Four years ago, the winning ticket Patty Jenkins-Gal Gadot (Wonder woman, 2017) introduced us to an elegant and distant double lady in the virilist world of superheroes. Incidentally, he allowed Warner to rake in $ 820 million (700 million euros) and to sign a big blow in the studio’s race for the repechage of visible minorities.
A year later, Disney was successfully exalting the African-American community (Black panther, 2018) before trying, in vain, to carve out croupiers in Wonder woman in the field of feminism (Captain marvel, 2019).
It is nonetheless true that the return of the female double with Wonder Woman 1984, visible only on platforms in France, is disappointing. Starring the rivalry between Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) and her nemesis, Cheetah the Cheetah Woman (Kristen Wiig), the film takes a stand on the feminist question, however, putting face to face a universalist matriarchal alternative to the model’s bankruptcy. masculine and a conception of the struggle of the sexes in which women, remaining on the bellicose ground of men, seek to appropriate supremacy therein.
What reminds us that feminism plays a central role in the genesis of the character of Wonder Woman, and remains the shadow cast. The super-creature was born in 1941 in the mind of psychologist William Moulton Marston, under the pencil of Harry George Peter and under the banner of the publisher All-American Publications, directed by Max Gaines, the inventor of the comic book. It is the first of these gentlemen, tired by the testosterone rampage of the superheroic universe, who has the idea of inventing what we would today call a powerful woman.
He himself, a staunch feminist and a supporter of polyamory, knew what he was talking about, having lived under the same roof with two strong women – the lawyer and psychologist Elizabeth Holloway, his rightful wife, and Olive Byrne, an underground member of this. love triad and niece of famous feminist Margaret Sanger. They had four children with him and inspired him with some of the characteristics of his heroine. The two women, notably, continued to live together after Marston’s death in 1947.
A “psychological propaganda”
This singular character is trained at Harvard, works on a version of the polygraph to measure emotions, writes screenplays for the cinema, advertises Gillette razors, becomes a psychology consultant at the Universal studio, ends up being hired by Max Gaines – who naturally knew nothing of his private life – to defend the publisher against the violent attacks of the leagues of virtue involving the violence and sexuality of comics.
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