Imaginary Worlds - Imagining Wonder Woman

Episode Date: February 25, 2016

Wonder Woman is finally going to make her cinematic debut in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Bringing her to the big screen has been a long and fraught process. She is a beloved character with a tricky backstory -- not just in the comics, but in real life too. While Superman and Batman have drawn from familiar genres of sci-fi and detective tales, Wonder Woman was created by psychologist William Moulton Marston, who tapped into long forgotten utopian feminist fiction while adding a few twists of his own. Featuring Jill Lepore ("The Secret History of Wonder Woman"), former DC exec Jenette Kahn and comic book artist Cliff Chiang.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. So the super mega hyped movie Batman vs. Superman is about to land in multiplexes around the world. I'm kind of obsessed with this movie, but also wary at the same time. But there is one thing I am really looking forward to. Finally seeing Wonder Woman on film. Is she with you thing I am really looking forward to. Finally seeing Wonder Woman on film. She with you? I thought she was with you. Bringing her to the big screen has been a long, torturous process. I won't go into the whole production history, but there is finally going

to be a standalone Wonder Woman origin story next year, starring Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman after she makes her debut in Batman v Superman. I don't think you've ever known a woman like me. One of the reasons why Wonder Woman has had a troubled history is, well, sexism. But there have been plenty of male writers who approached this character with the best of intentions and just couldn't make it

work. And the reasons why are much deeper and stranger than a lot of people realize. And it all goes back to her origin story, not just the one in the comics, but the one in real life too. Way back in the early 1940s, comic books were skyrocketing in popularity. But they were also corrupting the youth of America, according to many concerned adults. So one day, a comic book publisher named M.C. Gaines was thrilled to read this article in the magazine Family Circle where a journalist named Olive Byrne went to see a psychologist, William Moulton Marston, to ask him if it's okay to let her children read comic

books. And he says you sure should because they're great. They're like the folk stories of our age. They're great fantasy. There's nothing wrong with them. Comic books are great. That is Jill Lepore. She's a writer for The New Yorker and she wrote a book called The Secret History of Wonder Woman. MC Gaines, the publisher of All-American Comics

and the sort of a precursor to what becomes DC Comics, brings Marston and says, I want to hire you as my own in-house consulting psychologist because he's fighting this incredible battle against censorship. And Marston says, you should have an editorial advisory board and Marston's going to join it

and they continue to talk. And then Marston says, you know, but editorial advisory board and Marston's going to join it. And they continue to talk. And then Marston says, you know, but what you really need, because the criticism of Superman is that he's a fascist and Batman, you know, for a while has a gun and they're like super violent. And you need a you need a female superhero. And she needs to repudiate violence and she needs to solve problems with love. And she needs to represent truth and justice and equality. And she can punch Nazis because, you know, it's World War II. Gaines is like, this is great. I mean, this meeting couldn't go any better, right? Well, there's a lot he didn't know about Dr. Marston.

Now, remember that interview in Family Circle magazine? It turns out the reporter, Olive Byrne, was no stranger to Marston. She was actually part of a polyamorous relationship between him and his wife, Elizabeth Holloway. The three of them were actually raising their children together. Marston had been blacklisted from Harvard and Columbia because of his deviant sexual beliefs. Now, he had always been fascinated by sex and gender ever since he was an undergraduate during the heyday of the women's suffrage movement. And when he submits his ideas for this new female superman, he borrows heavily from feminist literature that he read as a young man.

The character has a backstory that she's really Princess Diana. She's the daughter of Queen Hippolyte, the Queen of the Amazons, who in the world of ancient Greece, the Greeks of legend, escaped essentially the enslavement of women by Greek men to an island called Paradise Island, where she was given by Aphrodite eternal life and peerless strength. Then one day, a U.S. military plane crashes on the island and Captain Steve Trevor from the U.S. Army Air Force is injured and someone has to bring him back to the United States because the United States is the last best hope for equal rights for women. And that's why the Queen's daughter, Princess Diana, becomes Diana Prince. So that sounds like, OK, it's like, you know, there's Batman and Bruce Wayne and there's Superman and Clark Kent. And this is just Marston's girl version of that.

