Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, released in 2017, was written and directed by Angela Robinson. The film is about psychologist William Moulton Marston, creator of the comic-book character Wonder Woman. The story is told in flashback from testimony William gives in 1945 to representatives of the Child Study Association of America, covering the late 1920s into the 1940s: his life with his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston and their partner Olive Byrne, from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges out to a New York suburb. For readers who care about BDSM and fetish, the film shows his DISC theory — Dominance, Inducement, Submission, Compliance — moving from an academic model into pictures of power exchange.
The triad and the lie detector
In 1928 William and Elizabeth teach at Harvard and Radcliffe. William hires student Olive Byrne as a research assistant. She helps invent the lie-detector device and push DISC forward. The theory treats human relations as dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance. Lie-detector records show, one after another, that the three have fallen in love, and they begin a triad. All three are adults. Word of the arrangement gets them fired from the university. They move to a New York suburb and tell the neighbors that Olive is a widow the Marstons have taken in. They raise four children together. Elizabeth earns the money, Olive keeps the house, William writes. In public the household looks ordinary. In private the power between them does not.
Charles Guyette’s shop and the costume
In 1940 William finds a New York lingerie shop run by Charles Guyette, and with it fetish-art comics and photographs. The images of restraint and submission strike him as a popular demonstration of DISC: submission and dominance as a visual language. Elizabeth disapproves until Olive tries on an outfit that later becomes a prototype for Wonder Woman’s costume. The costume carries the theory and the real influence of Elizabeth and Olive. William invents an Amazon superheroine for comics, meant to push feminist equal rights through a mass medium. He pitches the character to publisher Max Gaines at National Periodical Publications. Gaines accepts and suggests simplifying the name to Wonder Woman. The comic is a hit and the household gets money. A neighbor walks in on the three of them having sex. The children are bullied at school and pushed out. Fearing further attack and ostracism, Elizabeth reluctantly demands that Olive leave with her own children.
The 1945 hearing
The film returns to the 1945 hearing. Wonder Woman is accused of overtly sexual, sadomasochistic, and lesbian imagery, and that accusation is played as a public morals panic. William defends the comic at the hearing, then collapses with cancer. Dying, he asks Olive to reconcile with Elizabeth, and he pushes Elizabeth — the one who has been dominating — to submit for once. The Marstons kneel and beg Olive’s forgiveness. Elizabeth admits she cannot live without her.
What the family says is fiction
The film uses real history, and descendants have disputed parts of it. Christie Marston, granddaughter of William and Elizabeth, says the idea that Elizabeth and Olive were lovers is pure fiction. In her account the bond was close friendship, not a sexual couple. She says she cannot swear that no such relationship existed, but she is 99.99 percent certain they were not lovers. Josette Frank’s granddaughter criticizes the film for painting her grandmother as a conservative Christian type. The real Josette, she says, was the opposite. Closing text states that William died in 1947; Elizabeth and Olive lived together for another 43 years, until Olive’s death in 1990; Elizabeth lived to 100. After William’s death, sexual imagery and Wonder Woman’s superpowers disappeared from the comic. In 1972 Gloria Steinem put the character on the cover of the first issue of Ms. The powers were restored later.
Bondage in the origin story
The film gives kink viewers three concrete links. DISC shows up in Wonder Woman’s capture and rescue, in the bracelets, and in the truth-telling. Charles Guyette’s lingerie shop is the pipe from underground bondage photography into mainstream costume design, and Olive trying on the prototype outfit is the erotic test of that idea. The 1945 hearing treats sadomasochistic imagery as a moral crisis, which sits next to the early comic panels of capture, restraint, and power exchange.
