Professor Marston and the Wonder Women : Sexual Deviation in Comic / REVIEW

Last year at the beginning of June, the audience had the opportunity to look at the first worthy adaptation of the comic superstar in the movie's history, or at least the majority of audience said that. Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins, praised as a feminist revolutionary work, which in the genre of action science fiction gave a strong protagonist - with one small problem - such heroines already existed earlier. Let's say, for example, in the movies of James Cameron in the 80s of the last century (Ripley from the Alien movies, Sarah Connor from Terminator). Wonder Woman has to be acknowledged and it did successfully escaped from the extremely large number of (not all) movie trophies on weak women, which could be considered as a shift in feminist direction, but not yet feminist success.

Only a few months later, at the end of September 2017, the biographical drama Professor Marston and the Wonder Women was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. The work was given a shade of lesser audience ratings, although the comments on the movie were almost identical. The TIFF audience repeated that it is about "strong work, feminist revolutionary and unified approach". While Jenkins's Wonder Woman followed the story of the origin of a comic heroine, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, whose screenplay and script is signed by Angela Robinson, follows the story of the origin of the comic, or of its creator.



In the opening scene of the film, we see William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans) psychologist and creator of a polygraph watching the incineration of comic books in the 40s of the last century, including his comic Wonder Woman. Marston's work is under the guise of promoting sadomasochism, homosexuality, and "other sexual perversions", after which we get a detailed historical review of the comic book from the writer.

The story follows Marston as he teaches DISC theory (Domination (D), Appearance (I), Submission (s) and Compatibility (C)) at the faculty of Radcliffe with his wife, Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) who can't graduate from Harvard because she is a woman. William and Elizabeth are seeking help from students in their lie detector development, where, one of them, Olive (Bella Heathcote) end in a love affair with the professor.



The unusual community of these three people is at the same time the best quality of the film, as well as its greatest defect. When it comes to physically representing relationships, director Robinson doesn't hesitate to show the games of this three. The film slows down its action, and visually orgasmic scenes that fetisheze love relationship between Marston and two ladies are shifted before us. At the same time, these scenes represent all those controversial comic moments that Wonder Woman originally found in front of the American Children's Research Department.

According to what the film shows, Marston translated the events from his life (polygraph = the lace of truth, he sisterhood followed by Wonder Woman, the heroine in the burlesque dressing combination ...) into her creative work, which is partly interesting to see. Nevertheless, these three characters, as well as their daily struggle for survival, are pushed into the background because of the beauty of the film.



The film draws its biography strictly from the extraordinary situations, the uniqueness of the lives of William, Elizabeth and Olive. Looking at Marston discussing his DISC theory, Elizabeth is talking about feminism and injustice that seems to be about women and Olive, who is interested in sexual freedoms, manages to keep viewers attention in the first third of the film, and then it becomes simply tedious. At the moment when the character's development could have been expected, since the film had a change in the period of the action of about five years, the audience gets a lot of nothing. Characters remain the same with their behavior, whether they have a safe source of finances or not, whether they live in a small suburb or campus. The uniqueness of the characters through different periods of their lives goes to the extreme that it's impossible to see the physical differences on characters although the time that passes in the film is between 15 and 20 years.

Lazy director Angelo Robinson have turned a unique, powerful story full of potential in almost two hours of unnecessary sexual fetishism, that would simply be described as 50 Shades of Gray housed in the thirties of the twentieth century.

This was my translation from Ziher.hr article ''Seksualne devojacije u stripu'' by A.Fatic