But that's not the case at all. That entire story about Wonder Woman's origins comes from feminist utopian fiction. Describe to me more the feminist utopian fiction. Tell me more about what kind of storylines would typically happen in the different worlds. So there was this weird thing in the 19th century where anthropologists postulated that historically there used to be a matriarchy, like before the rise of patriarchy. And so the one way that feminists start playing with this is by writing fiction about, it's a little bit like the leftovers or like these left behind places. So Herland or Angel Island, often it's an island,

like there'll be like a remote deserted island where women still rule the world because they never kind of got the memo that patriarchy had come along. And there are these women only islands and they have like they create new children by parthenogenesis or they have some weird magical powers and they can still have children and, and they, they, they never have wars and they never fight because women are so good. And, and then along comes some disaster in, I think an angel Island, there's a shipwreck and like a bunch of men wash up on shore. And in Angel Island, the women are so good that they've grown wings. And then the men who wash up on shore are like, okay, we're stuck on this deserted island.

There's beautiful women, but they have these wings and they just fly away from us. So they devised this crazy plan. The men, they capture the women and they cut off their wings. Like it's this bloody gruesome thing. But it couldn't be further from the world of, you know, these teenagers who are riding Superman. So Marston had to make his case to the skeptics. Although I don't think he really won them over with stuff like this.

Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world. There isn't enough love in the male organism to run this planet peacefully. Marston also believed that the Amazon women, living on an island that was devoid of men, are not necessarily heterosexual or asexual. He even gave Wonder Woman the signature phrase, which is a reference to the island of Lesbos. Marsden was absolutely thinking about homosexuality, a lot, and writing about it, and writing about transvestitism, you know, having multiple partners. His mistress's mother did not believe in marriage. They were, you know, Margaret Sanger

and Ithel Blum believed in free love. They were very, you know, what historians call, they were sex radicals in the 19-teens. Another thing that's really striking about Wonder Woman that people are often distressed by is that Wonder Woman is often chained up. And in every, especially the early episodes that Marston wrote in 41, 42, 43, she's chained up, she breaks free of her chains. And this was hugely scandalous at the time. People thought it was so fetishistic and it's so pornographic.

And Marston said, look, she's an allegory for women's emancipation. She has to be chained up so she can free herself. But in fact, showing women in chains was a signal move of the suffrage and feminist and birth control movements of the 1910s. So women marching for the right to vote in these giant suffrage marches like Chicago and in the 1910s, they marched in chains. But Marston also had a thing for women and I mean, for submission. Marston did also have it, right. Actually, it's very multifaceted. So it's interesting. I mean, for submission. Marston did also have it. Right. Actually, it's very multifaceted. So it's interesting.

I mean, there's no denying that it's totally kink. Wonder Woman's famous golden lasso, which forces bad guys to tell the truth, was inspired by Marston's invention of the lie detector test and his fixation with domination and submission. mission. He thought if men incorporated submission into their sex lives, they would be purged of violent urges and wouldn't feel compelled to start world wars. That's why Wonder Woman loses her powers if a man chains her up, but not if a woman does. And reading these comics today, they're so much fun because they feel kind of shockingly modern in some ways, but it's just not the kind of shockingly modern in some ways. But it's just not the kind of stuff you'd expect to hear in a 1940s radio play, which I guess would have sounded something like this.

In the repair shop two levels below. It's very strange we cannot make you talk. No matter. In three minutes, train of American generals will make contact. Bang. Tunnel blow up. Aphrodite, help me. As though an answer to Wonder Woman's prayers, the welder who chained her reveals herself to be a woman.

