Professor Marston and the Wonder Women: Secret Identities for Everyone

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20th Century America, Angela Robinson, Bella Heathcote, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Luke Evans, Olive Byrne, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, Rebecca Hall, Superheroes, William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman

When I first heard about Professor Marston and the Wonder Women ( 2017, dir. Angela Robinson), I was really excited. The film is a biopic of William Moulton Marston, the Harvard-trained psychologist who was the creator of Wonder Woman. Marston lived a rather unconventional life and I was interested to see how Robinson, who also wrote the film, would treat Marston.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning to see this movie, you might want to put off reading this until you’ve done so, because I discuss the plot of the film in detail.

The film tells the story of Marston (Luke Evans) and his ferociously intelligent but academically-thwarted wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall). They are trying to develop a prototype lie-detector at Radcliffe when they meet Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), the niece of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, who takes one of Marston’s classes. The Marstons are feminists and believers in free love (the early 20th century term for sex outside of marriage), and they are both attracted to Olive. Elizabeth figures out a way to make the lie-detector work, and after several rounds of lie-detector Truth or Dare, the three admit they are all attracted to each other and start a polyamorous relationship long before that was a thing,

Evans as Marston

 

Unfortunately, word of their unconventional (not to mention unethical) relationship leaks out and the Marstons are dismissed from Radcliffe right around the time that Olive announces she’s pregnant. Elizabeth takes work as a secretary and William starts trying to make a living as an author. Along the way he encounters a bondage fetishist and the threesome discovers that they’re all kinky; Elizabeth is dominant while Olive is submissive. (Magic lassos, anyone?)

All of this sparks an idea in William. He will write a new comic book involving a female superhero who defeats her opponents through love. As a psychologist, William developed what he called DISC Theory, which focuses on two dimensions of people’s emotional behavior: whether they perceive their environment as friendly or hostile and whether they perceive themselves as having control or lack of control over the environment. Control in an antagonistic environment produces Dominance, control in a friendly environment produces Inducement, lack of control in an antagonistic environment produces Submission, and lack of control in a friendly environment produces Compliance. His character, Suprema the Wonder Woman, was conceived as a demonstration of these principles, as well as an expression of his sense that women are inherently superior to men because they are not automatically aggressive.

Despite Elizabeth’s skepticism, William sells the character (sans her original name) to a comic book publisher and makes a good deal of money writing the character. Olive and Elizabeth both have children. But one day during a kinky romp in their house, a friendly neighbor walks in, discovers the threesome in flagrante delicto, and their world collapses around them. Elizabeth demands that Olive and her children leave to start a new life. William is investigated by a morality crusader; her ‘interrogation’ of him forms the film’s frame tale. William develops cancer, and is eventually able to persuade Olive to return by getting Elizabeth to drop her Dominance and enact Compliance with Olive. The film ends shortly before William’s death, with an epilogue text that explains that Olive and Elizabeth continued to live and raise children together for the next several decades until Olive’s death.

The film is very well-done, if not at all subtle about its themes. Olive and Elizabeth are together William’s perfect woman and both contribute components to Wonder Woman’s character. The film liberally peppers panels from early Wonder Woman comics into scenes of the trio’s life, illustrating how their sexual interests were freely expressed in the comic. When the three of them first make love, they do so in a theater prop room, which allows Olive to be dressed as the goddess Diana, Elizabeth wears a cheetah-print coat, and William is dressed in a WWII pilot’s outfit; anyone who knows Wonder Woman will immediately spot the references to Wonder Woman’s secret identity, her arch-nemesis the Cheetah, and her love interest Steve Trevor. William’s lectures on DISC Theory act as chapter headings for the film.

The three title characters

 

It’s interesting that in a biopic about William Marston, he’s not really the main character, which is not a bad thing, since as an actor, Evans is very pretty to look at but not really a very dynamic presence. The main focus is on Elizabeth and Olive’s complicated relationship, and Hall shines as Elizabeth. Every time she’s on-screen, she absolutely commands attention, which both fits the historical Elizabeth’s ferocious self-confidence and helps explain why William adores her so deeply. Heathcote’s Olive is a gentle woman but one willing to pursue her desires and stand up for herself against Elizabeth’s harshness. And the film handles their polyamorous relationship in a very sensitive way, never treating it as freakish while still acknowledging the difficulties it creates for them.

