I will not be spoiling Wonder Woman 1984 in this video. At least, not if you’ve seen the poster.
But when I saw that Wonder Woman was getting herself some shiny shiny armour for her sequel
I thought to myself, amazing! Maybe they will take this opportunity to get rid of the costume
piece that seems to plague a significant minority of live action superheroines!
Spoiler they did not. And...even though I know the reason for the costume piece
and its relative prevalence, I still can't explain why not.
See now you’re thinking ‘is it the boob plate Jill?’ and while that’s a decent guess but no,
no it is not. I mean it’s fine, it’s not my favourite breastplate design ever but
it’s not beating me over the head with its egregious awfulness so you know, we're good!
Topic for another time, perhaps.
No, this is a very specific costume element I dislike and it is shared across the Marvel and
DC expanded live action universes. Oh yeah. Black Widow, Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman again, Gamora,
Black Canary, Mantis, and probably some other ladies I’ve forgotten.
Who doesn’t have it? Okoye. Shuri. Captain Marvel.
Supergirl and Scarlet Witch are all pretty much okay?
Harley Quinn and Catwoman are just...Harley Quinn and Catwoman so we're not even going to go there.
If you guessed the stupid four inch wedge heels, then you are
correct. They mostly come in boot form, but Wonder Woman has a sandal version as well.
I just hate them. And I know the reason they’re so prevalent, it just doesn't make it any better.
What is the reason they're so prevalent? Well,
it's mostly so that the ladies’ heads are nearly on a par with the chaps. Yeah.
Now this is most obviously necessary for Wonder Woman, who is played by Gal Gadot, who is 5’9”.
Ben Affleck is 6’4 and Henry Cavill is 6’2. Wonder Woman canonically is somewhere between
5’10 and 6’2 because you know, she's an Amazon, and so I understand that they gave her big shoes
in order to get her up to the level of the men.
because it was either that or a box, and while boxes can be useful, I mean Robert Downey Jr uses
them a lot, if you have to move with other people then a box is of limited utility.
For movie making purposes it's much easier to just have Gal Gadot in these great galumphing sandals,
so that she's pretty much at head height with Henry Cavill and Ben Affleck.
I said that Gal Gadot was the most understandable example, and here's why. Unlike with boots,
you can't add internal height to sandals, and you wouldn't really want to add regular
block heels to the sandals, because particularly with how high you're having to make them, that
would just draw even more more attention to how impractical they are. So I kind of understand the
seriously impractical wedge heels on the Wonder Woman sandals, even if I don’t really like them.
But the armour could just have been a completely new costume.Especially since she’s only 3 inches
shorter than Chris Pine, but no. Sigh. Oh well, never mind. On to the boots.
Scarlet Johansson is 5’4.
And Black Widow canonically is what, 5’7, but there’s no particular reason she needs to be.
But with Chris Hemsworth standing at 6’3, Chris Evans standing at 6 foot,
Tom Hiddleston being 6’2, and the next shortest person in the original lineup being Mark Ruffalo
at 5’8 (RDJ doesn’t count) I understand that they might want to boost her up a bit.
5’4 to 6’3 is an eleven inch difference between the heights of your tallest and shortest people,
that's 27.5 cm or something like it. That's a lot. Which means that if you want them
all in the same shot, you either have to be further away, which you want to avoid
because the actors' faces are expensive, you want as much of them in the shot as possible,
you need to put someone on a box, which as I said, limits their ability to move around,
or you just need to boost them up by putting them in really big shoes.
Also it's more difficult to light people whose faces are at drastically different heights.
And if your shot contains 2 characters who are wildly disparate heights then,
you know, why not boost the shorter actor up a bit so you can get in a bit closer. Again,
they do it with Robert Downey Jr all the time.
Which is what gets me really, because it is possible to lift your actresses
up a bit without resorting to giant wedge heeled boots. And I really think that would be better,
because giant wedge heels are a really impractical choice for superheroes. I
mean not if they're low enough I suppose but particularly the ones which are as
high as the ones the actresses have to wear? it's just... not a fun time.