Wonder Woman is herself again. I have not lost my power. A girl chained me. Pardon me, boys. I'm the Chattanooga Choo Choo. By the way, that dialogue is not coming from Marston. He ends up, you know, hiring this young 19-year-old girl, Joy Hummel, who's a student of his, because he realizes he can't write slang.

Like, he's this old guy. He has little kids who are reading these books. She's completely uncredited and has largely—she's still alive. I mean, I found her in an interview. She's an amazing person. And she wrote a ton—you know, more than half probably of the Wonder Woman comics that are attributed to Marston. The comics sold really well, but Wonder Woman faced a backlash within the company. Like there was another writer who started what was essentially the Justice League, and he made Wonder Woman the secretary. Marston was furious, but there's nothing he could do about

it. Then he got sick. Once Marston gets polio in 1944, that's only, you know, three years in, barely three years into the comic book. You know, then everything kind of goes to hell in a handbasket. One of the reasons that it's hard for other writers to deal with a character is, okay, Superman quite clearly borrows from the conventions of science fiction, you know, which has been around in the kind of pulp way since, you know, Gernsby's Amazing Stories in the 1920s, right? There's a very well-established conventions of pulp science fiction.

So anybody who's going to become throwing out a plot idea for Superman or a character turn for Superman, there's this whole genre to rely on, right? Batman is just completely reliant on detective fiction. right? Batman is just completely reliant on detective fiction. Marston's relying on Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Sanger and, you know, Lou Rogers, this feminist cartoonist who really influenced Harry G. Peter, the artist who draws Wonder Woman. But other than Marston and Peter, those guys are too young to even remember that stuff from the 19-teens. And they're not, they didn't, you know, they're just, people don't go around reading feminist utopian fiction in the same way there's the mass appeal for detective fiction and science fiction.

They can't continue a storyline within the conventions of a genre that they have no knowledge of whatsoever. The backlash against comics was gaining momentum in the 1950s, to the point where there was a hearing in Congress. And to survive, the comic book industry had to adopt a really retrograde code. Batman went from film noir to candy-colored Fantasia. Wonder Woman stopped focusing on punching bad guys and became obsessed about whether her boyfriend Steve Trevor was ever going to propose to her. She even lost her powers for many years and just became a fashionable spy.

Jeanette Kahn, who would grow up to run DC Comics, says that when she was a girl in the 1950s, she never read Wonder Woman because she didn't even know Wonder Woman existed. It all depends on what your local Five and Dime or soda shop carried. And I don't remember them carrying Wonder Woman. And we would go there and we would read as many comics as we could before we had to pay and were chased out of the store. But I don't remember Wonder Woman being among them. And then in 1972, when she's an editor at DC Comics, she gets a call from Gloria Steinem, who wants to put Wonder Woman on the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine. Gloria was an enormous fan as she grew up on the wrong side of the tracks of East Toledo, Ohio.

And she thought there is just no way out of East Toledo short of becoming a Las Vegas showgirl. And then when she was seven, Wonder Woman was published. And here was this beautiful, independent woman who liked men, but was nonetheless independent, didn't feel she had to be married, who was compassionate, humanistic, but also had tremendous power. And Gloria so treasured this early sense of Wonder Woman because she read Wonder Woman and thought there is another way out. The cover of the first issue of Ms., she got the rights from us at DC Comics, and there was Wonder Woman striding the metropolis, stopping crime with one hand and dispensing food to the hungry with the other.

That magazine cover had reverberations within the DC universe. Wonder Woman got her powers back and her classic costume. She became part of the Super Friends cartoon show and the hugely popular live-action show with Linda Carter, the one that inspired a generation of girls to twirl around their living rooms. But her comics never sold very well, even when the folks at DC thought they were doing everything right. She never had the fan base or the kind of enthusiasm that our male superheroes had.