 

Unfortunately…

A lot of the film is made up.

Yes, the film is “based on a true story.” But that doesn’t mean it’s based very closely on it.

The film opens with William and Elizabeth already at Radcliffe, and in doing so glosses over a good deal of interesting stuff in William’s earlier life, including the fact that he wrote at least four screenplays that got turned into silent movies (including one directed by DW Griffiths). He claimed to have supported himself as an undergraduate at Harvard that way. He also spent a year in Hollywood working for a film studio. William’s natural gift for attracting media attention was quite useful there, but ultimately he returned to New England. The man lived a very interesting, if not entirely successful life, but much of it gets cut out in the interests of focusing on the relationships at the heart of the film.

William didn’t invent the Lie Detector. He invented a precursor to it that focused on systolic blood pressure. He repeatedly used it for experiments, some of which were basically publicity stunts, and both Elizabeth and Olive helped him conduct these experiments, but there’s no evidence that the trio ever used the device on each other to uncover their secret feelings. The actual Lie Detector, more properly called a Polygraph (because it measures several body functions, including systolic blood pressure) was invented by John Augustus Larson, whose protégé Leonarde Keeler improved on it and then patented it. William’s work was certainly important to the development of the device, and William frequently claimed to have invented it, but that’s a considerable exaggeration. It was Keeler who made all the money on it.

Marston doing a publicity stunt with three women at a movie theater

 

The film greatly simplifies William’s employment history. He never actually taught at Radcliffe, but did teach at several other universities, including founding the Psychology Department at American University. He was not fired because of his unconventional relationships; rather departments just stopped renewing his teaching contracts. It’s possible that word of his relationships played a role in this, because at least one letter in his file at Harvard hints at improprieties, but that’s as much as we can say about why his academic career faltered. He also had a law practice (since he and Elizabeth both went to law school) and tried to insert himself into various famous criminal investigations (such as the Lindbergh case) as an expert on lie detection. One of the cases he was involved in, the Frye case, resulted in an important appeals court decision about when scientific experts can be introduced as witnesses, a decision that still gets cited today. He worked for the FBI briefly. He also ran at least four separate businesses, all of which failed, and one of which got him charged with mail fraud, although he was found innocent (that trial is probably why American University dismissed him). All in all, William was something of a publicity hound and a bit of a grifter, which doesn’t come through in the film at all.

Also, he can’t be Professor William if he’s not working at a university. Professor is a job title, and he didn’t have it, except perhaps for a year at American University.

 

His Relationships

The biggest problem in the film stems from its misrepresentation of the relationship between himself, Elizabeth and Olive. The film suggests that the Marstons had an essentially conventional relationship until meeting Olive in the mid 1920s. In fact, by that point, the Marstons already had at least an open relationship, because while William was working for the Army during WWI, he met Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, a divorcée several years his senior. By 1919, she had moved in with the Marstons. For the rest of William’s life, Huntley moved in and out of wherever the Marstons were living; she had a permanent room in the house they raised their children in. The exact nature of the relationship is unclear. Although Margaret Sanger, who knew the Marstons’ circle quite well from the 1920s on, said that the relationship was non-sexual, Huntley herself described it as a “threesome”. She and William were certainly lovers, but there’s no clear evidence that she and Elizabeth were intimate, depending on how you understand “threesome”. The film complete omits Huntley, but it’s clear that the Marston trio was really more of a periodic quartet.

The Marston clan: Elizabeth is far left, Olive far right, the three boys are their sons, the girl on his right is his daughter, and the woman on his left is Margaret Huntley

 

Nor were Huntley’s sexual interests purely vanilla. When she met William, she was already a devotee of “love-binding”, what modern kinksters call bondage. The film claims that William stumbled across a group of bondage fetishists in New York some time after Olive had moved into his household, when in reality he was probably already familiar with bondage before he met her, thanks to Huntley.

Nor was Huntley the only sexual adventurer in William’s circle. His paternal aunt, Carolyn Marston Keatley, was a believer in an early form of New Age spirituality, maintaining that the world was entering an age of free love. She maintained a regular weekly gathering at her Boston apartment where about 10 people, including the Marstons, Huntley, and eventually Olive, would gather regularly. These meetings seem to have been devoted to exploring female sexual power; the women routinely went naked, and a set of meeting minutes from this group strongly suggests that group sex and bondage were a regular part of the activites. These meetings seem to have laid the foundation for the philosophy that Marston and his women used to govern their complex relationship. Instead of being a later development of their relationship, as the film depicts, bondage seems to have been one of its early components.

