Authors: Ken Alder
In his own how-to book for screenwriters—
The Art of Sound Pictures
of 1930—Marston showed how to reunite this long-separated pair of emotion engines: the dos and don’ts of a gripping story, the physiological gestures that brought the passions to life, plus a thirty-page state-by-state guide to "what censors do to your story" as regards violence, vulgarity, sexually suggestive acts, and criminality.
Meanwhile, Marston was arranging screenings where he tracked the responses of squirming test audiences so that the studio might fine-tune the appeal of the movie, forestall public controversy, and reduce expensive post-release editing. He took credit for the final look of
Show Boat
(1929) and
All Quiet on the Western Front
(1930), helping craft the violent scenes so that they got past the censors. He boasted that he was Hollywood’s first on-lot censor, "a big money saver." Marston had been hired not so much to make movies emotionally true as to make them emotionally safe. Still, he did not last out the year at Universal; production executives clearly resented a Ph.D. vetoing their projects. After a brief stint at Equitable Pictures, he returned to New York, as "the best known psychologist in America," but without a job.
Not that Universal had given up on the idea of vetting its pictures for their emotional impact. In
Frankenstein
the studio knew it had a movie which the public (and censors) would find disturbing and which, not coincidentally, would make its fortune. At a preview in Santa Barbara in November 1931, several indignant reviewers walked out visibly shaken and demanding changes.
With Marston no longer on staff, Universal turned instead to Leonarde Keeler. In short order, he had strapped two undergraduates from DePaul University into his lie detector to watch Boris Karloff play the Monster. While the film was projected as flickering images on the screen, Keeler monitored the viewers’ physiological reactions on the graph paper unfurling from his box. As the man-made Monster on the screen lumbered into life, pleaded for sympathy, and then turned to rape and murder, the apparatus inside Keeler’s box mimicked the viewers’ inner palpitations, like a living, breathing machine. And as the resurrected Monster and the young bodies seated in the darkness trembled together, Keeler recorded the connection of sympathy and horror that was the physiological index of the film’s truth, its capacity to suspend disbelief and bring the creature to life.
Keeler’s report for Universal has not survived, though we know that his instrument was used to adjust the film’s shock, as well as to eliminate "emotional…dead spots." The studio trimmed a scene in which the Monster drowns a little girl; eliminated three close-ups of Fritz torturing the Monster; and deleted Dr. Frankenstein’s blasphemous cry, as the Monster rose from the dead: "Now I know what it feels like to BE God!"
James Whale, the director, considered this creation scene the key to the movie’s success. To make it credible, he drenched the lab in electrical razzle-dazzle that awed the characters as much as the audience. As Whale put it, "Frankenstein merely has to believe what he sees, which is all we ask the audience to do." Mae Clarke, who played Frankenstein’s young fiancée, agreed. "[W]e actors experienced exactly what future audiences would feel as the film rolled on the screens." In other words, the sets were fake, the images were staged, and the dialogue was censored, but to the audience it all felt true.
On December 4, 1931,
Frankenstein
opened in Times Square to become the country’s biggest hit, giving new meaning to the cliché "spine-chilling." When state censorship boards demanded changes, they only fed the publicity. Even the application of Keeler’s lie detector to vet the film was used to publicize it.
Marston, back in New York, was already running the same operation for advertisers. His ad agency lasted only a year, but throughout the 1930s he consulted for Madison Avenue. He applied his lie detector to compare the responses of smokers to four brands of cigarettes, and to gauge the satisfaction of 150 drivers who filled their tanks with Texaco Sky Chief instead of a rival fuel. Each stunt won its little notice, which was the point. For his biggest contract, Marston strapped men into "the same scientific instrument used by G-men" while each shaved one side of his face with a Gillette razor and the other with a rival blade. Full-page ads in
Time, Life,
and the
Saturday Evening Post
confirmed that the rival blade made men "grouchy and irritable," while nine of out ten expressed an honest preference for Gillette.