Of course, the reason they are wedges as opposed to stilettos or block heels is
specifically so that they don’t call attention to themselves. If you're wearing stilettos in a long
shot you can kind of see that and its very distracting because it looks really stupid
and impractical. If you're wearing wedge heels in a long shot it's just less obtrusive. Still
really difficult to run around in, but it doesn't look like you're character's kind of an idiot.
Unless of course you’re Catwoman, in which case I must assume they are doing
this deliberately as a costume choice to show that she is a sexy sexy...cat...lady.
Or you're Harley Quinn in which case...who even knows?
The thing about wedges, though, is that they’re deceptive.
You’d think they’d be easier to walk and run, move around in than stilettos and you'd be
partially right...they are a bit easier, but they have no GIVE at all because the sole is
a solid block. You can't really flex it and so you can't really flex your foot.
A heel that is separate from the sole technically gives you a smaller area on which to balance,
true, but if you have a chunky enough heel then it's not really too much
of a problem and you can at least flex the sole of your foot a bit.
Assuming that the heel is not so high that you don't already have maximum flexion,
which may well be a problem for Nebula and probably Black Canary as well.
When you're running, you ideally want the ball of your foot, like just the front kind
of section to strike the floor first, but if you're in high wedges, yeah, forget that.
Because your foot is basically already as flexed as you can make it, you can't lift
up onto your toes or the ball of your foot and so your entire foot is striking the floor at
the same time. And it's pretty hard to do heel to toe foot placing when you're in wedges, it's
possible but it's difficult at speed, and so you're just going to be clomping along.
In sufficiently high stilettos or even in very high chunky heels like Nebula's you're still
going to have the same problem that you still may have to put your entire foot on the ground
which may or may not include balancing on a heel which is about 1cm squared, hello again Catwoman.
Thing is, if you insist that the actresses need to be around the same height as the actors, then
there are other ways to do it. Robert Downey Jr is 5'8". He’s standing next
to Gwyneth Paltrow who is 5’9 and wearing high heels and and yet he's still taller than her,
clearly some shoe related jiggery pokery is going on there. Why not just use whatever
you put in his shoes?You're still raising the actresses up uncomfortably off the ground, but
it's probably more comfortable and more practical than having wedges on the outside of their shoes,
because the wedges do make them look like their character thinks that 10cm is a perfectly
acceptable heel height for going into combat, which kind of makes them look like a doofus!
I just think that chunky boots with hidden insoles would be a much better option.
Or just...let female characters be short. It’s okay to be short.
Scarlet Johansson is 5'4", she's not even short,
she’s average height for a woman in America, just let her be average height and let that be okay!
This is a power fantasy! Surely she can still be badass and you know, kinda petite.
Especially because if you’re okay with your actresses like, just being at their
normal heights, then you can have a very slight heel like Captain Marvel’s boots,
or you can have Elizabeth Olsen, or Scarlet Witch's chunky combat boots. Or you can
have Supergirl who gets a reasonably decent low block heel, and all of those are fine.
Because Supergirl's costume is more of a spandex, dancer, gymnast kind of aesthetic,
I would probably put her in completely flat boots,
but there is something to be said for at least a little bit of separation between you and,
I don't know, floor eating acid or primordial ooze or whatever it is.
And lastly, even if you do decide that you're going to go for the wedge heel option,
because it's the most practical or that's what you've got within the costuming budget
and whatever constraints, just have a flat pair of shoes for closeups.
Because when they did that iconic scene from the first Wonder Woman movie,
where she climbs the ladder and off she goes into no man’s land to show everyone what she
can do...I do remember wishing that they’d either skipped the shot of her feet on the
ladder or they'd just swapped her out for some slightly lower heeled sandals.
Because trust me, you can climb a ladder in four inch wedges but I imagine, given the option,
most women would prefer not to.
Thanks for watching!