However, understanding what William, Elizabeth, and Olive (and Huntley, when she was around) did sexually is complicated, because there is conflicting evidence. The aforementioned evidence about Huntley and about Keatley’s meetings strongly suggests that kinky sex was a basic element of their dynamic, but the Marstons’ children have insisted in interviews conducted by historian Jill Lepore and others that they never saw any hint of bondage in their household and that neither Elizabeth nor Olive would have tolerated such things.

Even more problematic is the film’s central conceit that Elizabeth and Olive were lovers, because William and Elizabeth’s grand-daughter, Christie Marston, insists that this was not the case. Christie says that she knew her grandmother quite well and had many frank conversations with her. Christie insists that the two women lived together as “sisters” rather than lovers. She points out that Angela Robinson made no effort to contact any of the Marston family and therefore Robinson’s treatment of the relationship is entirely fictitious. We know that the two women maintained separate bedrooms, and on one occasion when they visited Sanger, she arranged from them to use a room with two beds (she was very emphatic that they not use her bedroom, which might point to a willful blindness on her part). There is no explicit evidence that the two women were ever lovers (and as we’ll see, their children had no clear idea that Olive was intimate with their father, even though one of the children caught the two of them having sex).

Elizabeth and Olive leaning into their first kiss

 

Despite that, there’s certainly reason to speculate that Elizabeth and Olive might have been lovers. William had a remarkably contemporary view of sexuality, maintaining that homosexuality was entirely natural and that sexual desire was not inherently connected to a person’s gender (which he considered more social than biological). He found lesbian sex arousing and claimed to have watched women having sex; it’s not a far leap to guess who those women might have been. The notes of the Keatley meeting group talk about a ‘Love Leader’, a “Mistress” and their “Love Girl” coming together to form a “Love Unit.” That certainly sounds like Elizabeth had some sort of sexual relationship with Olive. “The ladies” (as the family still calls them) continued to live together for decades after William’s death, and long after their children had moved out.

And while their children and grandchildren certainly knew the trio well, there’s reason to think that their testimony is not entirely reliable. As Lepore has documented, the Marston trio were remarkably dedicated to hiding the nature of their relationship, even from their children. Olive invented a husband who fathered two sons on her and then died. She never told her sons Donn and Byrne that William was their father; as adults, the sons finally pried the truth out of Elizabeth, who only told them on the condition that they never ask their mother about the matter again. Olive was, in fact, so dead-set against anyone learning the truth that she threatened to commit suicide if her sons pressed her on the subject of their father. William adopted both of Olive’s sons to help protect the family secret, and Olive was variously passed off as either a domestic servant or a widowed sister, to prevent neighbors from gossiping. But the fact that Donn and Byrne felt there was something their mother wasn’t telling them suggests that they had suspicions that they had been lied to.

Later in life, as Elizabeth was sorting through William’s papers, she aggressively culled the documents, and then very carefully decided which of the four children would get which papers. Lepore, who was able to see three of the four sets of papers, was startled to realize that Holloway had given each of the children a sharply different family narrative, as if she was trying to keep each of them from finding out the truth even from each other. Although William drew much of his inspiration for Wonder Woman from “the ladies”  and although Olive functioned as William’s typist and secretary, Holloway insisted that Huntley was much better informed about Wonder Woman’s origins than Olive was. So it seems that neither Elizabeth nor Olive wanted anyone to know the details of their unconventional relationship, and it seems entirely in keeping with that to think that Elizabeth might have lied to Christie in an effort to protect Olive’s privacy. So she may well have been sexually involved with Olive and simply chose not to reveal the fact. Given that the children had no clear awareness that William was Olive’s lover and Donn and Byrne’s father, it seems to me plausible that the trio might have successfully hidden a relationship between Elizabeth and Olive as well.

However, against that interpretation, we must set the fact that some of William’s co-workers at All American Comics (which was later sold to DC Comics) seem to have been fully aware that he effectively had two wives. In fact, William seems to have been quite the ladies’ man his entire adult life, and numerous people were aware of it. William’s mother was fully aware of what was going as, as were Margaret Sanger and Olive’s mother Ethel (and quite possibly two of Olive’s uncles, who performed as drag queens on the vaudeville circuit). So the family secret wasn’t so important that William didn’t tell anyone at all.

