Heroic Love: Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
The idea of life, love and empowerment as exalted by William Moulton Marston, both in his campy Wonder Woman comics - risque and subversive for their time - and in his radical polyamourous relationship complete with the home his threesome had built together, only seems preposterous to the outside world. But Angela Robinson's sexy, dreamy, deeply affirming 2017 film agrees with its disgraced academic proto-hippie protagonist that actually, none of this is preposterous. All one needs is genuine love. An oversimplified mantra for getting along in life, sure. But Marston believed it wholeheartedly and so does Robinson’s film. That’s what makes it such a treat.
In this sense, the movie becomes a road map for different types of interconnected, interdependent fantasies. I don’t just mean sexual fantasies. This romantic, smart and touching film gives us fantasies about better and more just societies, about feminist achievements that it believes are within reach, about a shared liminal space where men and women can come together, and about the possibility for the acceptance of non-heterosexual love and unorthodox households. The accomplishment of the film is in its relating the ways in which all of these fantasies are coterminous, coming from the same ideological breeding ground and serving the same ultimate purpose. In Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017), a sexual fantasy is the same thing as a political one.
The story centers on the Harvard-Radcliffe professor (Luke Evans), his brilliant, brassy and neurotic wife, Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall), and the pretty, ambitious blond student, Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote) whom they bring on to help with their scientific experiments. The origins of Wonder Woman and Marston’s unusual interests and circumstances are depicted in flashback as he’s interrogated by a representative from the Child Study Association about the popular comic strip’s hypersexualized, subversive content. But the struggle against censorship in puritanical 1940’s America is made into less of a threat than exposure and the bullying of their ménage-a-trois relationship in professional and domestic circles. As they navigate these uncharted waters - with Elizabeth being the most hesitant - Robinson’s witty, fanciful script dramatizes each beautiful and stimulating discovery over the course of their adventure and shares it with great empathy. It’s what makes this, to put it in stark terms, a film to get off on.
Below, I’ll illustrate what I mean by “get off,” because there are many angles from which we can get off on Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. We’ll start with the most obvious way you can get off to a movie and go angle by angle:
Erotically - If you’re not held down by the puritinical notion in America that associates any of the pleasures involved in sex with decadance, corruption and sin, there are plenty of kicks to be had in Robinson’s film - kicks her techniques invite us to unabashedly enjoy. Robinson wisely avoids the primary color palette of old comic books and instead goes for sepia and earth tones, the tasteful hues of vintage knitwear and wood paneling. Interiors are rich with yellows and browns. The buildup to the sex scenes is in some ways the most erotic thing, mainly because of the clear ideological and biological alignment of the three people involved.
Elizabeth is scathing in pointing out her husband’s obvious attraction to this student but then bluntly tells him that he has her permission to try to have a go at Olive. Later, in interviewing her as a potential assistant for their experiments in developing the first lie detector machine, Elizabeth warns Olive against “fucking my husband,” and it’s implied, despite Olive’s offense taken, that this planting of the idea of forbidden fruit in Olive’s head is the first of many games the trio play with each other.
When sex finally does happen after the string of anticipatory scenes involving the role-playing, window dressing and jockeying for position people do to get to sex (all activities that bondage and kinky role-playing games essentially mock), it’s discreet both in the way it’s engaged in by the characters and the way it’s shot. The images look almost pallid, rendered as a montage of costumed play and discovery. The relatively tasteful manner in which all of this is executed works to its advantage.
Sure, I’m watching a story about a man who came home to two ruinously intelligent and desirable women who adored him and catered to his every need. There’s a fair bit of vicarious pleasure to be gleaned from the surface level of the film itself. But the film we’re watching is ultimately a very dignified plea for the acceptance of untraditional ways of living and loving, and their capacity for creating a happy and equal society, rather than a salacious superhero origin story. This noble intention is - for this viewer, anyway - what actually makes the proceedings more sexy rather than less.
Marston is boyishly earnest in his aspirations and sees everything he does with the women as part of grand experiment. We could look at him as just a manipulative creep, using science as a cover for playing out his fetishes. But he’s honest when he talks about injecting his ideas “into the thumping heart of America.” So inserting scenes of bondage into his Wonder Woman comics or faciliting a bit of kinky sex at home after their kids (two by each woman) have gone to school are part of an outré lifestyle that must carry an erotic charge all its own.
