DC’s latest “Wonder Woman” movie forms a constellation from Scythia to Trump
Salon
by EMILY JORDAN
Pop culture traces the mythic question of what makes a civilized beast. Teetering on this fulcrum of meat and mind is the goddess figure, who must hold her precarious position, bring home the bacon and look damn good while doing it. She is both a sacred box and a primal symbol: the virgin mother who never betrays you or the sexy mother who will tie you up and compel you to be good. In the case of Gal Gadot, the stunning Israeli actress who plays Wonder Woman in DC’s titular blockbuster, this might not be such a bad thing.
If there was one aspect that both the early hero comics and the pulp fiction writers and illustrators had in common, it was a shared understanding of the commodity of the primal image and how the relationship between female sexuality and human behavior could be exploited. The industrial revolution enabled mass production, which enabled mass printing, which enabled mass media. Essentially, a series of interchangeable tropes and the writers who produced them eventually led to the pulps and the studio system. The pulps — a funny mix of literary fiction and junk — rose up as another popular form of mass-produced entertainment. The trope of bound women in peril became a formula to help sell magazines, as did the practice of creating the cover before the story. Thus the selling of the story became more important than the telling of the story. And nothing sold more copies than a girl in underpants and chains.
While the pulps tapped into a fantasy that wasn’t bound by cultural restrictions — think of Margaret Brundage and her naughty BDSM covers for “Weird Tales” or Bob Howard’s “Conan the Barbarian” — comics provided a pantheon of immigrant stories for kids during a time of war: Superman, leaving the old world behind for the new. Batman, the brooding orphan. Or Wonder Woman, the fetishized, supermodel psychologist in a headband and bustier. These archetypes are as timeless and primal as that scene in “Alien” when the alien bursts out of Kane’s chest in counterpoint to the real-life nation obsessing about abortion and women’s lib. Ridley Scott would never recreate this moment.
William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, was the only person to come up with a female superhero who stood the test of time. One of the co-creators of the polygraph test, and a PhD in psychology, Marston lived in Rye, New York, with his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston and mistress Olive Byrne. He fathered children with both, a fact that all three kept hidden. In addition to being his former graduate student, Byrne was also the niece of birth control activist Margaret Sanger. On top of polyamory, the thrupple practiced an idealized feminism wherein the woman was reimagined as a purer, more fully realized counterpart to her male brethren. Add a little light bondage to the mix, and you got yourself a Saturday night. (For more on this read Jill Lepore’s book “The Secret History of Wonder Woman.”)
If Superheroes have origin stories, it follows that origin stories must have their origin stories too. From this den of polyamory and kinda-sorta female power hatched our leggy heroine, an ageless figure who ports a lasso of truth — the polygraph — and her bracelets, objects that are more defensive than offensive. Additionally, she is a combo of pagan virgin wisdom goddess and pin-up girl. A product of sexless birth, she leaves the all-female perfection of Paradise Island, AKA Themyscira, for the hell-pit of despair that is life among men. Though every civilization requires violence, Wonder Woman seems most likely to want to talk it out rather than fight it out.
The Amazons of legend, such as Wonder Woman’s mother Hippolyta, whose girdle Theseus famously stole, and Hippolyta’s sister Antiope, were warrior-enemies of the Greeks — the platonic form of civilization. An ironic aspect of the Amazon mythos is their reverse-rape narrative wherein their “perfect society” entails their stealing off to ravage men and then abandoning the male offspring in neighboring towns or castrating them. This is likely apocryphal, as is the one-breasted (a-mazos) moniker that was given to them by later Greek historians. IRL, the Amazons were Scythian warriors who practiced archery and rode horses.
Basically, Marston took elements of the Amazon legend and conflated those elements with a Sapphic love vibe and then dropped some good ol’ fashioned superheroism and psychology into the mix. As in Steve Trevor’s plane drops right out of a hole in the sky. In 1942, it may not have been certain how the war was going to go, but the enemy was clear. The only antidote to end German putrefaction: a gentle touch, light bondage and a swift kick in the rear from androgyne Barbie.