Marston’s campaign capped a twenty-year effort by psychologists—again initiated by Hugo Münsterberg—to convince advertisers that psychological expertise could help shape and direct consumers’ desires. Politicians might argue that citizens were sovereign; economists might assert that consumers were rational; political theorists might insist that human beings were born free; but psychologists knew Americans to be creatures who responded to conditioned stimuli. All one needed to know was what the lie detector indicated that citizen-consumers believed to be true.
Unfortunately, before expanding their campaign to radio, the folks at Gillette asked John Larson to replicate Marston’s findings. Marston had been cultivating Larson for several years, offering to help him write articles, land a job in New York, and wrangle an entry in
Who’s Who.
In return, Larson had agreed to write the introduction to Marston’s book—even though it was full of the hokum Larson despised—so long as Marston added some oblique slurs against Keeler. But Larson would not let personal favors undermine his scientific integrity. For a $750 fee and a promise to keep his name out of any ads, he used his lie detector to test the emotional response of 100 shavers to seven brands of blades, finding no preference for Gillette. Behind the scenes, according to Larson, Marston begged him to modify his report and even offered him an "inducement" to do so: a cut of the $30,000 he hoped to make from the deal. Larson indignantly quashed the campaign and even ratted out Marston to the FBI.
Undeterred, Marston extended his populist reach in the late 1930s, softselling his theories in "pop psych" articles for women’s magazines and becoming a scientific pastor of uplift and proper adjustment. "Try Living" was his catchphrase. His most enduring creation was the in-magazine personality test. His particular version let readers assess their urges for dominance and submission, so that they might better adapt themselves at home and office. Today known as the DISC test (for dominance, influencing, steadiness, and conscientiousness), its merchandisers still tout it as the "original, oldest, most validated, reliable, personal assessment, used by over 50 million others to improve lives, relationships, work productivity, team-work, and communication!"
Through all this, in his private practice, Marston put his lie detector to work uncovering the lies men and women told themselves, thereby freeing them from "twists, repression and emotional conflicts." His gadget, he said, could gauge whether a couple had married for money, the "higher emotions," or "just plain sex." Marston helped one woman whose college roommate had seduced her fiancé; when the seductress was put on the lie detector, she admitted that she didn’t want the man and released him to her roommate. One married woman who suspected her husband of having an affair discovered that it was her jealousy that was driving him away. For the readers of
Look
magazine, Marston compared the physiological reactions of a neglected young wife: first when she was kissed by her wayward husband, then when she was kissed by an attractive young stranger; apparently she preferred the stranger, but Marston still had hopes of saving her marriage. "Healthy love adjustment," explained Marston, "requires, first, the cutting away of disguises, the elimination of false expressions of the true emotions underneath."
The culminating act of Marston’s career began almost by accident in 1939, when he went on record in
Your Life
and
Family Circle
as a judicious critic of the comics. "Superman" had just taken America by storm, and the moralizers’ indictment of the comics ran long: "mayhem, murder, torture, abduction, superman heroics, voluptuous females, blazing machine guns and hooded justice." As a professional psychologist, Marston was awed by their emotional efficacy: 30 million children read 1.5 billion strips a day. Marston’s children read them; he himself read them; he even liked them—most of them, anyway. There was nothing wrong with a little wish fulfillment, so long as it wasn’t perverted. "Dick Tracy," for instance, struck Dr. Marston as violent and sadistic, but he did not agree with the would-be censors who fretted about female décolletage, while overlooking the comics’ portrayals of women as "jealous, mercenary, and moronic." Parents who wanted to bring out the better side of comics should organize a Cleaner Comics League.
