The great thing about watching Wonder Woman 1984 on HBOMax is that I can re-watch it over and over and really get into it for this blog post. I want to start by saying that this will be completely based on the way Max Lord is portrayed in WW84 by Pedro Pascal, no previous characterization is being considered. With that…
My favorite part of WW84 was the antagonists. And I use that word deliberately instead of villain because I don’t believe that Kristen Wiig’s Dr. Barbara Minerva nor Pascal’s Maxwell Lord are evil people. At least not in this film. They were people who wanted a better life. And it’s not that they didn’t care who they might hurt along the way, I don’t think they thought their ambitions would hurt anyone directly. Anyway, let’s talk about Max Lord.
Maxwell Lord is a product of the 1980’s. And I mean the word “product” because it becomes obvious very quickly that he is a construct, an ideal image being projected to the world. Max Lord is Maxwell Lorenzano, and before the origin story montage towards the end of the film, I already had this character pretty much worked out. Max changed his name, dyes his hair blonde, has an accent, and is desperately trying to achieve this ideal in his head of being a “big man”. It’s 1984, and I was born in 1978 so I’m looking at it through a generational lens.
When I was a kid I wanted to be blonde and I hated my boring last name. Aside from Snow White, all the heroines were blonde and all the villain girls had black hair it seemed. Even in shows like I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched, the evil cousin was the one with black hair. I tend to joke that society turned me evil for these reasons. I had ideas about what I might change my name to and never really noticed that all those new names sounded not Hispanic. So from very early on in the film, Max Lord is a character I can relate to on some level, a victim of the societal standards in a country he is trying to succeed in.
Max Lord wants the American Dream, “the opportunity for prosperity and success, as well as an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers,” (Wikipedia). There’s no doubt Max is working hard to achieve these dreams. Unfortunately, what he’s working on is the smoke and mirrors part and the magic solution. There may have been a time when he was actually trying to find oil, that’s not in the movie, but it could be inferred. Unfortunately, the land is dry. So after exhausting non-supernatural avenues he realizes he was going to need a miracle to make this work, or a chaos crystal in this case.
We also have to look at Max through a 1980’s lens. The 80’s was “often remembered for its materialism and consumerism,” (history.com) . If I think back to movies in the 80’s, aside from John Hughes movies, I can’t help but remember all the big business type of movies like Big Business, Wall Street, Secret of my Success, Trading Places, Working Girl, Baby Boom, and so many others. Movies where the goal for so many protagonists was succeeding in business, making money, champagne wishes and caviar dreams. I’m proposing that the American Dream in the 80’s was an ostentatious version of the norm. Success was CEO millionaire or on the fast road to it, and anything else was failure. Thing is, there’s really only so much room at the top. It was always a fantasy only achievable by very few. And unfortunately for Max, he wasn’t one of them.
Max loves his son, Alistair, and really wants to impress him. Which is tragic on a different level. He is projecting his idea or perhaps society’s idea of what makes a man successful unto his child. It might be argued that one of the reasons Max was striving for the 80’s American Dream was because he wanted his son to have a better life. After all, it’s the love for his son that finally snaps him out of not just the power of the crystal, but the materialistic brainwashing of societal expectations. He doesn’t realize that his son just wants him to be a good and present father. When Max is on TV telling everyone to make a wish, Alistair just wishes his dad were with him. Alistair might like the idea of having all these material things his father is promising, but if it’s a choice between that and his father, Alistair just wants his father.
The villainous acts Max commits occur after he makes his wish and becomes the stone. And I would argue that those things are a product of the terms and conditions of the stone itself. The stone was made by a god to take an equal amount from a person as it gave, and that’s what Max does to the victims. It takes as much as it gives, and what it takes from Max seems to be his health. Max always wanted more, more, more, as I once heard Madonna yell when she was arguably the biggest female popstar in the world. “The answer is always more,” Max says. But that means that nothing was ever going to be enough for him. He’s more self-destructive than he is deliberately bad to other people. Despite the fact that he is lying to his investors, if he became a successful oil tycoon, which seems to be his ultimate goal, those investors are also going to make a lot of money. The end goal isn’t to take their money and run, it was to build a successful company.
I was a teen in the 90’s so maybe that’s why I didn’t buy into an 80’s mentality and aspire to be a yuppie. The American Dream of the 80’s is not something I’d ever thought I’d achieve which just left me with an apathetic view of the future. Eventually, I grew up, and while I still think my name is boring (it’s like the 2nd or 3rd most popular Latin last name in the world) I would not be inclined to take a pen name that didn’t make it obvious I was Latinx. I don’t think my skin tone really goes with blonde hair and I don’t care, I like my black hair. I think it’s my best feature. And all things considered, I think I am living the American Dream. The toned down version where my immigrant mother worked so I could have a better life than she did, and I in turn work so my own kid can have a better life than I did.
“Life is good, but it can be better,” Max Lord says to America from behind a TV screen. And he’s not wrong. It can be better; it can always be better. But there’s something wrong with that mentality that I can’t quite articulate. So I sit and watch this movie and shake my head. This is not the way, Max, I want to tell him. And eventually he realizes that as well. I think his life will be better now if he’s let go of that more, more, more mentality. Not sure what happens to Max after the events of WW84 (is he a felon or can he just plea he was a victim like everyone else in the world?), but I wish him all the best… uh, oh. ಠ_ಠ
Vin Rodriguez 