 

If I had to guess, I’d say that Elizabeth and Olive did have sex at least occasionally, since the meetings of Keatley’s group seem to have involved that sort of thing. But it’s a far cry from that to the film’s version of the relationship, in which Elizabeth kisses Olive before William does and the three regularly share a bed at night. William seems to have maintained separate sex lives with each of them, and given that there’s no concrete evidence that the two women saw themselves as lovers, it’s best to not read too much into things. However, as I’ve already laid out, the evidence is somewhat contradictory. Robinson’s speculation that Elizabeth and Olive were lovers is certainly possible, but it’s speculation, not provable fact.

In the film, Elizabeth only finally acquiesces to William’s relationship with Olive when Olive has a baby. She goes to work as a secretary because someone in the family has to be earning some money. In reality, Elizabeth was very career-oriented and had struggled to figure out how to make that work with being a mother, something else she wanted. Olive was the solution to her dilemma; Elizabeth would be a career woman, and Olive would be the stay-at-home caretaker for the children. Far from being a secretary, she was an editor at the Encyclopedia Brittanica and McCall’s, and eventually began the assistant to the chief executive at Metropolitan Life Insurance.

The movie claims that after about 5-6 years, the trio’s secret was revealed when a neighbor wandered into their house and caught them in a bondage scene together. The trio came under so much social pressure that Elizabeth forced Olive and her two sons to move out, and William was only able to reunite them at the end of his life by using the fact of his cancer to goad them into a reconciliation. That never happened at all. The trio’s secret was never found out by their neighbors (or if it was, it was tolerated). Olive never moved out of the Marstons’ household, and given that William and Elizabeth had legally adopted both her sons, she probably couldn’t have taken her sons with her if she had.

Elizabeth (left) and Olive late in life

 

Another problem with the end of the film is that it distorts what happened medically. About a year before he died, William contracted polio, and gradually lost his ability to walk, spending his last months bedridden. During that period, he developed cancer, but the family chose not to tell him about the diagnosis (secrecy ran deep in the Marston household, it seems), so that he died never knowing what he was suffering from.

 

Wonder Woman

The film also gets a chunk of the comic book side of the story wrong as well. In the film, William comes up with the idea for Suprema the Wonder Woman, despite Elizabeth poo-pooing the concept of a female superhero, and pitches it to MC Gaines (Oliver Platt), the head of All American Comics. In reality, William had already been working with All American for some time before he pitched his concept. Gaines realized that having a well-known psychologist who could say that comics were healthy reading for children was a good thing, so he paid Marston a monthly fee to act as a consultant. William was always good at making headlines, so they were a natural fit for each other.

When William invented Wonder Woman, Elizabeth was not against it. In actuality, she was the one who told him that the character had to be a woman. William was trying to express his ideas about submission to loving authority, and Elizabeth pointed out that because he was trying to create a totally different kind of superhero, it ought to be a woman. William was already essentially a female supremacist, so it made sense.

The film suggests that Wonder Woman was a combination of Elizabeth and Olive, and that may well be true. Elizabeth was an extremely strong and assertive woman, and Olive was much more docile in many ways, which would fit Wonder Woman’s aggressive nature and her docility when she is bound by a man. But William seems to have modeled Wonder Woman physically much more on Olive than on Elizabeth. In the film, Elizabeth is tall and athletic and dark-haired, while Olive is shorter and more soft-looking and blonde. In reality both women were dark-haired, and Olive was taller than Elizabeth.

The scene in which Olive puts on a burlesque costume and accidentally inspires Wonder Woman’s costume is false. William created the costume in co-operation with the artist Henry George Peter, who partly modeled her on pin-ups he drew. But Olive did contribute one element of the costume; William had given her a pair of bracelets that she wore every day and those were the direct inspiration for the Amazonian bracelets that deflect bullets.

Olive in the Wonder Woman costume

 

The film’s frame tale involves William being forced to meet with a committee run by Josette Frank (Connie Britton), who is disturbed by the sexual themes in the comic. Gaines says that he cannot protect William from Frank, so that if William can’t convince Frank that the comic is wholesome, Wonder Woman will be taken away from him. The truth is quite different. Frank actually worked on a committee that reviewed children’s literature. Gaines hoped for their stamp of approval, but Frank was troubled by the copious amounts of bondage, and never accepted William’s theories about willing submission to loving authority, which he fully admitted were part of what the comic was about. Eventually Frank resigned from the editorial advisory panel reviewing All American comics.

