-member committee. Samah Idriss, a member of the boycott campaign, told the Associated Press, “Even if it is one hour before the show, they should ban it anyway.”
