The secret history behind Wonder Woman creation

YOU may have seen Wonder Woman kick the bad guy’s arse earlier this year but you won’t know the full story until you’ve seen this.

THANKS to the hugely popular Wonder Woman movie this year, there has been renewed interest in the comic character’s creator, William Moulton Marston, which makes the timing of this film kind of perfect.

Directed by Angela Robinson and starring Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall and Australia’s Bella Heathcote, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is a biopic that aims to tell the secret history of Wonder Woman’s creation.

There’s been some to-ing and fro-ing from one of Marston’s granddaughters on the accuracy of the movie, but even if only half of this is true, it’s still an extraordinary story.

Kicking off in 1928 at Radcliffe, the sister school to Harvard, teachers Marston (Evans) and his wife Elizabeth (Hall) hire Olive Byrne (Heathcote) as their student assistant.

Both women would be instrumental in influencing Marston’s conception of the female superhero.

As feminists — quite the radical proposition in those days — Marston and Elizabeth are impressed to find out Olive’s aunt is renowned suffragette and birth control activist Margaret Sanger.

A complex and compelling relationship.

The Marstons were psychology academics and have been credited with inventing an early prototype of the lie detector, using systolic blood pressure tests. He also advocates for his DISC theory, a doctrine that says behaviour is framed through dominance, inducement, submission and compliance roles.

Those core themes will later turn up in the pages of the Wonder Woman comics, which were replete with images of bound women — images that would attract the ire of conservative critics who condemned them as sex perversions.

The Marstons’ connection to the young, naive and engaged Olive is far beyond what is professionally appropriate. In turn, she’s attracted to them, especially the neurotic and compulsive Elizabeth.

The film primarily concerns itself with the development of this unconventional relationship in an era that was far more judgmental than ours, and ours isn’t very accepting of polyamorous arrangements.

There are several sexually charged sequences, including one involving a sorority spanking ritual and another in the backroom of a fetish shop. The film’s sexual exploration and the power plays within them doesn’t feel exploitative under Robinson’s watch.

The real Wonder Woman origin story.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women aims to tell a story about the dynamics of deception, truth, control and power, but it doesn’t quite achieve those lofty goals.

It’s probably what makes it a solid and enjoyable biopic rather than an exceptional one.

In the end, those higher-minded aspects don’t mesh with what really drives the film — your investment is in these three characters, the ups and downs of their relationships fuelled by emotion and not necessarily power.

At times the movie veers into sentimentality and the pacing slacks off in the final 30 minutes, but it never loses its magnetic focus on those three strong, central performances.

Hall is the most luminous of the trio, possibly because Elizabeth feels the most complete character. She is all strength and vulnerability and when she looks wounded, your heart breaks.

If the historical Marston drew even a sliver of inspiration from the women in his life, then is it any wonder the lasso-whipping superhero remains one of the most compelling pop cultural icons today?

Rating: 3/5

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is in cinemas from Thursday, November 9.

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