But Frank never had any real leverage that could have forced Gaines to take away the character from William. Gaines was making too much money off of William’s character to ever threaten his star author that way; by the end of his life, Wonder Woman was regularly appearing in three different comic books and an internationally-syndicated newspaper strip. William worked on these up until just shortly before his death, although his assistant Joye Hummel was increasingly scripting the comics from his notes. So the entire frame tale of the movie is made-up. Gaines did come under some pressure over Wonder Woman while William was writing her, but the real attack on comic books and Wonder Woman was just beginning to take shape as William was dying.

It’s not hard to see why Frank found material like this problematic

 

William would certainly have been very disappointed to see that the next writer to control the character was Robert Kanigher. Where William was a full-blown feminist convinced of women’s moral superiority to men, Kanigher was an outright misogynist who despised the character he was being asked to write, and reduced her to a love-starved simpering editor of a woman’s romance magazine, desperate for Steve Trevor to marry her. It was not until the publication of the first issue of Ms Magazine in 1972, which put Wonder Woman on its cover, that Wonder Woman really began to return to her feminist roots.

Despite being largely invented, I still like Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. It’s a well-done story that brings a fascinating and rather neglected trio of historical figures to the awareness of the viewers. It’s a moving portrait of a polyamorous family at a time well before that was a thing. And it doesn’t hold back from the original feminism that made Wonder Woman such an inspiration to many of the women of Second Wave feminism.

My next post will finish up looking at The Last Kingdom.

Want to Know More?

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is still playing in theaters, so it’s not available elsewhere yet.

If you want to know more about William Moulton Marston, his women, and his famous creation, I cannot recommend Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman highly enough. She painstakingly pieces together the secret life the Marstons worked so hard to keep hidden, and she does an excellent job setting Wonder Woman in the context of 1920s feminism, showing how the issues of birth control, suffrage, women’s right to work, and so on are played out in the pages of Sensation Comics. It’s honestly one of the best pieces of historical scholarship I’ve read in a long time. If you have any interest in Wonder Woman, this is a must-read.

Dracula Untold: Don’t Go See This Movie

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Anita Sarkesian, Dracula, Dracula Untold, Luke Evans, Medieval Europe, Mehmet II, Ottoman Empire, Sarah Gadon, Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler

There have been lots of Dracula movies over the years, and with the current fad for vampire stuff, it was only a question of time until some studio went back to that particular well. Dracula Untold (2014, dir. Gary Shore) is a mediocre example of a vampire flick. It’s neither especially good nor especially bad. It has a lot of the same problems that recent vampire films like Underworld: Rise of the Lycans have: medieval characters wearing improbably silly armor, sunlight and clouds that come and go largely on the whims of the plot, medieval architecture that makes little sense, and people who spend lots of time running around at night because that makes them vulnerable to vampires (who knew that the Turkish army mostly traveled at night, and—I kid not–blindfolded?). It’s basically a fantasy action film. But it sticks its toe in the waters of history (and generally decides that these waters are too chilly for it), so I felt like I ought to review it here.

Spoiler Alert: I discuss a couple fairly major plot points, so if you want to see this movie, you shouldn’t read further. However, for reasons I’ll explain later, I don’t think you should go see this movie. So I’d encourage you to just keep reading.

The Film’s Vlad Dracula

The film deals with the life of Vlad Dracula (Luke Evans). Vlad was given as tribute to the Ottoman Sultan as a boy. He was trained to fight as a Janissary and served the Sultan so ruthlessly he became known as ‘the Impaler’. Eventually he was made prince of Transylvania, although it’s not clear (at least to me) whether he inherited the position or was given it by the Sultan.

At the start of the film, which is set in the 1440s, a messenger arrives from the Sultan Mehmed II (Dominic Cooper, playing a distinctly non-Turkish looking Turk), demanding tribute in silver and 1000 boys to be raised as Janissaries (the film incorrectly depicts this as a practice that was terminated prior to the 1440s, when in fact the Janissaries were an import element in the Turkish military down into the 18^th century, and weren’t disbanded until 1826). To save his son from this, Vlad tracks down a vampire and asks for help in defeating Mehmed. The vampire agrees to temporarily turn him into a vampire for three days, warning him that if he drinks human blood during that period, he will become a vampire forever. I think you can already guess where this is going.