This oblique threat caught the attention of M. C. Gaines, a former high school principal turned publisher of All-American comics and discoverer of "Superman." Gaines offered Marston a spot on his advisory board of child advocates. Marston was glad to be co-opted; it was his lifelong strategy. He was soon praising Superman as breathlessly as did the awestruck Jimmy Olsen. It was Gaines’s genius, Marston announced, to have seen Superman’s "fundamental emotional appeal," his "Homeric inheritance." Marston defended "Superman" from those who complained that the comic starred a vigilante hero who taught the moral superiority of force: in short, a Nazi. On the contrary, Marston argued, the fantasy of using superhuman strength to right wrongs could only be healthy for young Americans at a time when the United States needed to cultivate its national strength to protect weak and innocent peoples abroad.
Once on the advisory board, however, Marston denounced other comics for their "blood-curdling masculinity." But when he proposed a female superhero, the editors snickered; every previous attempt had flopped. This, answered Marston, was because the previous heroines had been weak. "Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to," he later proclaimed, "and they will be
proud
to become her willing slaves!" Intrigued, Gaines gave Marston six months to disprove the doubters. In February 1941, under the pseudonym Charles Moulton—a combination of his publisher’s first name and his own middle name—Marston delivered the first script for "Suprema, the Wonder Woman."
Wonder Woman became the champion for Marston’s worldview. Many elements of her Amazonian mythology are drawn from his life and works. Her magic lasso, which compels obedience, is the ultimate lie detector. Marston called it a symbol of "woman’s love charm and allure with which she compels men and women to do her bidding." The Amazonian bracelets that symbolize her submission to the goddess Aphrodite are the source of her strength as well as her vulnerability; she can use them to deflect bullets, but she loses her strength whenever a man attaches chains to them. Apparently Marston’s mistress, Olive Byrne, favored large bracelets of this sort. But the details mattered less than the "universal theme" he believed he had tapped: "the growth in the power of women." He warned the editors that although he was willing to consider changes to names, costumes, and story, "I want you to leave that theme alone—or drop the project."
"Frankly," Marston said, "Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world." She certainly took America by storm. One year after her debut in
Sensation Comics
in January 1942, she had her own comic book with a circulation of 500,000. She was quickly inducted into the Justice League of America—as its secretary, sad to say—and by 1944 she had a daily syndicated strip as well. By the end of the war, her circulation topped 2.5 million. Marston wrote all the scripts until his death seven years later, with Harry G. Peter doing the bulk of the illustration.
For dramatic and visual punch, Marston relied heavily on imagery of enslavement and emancipation, with (scantily clad) women led in chains, hypnotized into submission, and otherwise disciplined—only to overcome their bondage, thanks to Wonder Woman and her sidekicks, the Holliday Girls, modeled on the sorority sisters of the Baby Party. Many of Wonder Woman’s adversaries were women likewise endowed with sexual and physical powers, except that they sought unbounded domination. By contrast, Wonder Woman reformed her opponents on Paradise Island, where they were put in shackles until they had learned to follow her own "loving submission to authority."
The complaints began immediately. Josette Frank of the Child Study Association of America conveyed her dismay about Wonder Woman’s costume, "or lack of it," as well as the "sadistic bits showing women chained, tortured, etc." Outsiders attacked "Wonder Woman" for preaching a "cult of force, spiked by means of her preteniously [
sic
] scanty ‘working’ attire." Frederic Wertham, an émigré German psychiatrist who would become the nemesis of the comics, perceived a lesbian subtext in "Wonder Woman" and castigated Marston for using psychological science to create a monstrous perversion that could never have arisen "normally" in popular culture. And anxious editors feared the critics were on to something when they received a fan letter from a sergeant in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, who relished precisely this aspect of Marston’s creation: "I am one of those odd, perhaps unfortunate men who derive an extreme erotic pleasure from the mere thought of a beautiful girl, chained or bound or masked, or wearing extreme high-heels."
To mollify these critics, the staff at All-American recommended making Wonder Woman less "sexy" and more, well, all-American. They also commissioned a female tennis champion to write a monthly piece on real-life "Wonder Women of History."