Maybe it’s an acquired taste. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
by Don Clasen
Oct. 15, 2017
I have watched a lot of movies in my life but I cannot say I have been quite as floored and completely caught off guard in my expectations as I was with Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. It wasn’t that it’s a train wreck of a movie; it’s actually a well-done production that I even found touching at times here and there. It’s that it’s a train wreck of a story, though a true life one all the same, and the basis for the edifice of what I call the superhero movie madness of our time.
Moreover it’s one that causes that edifice to come crashing down with all the glamour, pretense, billions of dollars in profits and quite frankly, unmitigated bullshit and fantasy delusion it represents. Crashing down resoundingly and completely, in spite of the fact that 99% of movie reviewers insist on “celebrating” its damning indictment of the American public’s bottomless credulousness and naïve suggestibility. In fact, Professor Marston is so wide in its scope of implications for modern culture you could even fit in Hollywood’s own train wreck of the Harvey Weinstein scandal under its umbrella.
I say that because the Superhero movie craze is not just entertainment; it is some pretty subtle social conditioning to prepare the world for the coming “New Order” wherein the Ascended Masters, the “Gods Among Us,” are about to be manifested (i.e., revealed). As I have tried to show in so many of my writings, what’s really in view here is a “glorious” Zionist/Illuminati/occultic eschatological hope. The prime target is the “oppression” of “Christian culture” and all its “inhibitions and restrictions.” This may have not been the intent of the originators of the comic book craze but it has turned into an opportunistic circumstance by the powers-that-be to use it for such an agenda all the same.
Unfortunately for these would-be liberators, what’s in their way is much more than just the rabbis’ age-old nemeses Jesus Christ and the Christian Church. It’s what so much of the world outside the Israeli cult consider to be decent, realistic, common sense and yes, even practical standards that are necessary for civilized society to function.
And oh yes, there’s one other obstacle too. The God of Israel, Who is not mocked (Gal 6:7) and Who changes not (Mal 3:6).
Jumping In
I hardly even know where to begin or end in describing how much this movie disturbed me, yet confirmed so much of my own thinking. I’ve rarely seen two hours packed with so many thoughts, topics, dialogue, sights and sentiments, all of which could be taken in so many different directions. The contradictions the characters kept casually stumbling upon and quickly dismissing left me with smoke oozing out of my head.
Professor Marston is the true story of William Marston/Charles Moulton, the creator of the Marvel Comics character Wonder Woman and his wife Elizabeth, played by Luke Evans and Rebecca Hall respectively. As the movie opens it is about 1947 and Moulton, his pen name, is dismayed that children and parents around America are gathering up his comic books and burning them.
He is also in New York undergoing intensive questioning of his work by the Child Study Association of America headed by their executive Director Josette Frank (Connie Britton). Mrs. Frank is asking him to explain the extensive scenes in Wonder Woman of all sorts of people tied up, undergoing S-M Bondage ritual and undergoing “enhanced interrogation” with her “Lasso of Truth.” Indeed.
The ever skeptical Mrs. Frank
As he tries to justify his story, we flash back to 1928 when Marston was a Harvard-trained professor of psychology at Radcliffe, the exclusive New England women’s college. His wife Elizabeth is his partner off to the side in class, seeing she can’t get a position as a professor herself anywhere since she’s a woman.
We also learn this is especially galling to her since she is also highly educated (Boston U. Law School) and considers herself the smarter of the two. Her husband agrees and sympathizes with her feminist leanings though it’s hard to tell if Marston’s problem isn’t actually his boundless appetite for all ideas new and novel. Although psychologists today out of necessity perhaps, have reluctantly come to realize the importance of “boundaries” in people’s relationships with one another, Marston seems always eager to break them and “explore something new” when it comes to experimenting with people’s minds and their lives.
As if to illustrate this point in bold relief, in an early classroom scene he is expounding to his students his pet theory about the importance of dominance and submission in relationships. He draws on the blackboard—“Dominance, Inducement (Seduction), Submission and Compliance,” arguing that, “A person is most happy when they are submissive to a loving authority.” That Authority is supposed to be God Himself of course. Making a claim like that regarding human authority is one loaded statement.
Loving authority!
In a later discussion his cynical wife suggests that what he’s really talking about is the natural role of the male to be the dominant one and that his theory is basically an apologetic for age-old male chauvinism. She herself is taken up with the new and trendy “penis envy” theory then making the rounds of what little feminist circles existed at the time. Her husband with little sense of irony agrees with her, stating that the male of course is ordained by nature to “penetrate” wherever he goes.