It’s part of their crusade of love. He and Olive do come off as being essentially led by their libidos, but in a rather innocent way. The attachment he forms with his wife to their new mistress and the discovery of their shared enjoyment of ropes, costumes and role-play seem to fall under a vaguely exploratory sense of common purpose. If all the parties consent and everyone is enjoying themselves, so what if it doesn’t always resemble research?
Sex in Professor Marston can be romance and the movie argues that conversely, romance is sexy. They’re the same thing in whatever new form they take. If sexual partners engage in erotic power excanges like Bondange & Dicipline and other forms of kink outside the realm of the mainstream, this too constitutes romance. Romance is anything done by any number of lovers to each other for the enjoyment of each other. And for that matter, sex is anything consenting partners say it is.
In the world of this movie, all forms of consenual sex can be wonderful and exciting. Marston and the women come to understand new kinds of sexual dynamics. Whatever it is that they think they’re doing - in bed, in costume, in academia or otherwise - Robinson’s film celebrates the rightness of approving of those dynamics, and that idea that it can be enjoyable for an audience to watch a dramatization of these discoveries.
Sociologically - As scientists, the Marstons and their game personal assistant appear driven mostly by curiosity, even if it’s a libidinous curiosity. The challenges to human behavior, societal relationships and interactions - essentially the way the social order is structured - had been largely unexplored vis-à-vis human sexuality at that time.
Wilhelm Reich had only published The Mass Psycology of Fascism (which proports that fascist and authoritarian tendencies are the result of sexual repression) in Austria in 1933, and wouldn’t coin the phrase, “sexual revolution” until later in the decade. His ideas about orgasms or “Orgone Energy,” were just entering European culture when Wonder Woman was beginning publication in the early 40’s.
In the US, Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking studies on human sexuality wouldn’t be published until 1948 and 1953, before communist witch hunts would declare war on the revelations made by his data on the frequency of mastrubation, extramarital sex and same sex connections in both men and women in American life - handily illustrating some of Reich’s points about repression.
(pictured left) Wilhelm Reich, (pictured right) Dr. Alfred Kinsey
So the Professor and his female cohorts are more or less adrift in strange waters. In developing the lie detector, they’re trying to chart physical manifestations in the body as it communicates different kinds of information. But the process winds up leading to a whole new vista about power dynamics in male-female relationships. Marston discovers that his “DISC theory,” - a four part process for breaking down human relations in terms of the interplay between Dominance, Inducement, Submission and Compliance - has more social traction expressed within the kinky adventures of Wonder Woman than in his university lectures.
Throughout the movie, sex and fantasy are depicted as the sanest pathways to revealing new sociological insights. Olive is ostensibly brought on to help William and his wife build their polygraph. But along the way, they learn that the inconclusive results of the test are based on the lack of emotional risk in the questions being asked. So they approach the interrogations with a personal slant, using the type of questions asked to address the sexual tension that’s been building in the three of them. It’s a scientific process that serves to mediate the lust and desire stirring within their closed world, and in turn, this inner libidinal terrain proves a fertile ground for the legitimizing of their invention.
Olive is sitting on the far left, presciently wearing the inspiration for Wonder Woman’s bracelets. Elizabeth is the guinea pig for this early polygraph model, the psychology of being bound and restrained as a means of compelling subjects to tell the truth under questioning. All so the court would eventually rule it inadmissible as evidence.
Each act in the movie is introduced as an investigation into the principles represented by each letter in the “DISC” of Marston’s theory and their applications, or rather, interpolations in Marston’s polyamourous life. We see the interplay between various forms of dominance and submission between William, Elizabeth and Olive as it plays out across every successive step in the gradual process of their acceptance, love and commitment to one another. William is eager as a scientist to see how his process of inducement (without manipulation or coercion) leading to willful submission to a loving authority in Olive can lead to the kind of pinnacle of contented empowerment he imagines. Of course, he’s also very horny and despite being ahead of his times, painted as a bit of a charlatan, though an earnest one - if that makes sense. An egghead with a porn collection, doing “research”.
