Three Levels of Deception, Fantasy and Truth
(originally posted on IMDb 14 July 2018)

The kinky sex stuff and the piggybacking on the success of the superhero movie "Wonder Woman" (2017) deservedly draw much of the attention for this, "Professor Marston and the Wonder Women," which was controversially advertised as the true story behind the creation of the Wonder Woman comic books, but they're also part of its playing with ideas of reality and fiction and the role of deception and fantasy in both worlds.

Almost every layer of the movie and even the outer-world of it, in our world, is about these ideas. There's the concealment or lack thereof of a polyamorous relationship, bondage and role-play sex, the ideals versus the reality of the politics of sexual and gender rights and roles, the use and confusion of sex in psychology and the spread of ideas, including in the creation of a fictional comic book supposedly inspired by real things. There's the invention and use of the polygraph, which is usually presented in media as an effective lie detector, but which in reality is quite faulty and often inadmissible in court. The straps of the device in the movie recall the ropes used in the bondage role play by the trio, which in turn become Wonder Woman's Lasso of Truth.

Quite a few ironies manifest from all of this layering, too. There's the daughter and niece of radical feminists and proponents of birth control but raised by nuns who ends up a homemaker after an unplanned pregnancy from a married man. There's the social scientists whose objectivity is compromised by their sexual desires, their ideas repackaged in picture books sold to children. And so on--even the fictional movie itself sold as "based on a true story," aimed to capture some of the success of the comic-book movie and itself criticized as being untrue.

I like these kinds of movies largely because their analogous to a fundamental dichotomy in cinema between being a neutral recorder of reality and a subjective instrument of illusion. My main complaint with this one is that it largely bypasses this issue in its own presentation, as yet another "based on a true story" movie, rather than examine the tension between truth and fantasy. It does this fairly well with the comics within, but not with film itself. Had it done so, presenting itself as part fantasy rather than a straight "true story," I think it also could've helped with the production's defense against criticisms that it plays loose with the facts of the historical people it depicts. The movie's plot device of Dr. Marston narrating the movie via his interrogation, indeed, offered an opportunity for an unreliable narrator, but I suspect the filmmakers were, instead, mostly ripping off the structure of other movies, such as "The Imitation Game" (2014) (although the interview plot goes much further back to, at least, the more-complex "Citizen Kane" (1941)). Yet, even the movie's supposed failures, whether in cliché dramatics (the interrogation, a fist fight, burning books, etc.), truthiness, or at the box office, are interesting because they're part of the deception and fantasy, within the movie and without.