Luke Evans as Vlad Dracula; note the silly plate armor

The film depicts Vlad as a good ruler, a man who deeply loves his wife and son and who is well-liked by his people. He also, inexplicably, has no army, which is why he needs to seek help from a vampire. He admits to having once impaled thousands of peasants while serving Mehmed, but he is nicer than that now. Later, he returns to his impaling ways after he slaughters a bunch of Turks. But basically he’s a loving family man even after he’s become an inhuman monster. At least he doesn’t sparkle.

The Real Vlad Dracula vs. The Cinematic Vlad Dracula

It’s hard to sort out fact from fiction with the historical Vlad the Impaler, because the best sources for his life were written after his death. There are a number of German pamphlets that describe him as a horrible person, and a number of Russian pamphlets that are pro-Vlad (although they still mention his unsavory habit of impaling people and torturing small animals). And there’s Romanian folk tales about him to add to the confusion; they both revile him for his cruelty and celebrate him from his supposed hostility to German merchants. So there aren’t a lot of good, reliable, unbiased sources out there about him. And I’ll readily admit that Eastern European history isn’t my strong suit. But there’s a fairly clear core of fact we can discuss. So here goes.

Vlad’s father, Vlad II, was the Voivode (Duke) of Wallachia. He was inducted by Emperor Sigismund of the Holy Roman Empire into the Order of the Dragon, a military order created specifically to oppose the Ottoman Empire, which was in the process of pushing up into the Balkans. Because of this Vlad II was known as Vlad Dracul (Romanian for “the dragon”). His son was therefore known as Dracula (“son of the Dragon”).

When he was 13, Vlad and his younger brother Radu were given to Sultan Murad II, not to be raised as Janissaries (since Janissaries were slaves) but rather to serve as hostages for their father’s good behavior. As a result he was raised with the future Mehmet II (this fact the film gets right). Vlad became jealous of the attention his better-looking brother received at court (Radu was nicknamed “the Handsome”).

Probably the most historical image of Vlad the Impaler

In 1448, with Turkish support, Vlad succeeded his father as Voivode of Wallachia. He was quickly ousted, but returned to power in 1456. But he soon defied a request for tribute and young boys to serve as Janissaries, probably because paying it would mean acknowledging that Wallachia was part of the Ottoman Empire. So instead, he had the turbans of the Turkish emissaries nailed to their heads. (In Vlad’s defense, he wasn’t the only Eastern European ruler to indulge this sartorial fancy.)

When the Turks invaded, Vlad ambushed a large group of cavalry and defeated them. He ordered them impaled on spikes, with the commander getting the highest spike. In 1462, when Mehmet showed up at Targoviste, he discovered 15-20,000 of his troops impaled on spikes; sickened, he retreated briefly. As a result of this the Turks called him ‘Lord Impaler’. His Romanian nickname Tepes (“the Impaler”) seems to have been bestowed on him in the mid-16^th century, and was not a term used at the time.

However, Dracula wasn’t just impaling his Turkish enemies. Vlad seems to have used impaling and other forms of cruelty as a tactic to dominate the boyars of Wallachia (the land-owning aristocracy) and to encourage obedience. The boyars had conspired against Vlad II, so when Dracula came to power, he invited many of them to a feast, impaled those responsible for his father’s death, and enslaved the rest for a construction project. He reportedly impaled the merchants and boyars of the city of Brasov on St. Bartholemew’s Day, 1459.

Vlad having a snack

Various stories circulate about his other cruelties, such as impaling adulterous women, unchaste widows, thieves, and dishonest merchants. Nor was he just into impaling; sometimes he reportedly indulged in other forms of unpleasantness, such as flaying people and cutting off women’s breasts. When his concubine claimed that she was pregnant, he reportedly cut her open to find out the truth. However, given the nature of the sources about Vlad, it’s hard to know how much truth there is behind these stories. It’s clear Vlad Dracula was a pretty nasty guy, but just how nasty is hard to say.