In an article for The American Scholar titled, “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics,” Marston described what he saw as a tendency towards “bloodcurdling masculinity,” in comics, which portrayed femininity as an archetype lacking, “force, strength and power.” It seems suspect that Marston conflated female strength and social peace with submission. But he made clear - just as Robinson’s film does - that it was a submission not to patriarchal authority, which he saw as an instrument of repression, but to love. And to its seemingly endless potential for eroticism. To be subsumed in the whole of love and devotion. That the increase of love is the thing worth fighting and dying for.
This is what gives Wonder Woman her power. Not her truth lasso, or bullet-stopping bracelets or invisible plane. She’s distinguished by her capacity to act in the name of Love. Her potential for empathy and compassion is her great strength. Like Christopher Reeve’s Superman, her purpose is aspirational, not reactionary. Her weapons and accessories are defensive. This is what sets her apart from other superheroes. She doesn’t just save the day. She saves people from themselves.
This aspect was visible in both of Warner Brothers recent outings for Wonder Woman from their DC Studio division. Compared to the drab, colorless, self-serious glower-fests of Wonder Woman’s Justice League peers, they’re more human, colorful and upbeat as movies. If not always successful, they retain a sense of the comic strip’s campy flavor. For me, the rather beautiful and hopeful messages in both Wonder Woman movies more than make up for their hokeyness. Despite a good bit of clumsy CGI and even with their overpitched, Cecil B. DeMille-climaxes, they retain Marston’s raison d'être in conceiving the comic. Maybe this is why Gloria Steinem used Wonder Woman’s image for its second ever cover page of Ms.magazine in 1972, depicting a Golden Age restoration of the original character as a flustered super-giantess with her hands full trying to save a scary new world and the caption: “Wonder Woman For President.”
the current cinematic version of Marston’s iconic character, with a settled-on format and tone, placed in a DC Studio movie that actually considers its aspirational superhero someone worth believing in for a change
I don’t think anyone would hold up Marston’s original Wonder Woman comic strip or any of the character’s subsequent media incarnations leading up to and including the current one inhabited by Gal Gadot as serious feminism. But Steinem understood that social movements need icons and symbols and as a kind of cultural touchstone into a more modern feminist age, this one was ahead of its time. I have to think director Robinson undoubtedly read Jill Lepore’s 2014 book, The Secret Life of Wonder Woman in preparation for writing her script.
Among other things, it’s a very entertaining read, positing Marston’s Amazonian battle goddess as the missing link between first and second wave feminism, bridging the link between the sufferagette era and the women’s lib movements of the 70’s. This would seem like a lot to put on the shoulders of a comic book character but the iconography of Wonder Woman does fit in as part of the connective tissue between actual the American superwomen who emerged in the 30’s (Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Katherine Hepburn) and the scores of women who would join the military and go to work in factories during The Second World War.
Of course, a host of internal contradictions can be found in Marston’s life and his obsessive body of work; submission as empowerment, a symbol of feminist justice and power that also serves the male libido, a perpetually underemployed scientist promoting matriarchal social models while the ambitions of the women in his household were squelched. But then sociology itself is mutable and largely multi-paradigmatic, juggling numerous theoretical traditions like Functionalism and Utilitarianism the same way Marston and his women juggled their own roles as scientists, scholars, lovers, sexual pioneers, outlaws, comic book artists, parents and ordinary citizens. But perhaps that kind of cognitive dissonance is what makes the history of Marston’s ménage and the origin of Wonder Woman a very American one.
Intellectually - Can you be sexually attracted to someone’s brain?
The couple’s initial attraction (particularly Elizabeth’s) to Olive Byrne is portrayed not just in relation to her apple-cheeked, all-American beauty, but to her feminist pedigree. It turns out she’s the niece of Margaret Sanger, the socialist-pacifist crusader whose romance-driven form of feminist activism had a profound impact on WIlliam Marston. Sanger and her sister opened the first birth-control clinic in the US and Lepore’s book draws connections between the early 20th century women’s movement, the ideas in Wonder Woman and William Marston’s odd and fascinating inner world.