All this use of sexual language in intellectual inquiry was pioneered in the Talmud which likens drawing truth out of a rabbi to pulling on a penis to make it erect (as one example), which efforts I imagine result in a shower of insight. Although I doubt Marston got this proclivity from Talmudic study, I wouldn’t be surprised if he picked it up as part and parcel of Freud’s thinking, considering how deeply the latter was raised in Jewish culture. Freud also admitted he wanted to use his theory as a weapon against Christian culture by breaking down the “super-ego” (the conscience) and urging people to indulge their “id” (carnal, animalistic instincts) thus empowering the “ego,” the blessings of which are all around us in this narcissistic age.[1]
In none of this of course is there any questioning of Marston’s cockamamie theory about the value of “dominating,” any more than there is in our own uber-competitive, hard-as-nails, Social Darwinist time. America at that point was still operating under a Christian paradigm of serving one another wherein even leaders were expected to be public servants, not Alpha-male head-knockers as our current Dominator-in-Chief is constantly waxing ineloquent about on the Twitters. Or Dwayne the Rock Johnson telling Seri to “Remind me to dominate today.” Or Harvey Weinstein pursuing apparently the “thrill” of terrorizing women half his size that he too might convince himself that he’s “dominating” every day in every way too.
Sluffing It Off On “The Little Woman”
It is quite mystifying to watch Marston, having his own struggles with credulousness and constantly whining, “Why do things have to be this way?,” and claiming that his ideas are so superior to the “ignorance” of his times, being so infatuated with the glories of domination. In one scene with comic mogul M.C. Gaines (Oliver Pratt), William calls the censors fascists. “They’re not fascists, they’re Catholics,” Gaines explains. “Same difference,” Marston shoots back. It makes me wonder if he had ever heard about a couple of guys named Adolph and Benito.
Little matter, for the question of male dominance is soon dropped and shifted to domination and the female. In his class is a pretty young thing named Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote) who has already applied to be the professor’s intern. Elizabeth who prides herself on not being born yesterday is so open-minded she is willing to go along with his hiring her, but tells the young lady, “Just don’t fuck my husband.” Twice.
This is quite shocking for a female college student to hear in 1928, but in spite of her “beauty, innocence and guilelessness” as William later puts it when explaining why he’s attracted to her, it turns out that Olive is more eager to explore breaking taboos than the older couple themselves. This happens a number of times as their three-way relationship evolves. We also find out that part of that reason may be because her mother was Ethyl Byrne, the pioneer of birth control and her aunt was Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.
The first step in this evolution happens when the three of them are experimenting with William’s invention, the lie detector. Convinced the body will react when the soul tells a lie, the three of them take turns being strapped down (an on-going motif throughout the movie) to test the machine. When William answers with obvious lies to his wife’s questions and the machine doesn’t respond, Olive suggests that maybe the problem is that the questions aren’t personal enough.
Fair enough Elizabeth thinks, and asks her husband, “Are you in love with Olive,?” to which he naturally replies, “No” as the machine goes nuts. As uncomfortable as this is to all three, it’s as nothing when Olive is strapped down and they find out that, not only is she in love with William, but even more so with Elizabeth!
Flags All Over The Field
At this early point in the movie I’m thinking to myself, “OK, time out for some Christian philosophy here.” It is a fact true enough I would venture to guess, that everyone in this world is attracted to multiples of people, even to the point of wanting to have sex with them. The Bible’s answer to this however is that just because that’s going on inside doesn’t give one permission to act on it, nor even an obligation to have to admit such things.
But all this is part of the old paradigm of privacy and social boundaries that is rapidly fading in our day in favor of presuming the right of some people such as, you know, psychologists (the dominant) to discover the deepest thoughts of others (the submissive). And naturally since the Marstons’ start from the premise that, just because there’s prejudice against women having careers, that that means everything society “stands for” is ignorant and backwards and worthy of being challenged by “new ideas.”
It’s interesting how in multiple instances in this story, all three of our protagonists react in turn against taking forays into taboo. It’s as if they instinctively sense that such moves would be “morally wrong” or at least get them into a lot of trouble. And yet their philosophical commitment to challenge everything causes them to constantly brush such impulses aside.
Thus I could not stop thinking how much these three were on their way to founding a cult, maybe like the Children of God, so popular here in LA in the 1960s. Nor could I ignore the constant irony of them missing the fact that none of this is “new.” Polygamy is as old as the Bible, along with “free love” and “submission” to idols, superstition, sexual perversity, Satanism and the like, things that God told Israel they “shall not bow down [submit] to.”
Elizabeth is the first one to “see where all this is going” (her marriage in jeopardy) and fires Olive. Olive feels scapegoated since at that point at least, it wasn’t her who brought things this far. But when she flees crying, Elizabeth runs after her and in a fit of emotion Olive starts making out with her. By the time William shows up the two of them are necking passionately in the school auditorium and Olive beckons him to come join them. With a “come hither” strut she leads them behind the curtain where they have their first orgy.
