Wonderful tale of Wonder Woman’s creation
NEW YORK — and
were born, like brothers, in 1938 and 1939, respectively. But psychology professor William Moulton Marston had grander and more progressive aspirations for his comic creation.
“Frankly, is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world,” Marston said around the character’s launch in 1941.
The female-empowerment ideals Marston intended to espouse have perhaps — as plenty of recent events in Hollywood and elsewhere have attested — not advanced as much as he and his feminist wife and colleague Elizabeth Holloway would have hoped. But 76 years later, worldwide dominion has arrived for Wonder Woman. Just months after Patty Jenkins’
became a worldwide box-office smash — making Jenkins the first female filmmaker to helm such a massive blockbuster — the story behind the lasso-wielding superhero has also landed on the big screen.
Angela Robinson’s which Annapurna Pictures released in theatres recently, charts an origin story to beat them all: The creation of Wonder Woman by the freethinking Marston (played by Luke Evans), and his unorthodox family. Marston lived with both Holloway (Rebecca Hall), and Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), a researcher who moved in with the couple in 1926. They were a threesome who harmoniously raised four children.
The Marstons were collectively influenced by early feminists and suffragettes. (Byrne’s aunt, Margaret Sanger coined the phrase “birth control” and opened the first birth-control clinic in the U.S.) Marston studied gender, behaviour and sexuality, and his studies later filtered into He brought bondage imagery to the early comics. Wonder Woman’s lasso, which forces people to tell the truth, was a version of the lie-detector test Marston helped invent.
When Robinson came across the backstory to the sole superhero to ever capture her heart, she was floored.
“It just blew my mind. I literally couldn’t believe the story. I became totally obsessed.”
Since Robinson first encountered the Marstons, their story has been notably recounted by author Jill Lepore in (Scribe Publications, 2014). But the tale has, Robinson says, been a passion project for a decade — long before a movie was a reality.
Hall was brought to Robinson’s project initially after she, herself, sought the rights to Lepore’s book. Robinson’s desire to make the film, Hall says, was overwhelming.
“She wanted to make a romance about three people filled with love and hope,” says Hall. “It’s quite brave to try to make in some sense a conventional romance where you ask your audience to accept that the romance is legitimately happening between three people — and not only ask them to accept it, but to root for it.”
was shot last fall when Hillary Clinton was presumed by many to be on the cusp of the presidency. Robinson initially worried the film’s ideas might be “passe” by the time it came out.
“What struck me to begin with was how contemporary a story it is,” says Robinson. “The Marstons were ahead of their time and they’re still ahead of their time.”
Audiences didn’t initially respond to the much lower budgeted, more lightly marketed
as eagerly on opening weekend quite like they did to Jenkins’ (The film debuted poorly with $737,000 on about 1,200 screens.) But its makers believe strongly in the relevance of the story behind the superhero iconography.
“Their story seemed to be so metaphorically significant to so many other things, like the history of 20th century feminism, the changing ways we look at conventional relationships and family values,” says Hall. “There’s just too much in this story.”