These links between what a person takes in early in life, what turns them on (sexually and politically), what obsesses them and how they make sense of those obsessions - the motivating pathologies behind things like scientific curiosity and artistic expression - are what make the brain the biggest and most intricate sex organ any of us have. In the movie, the trio use various forms of external activity to understand their taboo pet obsessions. It’s this expression, this theatricalization of intellectual fixations - with costumes and role-play, with the kinky adventures of Wonder Woman, or the revealing fun to be had with the lie-detector - that let them explore and validate their real, sensual selves. The same fixations that social conventions make them (and all of us) hide.
the showstopper in which hearts, minds, bodies and libidos align to realize a fantasy, similar to Vertigo (1958) but without the necrophiliac overtones
Widely considered the seminal text on polyamory, open relationships and the potential for freedom in sex and love, Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton’s The Ethical Slut informs us that these kinds of expressions were nothing new. Kinks, fetishes and all forms of sexual play have been with us for ages. In fact, we can trace a direct correlation in the rise of Wonder Woman’s popularity in the 40’s with soldiers who returned from World War II having undergone more than a few changes to their psychology in the way they saw power, authority and masculinity.
The original strip takes place during that war and its heroine comes from an ancient island of Amazons given powers by Greek Gods. However, it incorporated then-modern images of sexual fetishism (none too subtly) into nearly every storyline. And the movie repeatedly shows us that dressing in costumes and enacting role-playing scenarios, which were mockeries of class and power struggles, were integral to the health of the Marstons and Byrne’s relationship.
The notion of Play as an open activity, which is not necessarily always sexual in nature, is depicted as part of a healthy intellectual life in the way it enables the brain and the body to join together in processing daily existance. These activities practiced by the trio and depicted in the comic can be simultaneously creative and destructive representations, making for a very enlightened and sophisticated form of sexual expression.
According to Hardy and Easton, it all works together: “Polyamory and open relationships are very common in most kink communities, as the chances are slim of finding one partner who is open to all your fantasies and whose company you can tolerate on an ongoing basis.” It’s done in the name of pleasure and that shows in Wonder Woman. The strip was never sadistic, a charge that was leveled at Marston by Catholic Decency Leagues who wanted to see his creation destroyed. There was no pain, no rape and no blood. And Wonder Woman always persevered.
the outlandish and kinky adventures of Wonder Woman, its sexualized imagery rendered in varying degrees of suggestion
We see William’s ideas and fascinations become fodder for Wonder Woman, which he used as a deliberate attempt to influence mainstream consciousness. The brazen rope games, the skin-tight costumes, and the absurd, campy storylines in the comic represented his hodgepodge of influences; World War I spycraft, Amazonian matriarchy, the constraints placed on women by law and repressive social mores, the suffragette movement’s use of shackles and chains in their protests as symbolic forms of bondage. A glass toy he gives his son becomes the inspiration for Wonder Woman’s invisible jet. The polygraph was the inspiration for her Lasso of Truth. Olive’s thick bracelets as an inspiration for the bullet-deflecting bangles. Even Wonder Woman herself is a synthesis of the two brilliant, amazing women in Marston’s life: Elizabeth’s tenacity and resourcefulness, Olive’s elegance and optimism. “Together, you make the perfect woman,” he tells them.
It’s fascinating the way our brains use fantasy to work things through. The fact that this relationship dynamic, radical for its time, would use the easy pleasures of a medium regarded as childish and inconsequential like comic books to advocate for their mature ideal of liberation, pleasure and equality is a wild notion. The enduring nature of this heroine, decked out in her patriotic costume with its thigh-grazing hemline, says something pretty revealing about our brains.
Early on, when William and Elizabeth secretly watch Olive paddling a younger sorority pledge in a Greek-themed hazing ritual, they’re immensely turned on. They’ve just seen an erotically charged power game play out in real life, which is all fetishes really are. The hoops a capable intellect makes itself jump through just to get to what it considers sexually gratifying. The campy trappings in which it sets its aspirations to power, culminating here in the fashioning of a model of hyperbolic, overflowing, almost rampaging femininity. I see a lot of humanity and humor in a paradox that goes like this: “I fantasize about you having total power, strength, dominance and complete social freedom. One thing: Could you wear this please?”
And yet, smart, consenting adults were happy within this arrangement. William isn’t too deluded to notice that the bond Olive forms with Elizabeth is even stronger. Rendered by Rebecca Hall’s brilliant, coruscating performance, Elizabeth is brittle and neurotic, assertive and foul-mouthed, less Id driven than both her husband and younger lover. Her frustration with the sexism of the academic world and its role in keeping her work from being published makes compliance and submission to authority a less savory prospect.