But then comics have always been more about male fantasy. Although that is changing, even in the last couple years. In 2011, DC rebooted their entire universe. Some characters were barely affected, but others got complete makeovers. And not surprisingly, Wonder Woman was reimagined from scratch again. This one was pretty radical. Now remember, a big part of Wonder Woman's backstory are the Greek gods. Usually they're kind of the villains.

But the artist Cliff Chang and the writer Brian Azzarello put those gods front and center and made them Wonder Woman's squabbling siblings. Here's Cliff. In our story, Wonder Woman was raised with the idea that she had been crafted from clay by her mother. Which had been her origin. Which was her origin for decades. And what we wanted to do was twist things up a little bit for her, where she was still born out of love, a very tragic situation where her mother had fallen in love. But because of Zeus's marriage to Hera, who he was no longer in love with, they were unable to let people know about it. So the story of her birth with the clay statue was concocted in order to hide her true parentage.

Now, some fans objected to this new origin story because Wonder Woman was no longer molded from clay and given life by a goddess. origin story because Wonder Woman was no longer molded from clay and given life by a goddess. And she gets so caught up in the Mount Olympus storyline, her traditional support network, the Amazons, are hardly in it. But what I loved about their series was the artwork itself. Cliff draws through these very thick black lines, which means you don't get lost in all the little details, which happens too much for me in comics. He drew really fantastical stuff like this Poseidon type sea god, which reminded me of Miyazaki's animation. But most of the gods are drawn as these very otherworldly people wearing very cool fashion. When he draws Wonder Woman, she looks totally badass. Part of Wonder Woman's appeal is that duality where she is dressed up in a bathing suit or dressed up as a pinup model, but she represents being free of that at the same time.

So her clothing, or lack thereof, is really a challenge to your ideas of what a woman should wear. Yeah, I told you, I was immediately drawn to it. is really a challenge to your ideas of what a woman should wear. Yeah, I told you, I was immediately drawn to it. And many of my screensavers on my iPhone are your covers. I mean, it's crazy, but there are even days when I feel like I need a little boost of empowerment and I'll switch my screensaver to her with like thrusting her sword forward. Right. Or, you know, there's one thing in the first issue, I think, where she's blocking a bunch of arrows. Yes, yes.

I love those. Like those make me feel strong in a weird way yeah in terms of my direct you know things i had direct control over the covers for wonder woman were something i'm very proud of uh because there's a publishing history of having Wonder Woman on covers, but always as a damsel in distress, as someone who's being dominated. These aren't situations one would draw Batman or Superman in. And so I thought it was a double standard. So whenever it was suggested to me that we have Wonder Woman doing this or that, I always tried to make sure Wonder Woman was drawn

in a way that it was coming from a place of power. So even if, say, she were tied up as she was on one of the covers, she's very defiant in having been tied up. He thinks body language is the most important thing to keep in mind when drawing Wonder Woman. When someone comes into a room and is that physically imposing, your eyes do go to them. And with Wonder Woman, you know, I wanted to have that sense of her being almost unearthly

but very controlled and quiet in the way that a confident person doesn't need to be all over everybody. And whenever a comic book character gets rebooted for comics or TV or film, the creative team can usually go back to the original comics for inspiration. And that's worked really well with Batman or Superman. But the reason why

Wonder Woman keeps getting reimagined from scratch is because when you go back to her origins, you have to deal with William Moulton Marston. The idea of a really sex-positive comic is interesting, particularly with a female lead. There's something very liberating about that. And unfortunately, it's not something you can do very easily with an all-ages sort of book. That is interesting because, I mean, if you want to take the original intention behind Wonder Woman and modernize it, a sex positive comic is really what it is about even more as much as it being feminist. Yes. Yeah, I think you have to touch on it lightly, but it's certainly something that needs to be discussed. and work it in in places um but you know the idea of loving submission is you know is key to wonder woman but it's a hard thing to uh put on the page in action it's possible that you know as the culture changes wonder woman could become more popular as people become more accepting that's

interesting she may be she she may over time, once society becomes more comfortable with that, DC could become more comfortable with that and then you could see a more, you know, a bisexual Wonder Woman and everyone would be cool with that. And it would actually be more in line with her origins. Right. That's very forward thinking though. Too forward thinking? For Time Warner, maybe. Now remember, Marston was a psychologist, not a writer.

