Comic Books Meet Polyamory in ‘Professor Marston and the Wonder Women’ Trailer

Behind every great man, there’s a great woman; behind Wonder Woman, there was a wondrous man.

Dr. William Moulton Marston was a professor of psychology when he first ginned up the idea for DC’s most famed distaff defender, working under a pseudonym to protect his reputation. But the man had more secrets than the average reader might realize. He and his wife Elizabeth entered into a passionate polyamorous relationship with one of William’s students, Olive Byrne, though the time’s standards of propriety forced them to live in secret. And then there was all the bondage stuff.

His whole story — the rise to prominence, the controversy over indecency charges, the intense private life — gets the big-screen treatment in Angela Robinson’s upcoming Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, due October 27. Today brings us the first trailer, and there’s discord in the golden-hued past. Luke Evans steps in to portray the eccentric Dr. Marston, with Rebecca Hall as his devoted wife and The Neon Demon star Bella Heathcote as their joint lover. It’s a novel corner of history to poke around in, freely commingling old-fashioned morality with some saucier shots of leather corsets being laced up and riding crops slapping against skin. The presence of Connie Britton as Person Whose Job It Is To Baldly State The Creative Subtext Of The Movie does not sit so well, however.

In summation, it looks like an atypical approach to a subject becoming tiresomely typical. If we’re going to have to sit through another troubled-genius biopic exposing the troubled personal life of a revered figure, normalizing polyamory along the way is really the least it could do.