The “Persecution” Begins
Happy on campus for the moment.
Given that this new “family” cannot stop showing their affection to one another in public, the inevitable happens and the school fires them. Shocked into reality, the couple suggest they stop this madness but Olive announces that she’s pregnant so they decide to stay together!
As William begins to father children by these two women, they begin to run into problems with “the neighbors,” regardless of what neighborhood they live in. Worse yet, William can’t get hired as a professor and Elizabeth’s hopes for a professorship are busted down to her being a typist the rest of her days. Olive of course could never even start a career. She was now a “statistic” as it’s put nowadays, a pregnant young woman who’s life is set back forever. You know, the kinds that are often found in ghettos and dismissed by both the liberals who push such avant garde stuff and the conservatives who consider their problem to be immorality and piously conclude that “they deserve it.”
In a flash forward back to the 1947 interview, William complains to the Board of how unfair all this is, that his two ladies became “victims of a man’s world.” From the look on Mrs. Frank’s face who wants to protect the families of America, I got the impression that she got the irony but the man sitting across from her didn’t.
And neither did the audience I suppose, what little was there with me. After all, they’ve all been well-trained in the mantra of “not being judgmental” God forbid, when it comes to “the rights of all people to decide whom they want to love,” yada, yada and et cetera. Rather it’s for them to “celebrate” the train wreck staring at them on the screen.
Tie Me Down Sport
All of this, important as it is to the story, is just prelude however. It’s how Wonder Woman came about and all the images of bondage that saturated his comic books that the Board was really trying to “understand,” as they kept putting it to him. William you see was busted down too, from being an academic to being a comic book writer. I suppose the irony of that was missed on the audience too, including its symbolism of what passes for American education and culture now.
He goes on to explain how he wandered into a costume shop one day, a kind of Victoria’s Secret of the time but even more: costumes and paraphernalia for sexual fantasies. The owner introduces himself as a Frenchman, Charles Guyette (JJ Feild), “King of the G-String.” In the threesome’s pursuit of how to support women’s rights and feminism, William had already envisioned Wonder Woman as being modeled on Venus, the Greek goddess of beauty and love, and something of an Amazon from a mythical all-female tribe of warriors. In claiming he was looking for a party costume for his wife, Guyette shows him a mannequin with a fantasy costume consisting of a halter top, short shorts, leather leg straps and a tiara. It must have been a sign from above!
But it was the white boots with the black laces that really got me. Guyette may have been from France but ground zero for unbridled sexual excess in the world at that time was Weimar Germany—Berlin specifically, where the prostitution trade was almost completely under the control of Jews. Things were so far gone by the time of Hitler’s rise (and clearly contributing to the public backlash) that they had specialties—sex with deformed people, mother-daughter combinations and the like. Bondage had become such a science that the dominatrixes wore 12 different color-coded boots to advertise their own specialties.[2] Black laces signified “punishment with a short whip” I believe.
Guyette goes on to introduce him to a fancy rope used for bondage rituals, illustrating on our hero how to tie him up. Marston/Moulton returns home and shows his two wives the pornographic comic books he bought and some fantasy costume drawings. The ladies’ reactions are, “These are illegal,” (which they were) and again they recoil instinctively about “going there.” After all, it’s served them so well in terms of social ostracization in the past, why not take it all the way to jail too?
I would have called but I was all tied up.
A Star Is Born!
But instead Wonder Woman is born, becomes a huge hit and the three become rich! It’s got to be a parable about modern day justice. Inevitably though the backlash comes, the book burnings begin, and Moulton is now before this Board. And one of their burning questions is, Why all the scenes of bondage and sado-masochism? In flash backs again, Moulton tells of how the three of them ventured deeper and deeper into bondage ritual, exploring their “fantasies.”
In one scene when a neighbor stops by one day and discovers them semi-naked and all tied up, she is stunned of course and instantly drops her eyes as if she is ashamed for them. This leads to her husband calling them perverts, at which William attacks him and gets the worst for it, prompting Mrs. Frank to say, “So now this leads to violence (in society) too?” I mean like, gee whiz. Who’da thunk that?
All this pressure gives William a massive heart attack and two months in the hospital. At this point in their story Olive has already left. Why? In the midst of all their troubles, the ever sharp-tongued Elizabeth one night insults her with the truth. “What career?” she says to Olive. “My husband used to be a professor and now writes comics. I had advanced degrees and now I’m a typist. And you? You never were anything.”
Which of course is true. Olive never “was anything.” Her hopes and dreams were dashed when she got pregnant. To pursue this chimera of freedom Olive scared off her perfectly normal, handsome but aghast fiancée early in the story. Such is the lot of women being “liberated” in this way.