As a woman, the process of being disgraced from the world of academia has graver implications and it’s more than a little despairing for her to watch the way her husband is freer to indulge his whims and fantasies as a result of those sexist double standards. She would be the Dominant in this relationship. The wonderful scene where she dissects an interaction between Olive and a potential suitor from a distance in addition to being amusing is emotionally revealing of her entire thought process and of the completely cerebral approach some people take to sexuality.
Another sterling Rebecca Hall performance. The movie is as much about her.
Humanistically - It seems preposterous that a crusade for the liberation of women somehow gets mixed up with bondage and spanking but perhaps the movie believes the recipe for equality among the sexes lies in folie à deux. Maybe submission to this idea - to fantasies that men and women (and all persons) can share - is a way of bricking together a utopia. When two or more people not only love each other but share the same fantasy, it’s hard to imagine a sweeter setup.
And if such a fantasy has the effect of teaching us about our relationship to power and the roles society makes us play, it has immense potential for creating a healthy society capable of love. It’s significant that Wonder Woman’s earliest foes in the comic were Nazis and other fascist villians: the restrictive, the nescient, the loveless. And through Wonder Woman, Marston and his lovers discovered new manifestations of happiness and growth in sexual openness, regardless of the opinions of church and state.
It also may seem ludicrous to think that both women saw what they were involved in as a kind of feminist heaven, suggesting that William had used his theories on inducement and compliance for nefarious carnal purposes. It should be noted however that the real romantic soulbond in the movie and reportedly in real life was between the two women, who lived together for the remainder of their long lives following William’s death from cancer in 1947.
But the real Marston had stated in interviews of his advocacy for female ascendancy in public life, and his genuine love and fascination with “femaleness,” (limited by traditional definitions as it was at that time). His track record of maintaining these positions across several aborted careers prior to and throughout his academic life, as well as within the Wonder Woman strip’s depiction of women as superior beings held down only by male repression, is a good case for taking him at his word.
Robinson’s movie goes as far in its humanist agenda to say that social conventions, practical concerns and financial necessity are nothing that can’t be managed as long as all the parties are committed. The Marstons and Olive look to have had little trouble acting as parents within their home in a relationship like this. More parental figures can mean more love, with more people to look out for each other. After William’s death, Olive continued to act as the other parent while she and the widow stayed together, allowing Elizabeth to adopt her children. The movie goes as far to suggest that not only can children grow up normally in households with same sex parents but that a male parent may not even be necessary.
The more we can acknowledge and accept the true variety of biological attractions and fantasies, and the more stories like this one come into the light, the more we can see social conventions as just a network of legal and religious restrictions, forcing us to conform to outmoded, puritanical and ultimately anti-human paradigms. Hardy and Easton: “More recently we hear about sex-addicts, avoidance of intimacy, commitment-phobia and attachment disorders. Pathologizing explorative sexual behavior is far too often used as a weapon in a moral war against all sexual freedom.” I would add that consequently defying these paradigms, listening to our desires with an open mind and then making considered choices about how we act, constitutes a worthwhile form of civil disobedience.
the backlash against Wonder Woman as a product of the 1950’s repression machine saw the character shedding her superheroine roots, surrendering her costume and powers to a man’s world before her Golden Era restoration by the second wave feminist movements of the 70’s.
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is another in a line of female-centric projects by Robinson including the queer Charlie’s Angels parody, D.E.B.S. (2004) and 2005’s Herbie: Fully Loaded. For actual camp value, there’s Robinson’s lesbian crime-thiller web series Girltrash! (2007-09) But this film never comes off as campy or over the top. It’s as stubbornly earnest as Marston himself. It asks whether a ménage-a-trois household was feasible in 1940’s America. The beautifully ludicrous answer is: Of Course, because love is all one needs to get along in life. In its delirious way, the movie lays out a case that sex can be politically liberating, radical politics can be sexually liberating and liberation is just plain sexy, all the while embellishing a story that’s purely and truly romantic.
It’s the first film I’ve ever seen that made me actually want to read a comic book.
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