And he really thought of Wonder Woman as a symbol more than as a character. And that's another reason why she's so challenging to write. But I think that's what's also great about the character. For as much as we changed her, she still remains Wonder Woman. There's something in that core. And what is Wonder Woman? What do you think is the core of Wonder Woman? Because that's the thing. I think if you ask people, who's Batman, who's Superman, you know, but if you ask who's

Wonder Woman, I feel like they'll start mentioning her costume more than who is she as a character exactly. How would you describe Superman? Superman is someone who... He's positive. He's optimistic. I think he has a belief in humanity, even though he's not of it. Right. There you go. Right. So the alien who fights for humanity. Yeah, the immigrant. It's the ultimate immigrant story. Yeah, the ultimate immigrant.

Right. And Batman is revenge? Or it's being able to... Come to terms with loss and grief. Yeah. You know, to overcome his grief over and over again, so that to stop what happened to him from happening to anyone else but again what's what is wonder woman's motivation exactly like why did you know she originally

leaves the island to fight the nazis but then once you get once you move her into modern day what why does she do what she does i think the core of wonder woman's personality is compassion it is it is compassion for other people um despite her warlike nature that's the reason she fights perhaps she fights for equality more than anything else is when she sees inequality that's what really makes drives her to action so she's someone who's willing to fight for peace that's she's a she's a she's a contradiction in fact she seems to really enjoy fighting for it. She has very strong, very great, you know, noble ideals, is willing to fight for them,

but there's a part of her that just really likes fighting. I think it's a fun thing to play with, particularly with Wonder Woman, to have her almost be a hothead in some instances because of what she's fighting for she she fights very passionately whereas Martian probably would have preferred her to just tie people up yeah and solve things maybe more peacefully and throughout all the different incarnations of Wonder Woman it is amazing that this quality of compassion does seem to always come through.

Jill Lepore says that's why the characters endured. I was sitting at my kitchen table with a seven-year-old girl, a girl who's in foster care, who I was taking care of for the day. And we had not a lot to play with in our house because I have only boys. And she wanted girl stuff to play with

and I couldn't really figure out how to find anything and then we found um a box I have of golden age of DC comics like postcards and so we dumped them out on the kitchen table we're looking at them and she very carefully she'd never seen them she didn't know anything about comic books she very carefully went through them all and she made two piles one pile was for all the wonder women and the other pile was for everybody else. And then she took the everybody else pile and she put it back in the box and back on the shelf. Then she took the Wonder Woman pile

and she spread them all out and then she arranged them in an order that she liked. And I said, you know what, what, what? She asked me a ton of questions like, who is this and what does she do? And I said, what, what's, no, this, mind you, this is a little girl. She's like, you know, one of five children has been taken from her mother and taken to the custody of the state

and is not sure where she's going to be sleeping, you know, two nights from now, whether she's ever going to see her mother again. And has been through a lot by the age of seven. And she just looks at me and she's like, this is a stupid question. She's like, because she rescues people. Like, that's why I like her. rescues people. That's why I like her. Well, that is it for this week. Special thanks to Jill Lepore, Cliff Chang, Jeanette Kahn,

Ellen Horn, Rex Stone, and Arun Roth. Next time, I'll talk more about Batman vs. Superman, focusing on the versus part. Like, why are they fighting? Imaginary Worlds is now part of the Panoply Network, which is very exciting. Panoply is the home of Slate's political and cultural gab fests, The Gist, you must remember this, and the radio drama, The Message. You can like Imaginary Worlds on Facebook

or leave a comment in iTunes. I tweet at emolinski. And you can check out any past episodes on the website, imaginaryworldspodcast.org.