After that she left and never returned until the Marstons were about to check out of the hospital, humbled and feeling quite guilty. When she shows up, one of the most bizarre of all the bizarro moments in this movie takes place when William and Elizabeth end up on their knees begging Olive’s forgiveness. At that they reunite again, with the two women living a lesbian life into old age (Elizabeth to age 100) after William dies.
I was tempted at this point to call him the Ed Wood of the comic book world.
In end-of-movie overwrites, we also learn that Gloria Steinem honored Wonder Woman by putting the older version of her (she’s been through many evolutions over the decades) on Ms. magazine’s first cover, claiming the original dominatrix inspired her idea of what “women’s liberation” means. Nevertheless this incredibly blind movie drowning in contradictions had to end on a positive note of course, as William in voiceover “celebrates” the “strength” and “justice” these two female role models for Wonder Woman embodied.
Some strength. Some sense of justice. Where’s the justice for the millions of American families who didn’t want their impressionable kids subjected to such self-destructive propaganda? In a video interview, a descendant explained what Grandmother Elizabeth’s values were—“all-inclusive; fair play is critical; this person and this person are equal; you try not to kick their ass; if you can’t talk them out of it (?), you do what you have to [enhanced interrogation?]; get things done; don’t let anything stop you.” You could probably find a clearer life philosophy on a Celestial Seasonings tea box than the jibberish that represents.
Pop Psychology and Fighting God
I assume you can see how many huge issues this movie brings up, all so wide and deep as to hardly be the place here to tackle all of them. They include things like sex in general, sexual perversion and what constitutes it, interrogation and its ethical limitations, and of course, feminism and women’s rights which represent a wide spectrum of questions alone.
As for the latter, I don’t think anyone would argue that the feminist movement has had both good and bad impact on society. The sentiment that a woman deserves a right to a career if she chooses is widely accepted today and something she can craft while being a mother at the same time. On the other end is the lesbian/man-hating culture that some of it has dead-ended into. Women (and people in general) neurotic over their sexual identity has likewise made us a laughing stock to the rest of a world where people just accept the basic gender identity God gave them.
Another aspect of this that feminists really hate is the objectification of women as sex objects, leading to the “bimbo” culture of sexual liberation (to a point of obsession) and women being as much “property” as they ever were in the most backwards of societies. If you don’t believe me, just consider the revival of sex slavery world-wide and the implications of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. In this story, the lack of wisdom of Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, brings her nothing approaching empowerment. Instead she becomes the dress up model for a cartoon character while in the second-class status of being a mistress. What exactly is “new” about any of this?
Marston’s motives were far less noble than this film wants us to think. In one scene where he’s trying to sell comic book mogul Gaines on his idea, he literally describes it as, “‘Suprema The Wonder Woman’ will not be an ordinary comic book but instead, the start of a powerful feminist movement. She will be carefully-crafted psychological propaganda based on a lifetime of research into the human mind inserted into a populist medium to further the cause of human rights for women.” Awkward as dialogue but deadly accurate all the same.
Throughout the entire movie whatever objective was being considered it was always within the context of the psychologist’s presumed right to explore the human mind for manipulation purposes with no moral judgment. In this of course as with all subjects it touches upon, what’s always present is the presumed right of humans to do whatever come to their minds. What’s always absent is the question at the heart of all Christian philosophy, What does God want from us? And are there any limitations on our boundless enthusiasm for “freedom”?
As was said, the comic book craze, as horrible an alternative as it is compared to the real reading of substantive literature, never was part of a deliberate plot to undermine society. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s become exactly that, a part of the Talmudic/ Illuminati effort to get the Christian/ Enlightenment world to self-destruct through the promotion of fantasy, escapism, sexual “liberation” and self-genocide as I tried to illustrate in “Super Hero Madness and the New World Order.” Just the attempt to mainstream torture, Fifty Shades of perversion, horror, terror and authoritarianism instead of a rule of law is but a taste of all the damage movies today are normalizing.
If you’re stupid enough to fall for their “inducements,” they’ll hang them around your neck and tell you you deserve it while they go off to pursue a demographics maternity race in the West Bank with the Palestinians, so to speak.[3] Meanwhile your heritage in the earth can die. The day we begin to answer their seductive calls for unlimited “freedom” and frame “identity politics” for what it is—a con job to get you to self-genocide both individually and collectively, is the day we might start to open the eyes of a gullible public.
Notes:
[1] It is easy to argue that psychology in general is very much a non-Biblical subject in that God does not spend a lot of time focusing on the inner thought and emotional processes. His salvation is commandment or law-oriented, in the sense of “Do this and don’t do that, and if you do this and don’t do that you’ll avoid guilt and feel good about yourself.”
[2] Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/12924542
[3] None of this of course addresses the very real problem of world over-population. But they don’t care since they’re planning on killing 85-90% of us off anyway.