Ultimately though, Mehmet sent in Vlad’s brother Radu, backed with enough troops to exhaust Vlad’s forces. They captured Poenari Castle, his stronghold, which the film inaccurately calls ‘Castle Dracula’. In the film, it’s not surprising this castle gets captured; it’s built in the middle of a plain instead of on a mountain cliff. (In general, the architecture in this film makes little sense, and the first castle we see in the film, when the Turkish emissary comes demanding tribute, would have been a much stronger defensible position to take a stand at. But apparently that didn’t serve the needs of the action scenes very well.) Vlad’s wife reportedly leapt to her death rather than be captured, and Vlad was arrested by the king of Hungary, for reasons that are still unclear.

Some time later, however, the king patched things up with Vlad, let him out of prison, and let him marry his cousin Ilona (not ‘Mirena’ as this movie would have it). He returned to power in 1475, and died late the next year; stories about how he died vary—a Turkish ambush, betrayed by the boyars, or in an accident. He was buried, perhaps at Comana (not at Snagov, as 19th century tradition would have it, or in Naples, as recent crappy scholarship claims).

Also, as a minor note, Vlad Dracula did not kill Mehmet, who died in 1481 of natural causes. At the time of the movie, Mehmet II was in his mid-teens. He was a major figure in Turkish history, so killing him in the 1440s is sort of like killing Elizabeth I in the late 1550s not long after she has started her reign.

So the film is, to say the least, not particularly historical. But it’s a film about how a historical figure became a vampire, so you probably knew that already. It’s a bit perverse to make one of the most infamously cruel figures in history a romantic hero, as others have already pointed out. But I suppose in 600 years, we can look forward to seeing a rom-com about Pol Pot or Josef Stalin, in which our hero has a meet-cute with some dewy ingénue and then has to keep his genocidal schemes from her in order to win her love, with wacky consequences.

It’s also sad that the film decided to omit Vlad’s brother Radu. The two of them seem to have had a powerful rivalry, and making Radu one of the central bad guys would have given the plot more…um…bite. But I suppose we’ll just have to save that for a better movie.

So Why Shouldn’t I Go See It?

The film is not particularly good history, but it’s not historically offensive either, unlike, for example, Braveheart. My objection to it has little to do with my role as a historian. My objection to this film is entirely about my role as a decent human being who thinks women deserve to be treated better in film.

The movie is neither particularly feminist nor anti-feminist for the most part. Mirena (Sarah Gadon) is a generic cinematic wife. She gets one moment of being commanding, but is otherwise just there to give Dracula a motive to do anything to fight the Turks. She and his essentially pointless son are mostly just the triggers for all the manpain modern cinematic heroes are required to experience.

Sarah Gadon as Mirena

But then, as the film approaches its climax, it suddenly veers into one of the most horrifically misogynistic tropes developed by the video game industry. Mirena falls off a high balcony of a monastery (why did these monks build a pointless balcony over a high cliff and forget to include a railing?) and Dracula is unable to catch her in time. As she lies dying (having been tough enough to actually not die instantly from the long fall), she begs Dracula to kill her by drinking her blood, knowing that this will transform him permanently into a vampire and give him the power to defeat Mehmet. Dracula does as she asks and thereby gains vengeance on Mehmet.

As Anita Sarkesian has pointed out, the trope of the Damsel in Distress begging the hero to kill her has become a common story-telling device in video games. But the ‘Euthanized Damsel’, as she terms this sub-trope, is a deeply misogynistic idea, in which women beg their loved ones to kill them and then thank them for engaging in violence against them. As Sarkesian puts it, “These women are asking for it, quite literally.” Given that Dracula immediately runs off and starts making vampires of his other dying followers, the film never explains why he doesn’t just do the same to Mirena (we can hypothesize that he can’t make other vampires because he hasn’t yet drunk human blood and therefore doesn’t have that ability, but the film never clearly says this), so there is no objective reason why Mirena has to die, except that Vlad’s unhappiness is incomplete without him having to kill his beloved wife. In this particular example, all of Dracula’s immortal unending manpain is due to Mirena begging him to become an evil monster to avenge her and defeat the Turks. So Dracula is just a good guy who gets to suffer an eternity of torment because he loves his wife and kills her just like she asks him to. Some women are just never satisfied.

Here’s the video in which Sarkesian lays out her critique. Give it a watch; it’s disturbing to realize how widespread this trope is in video games. I enjoy video games, and I’ve played my share of them over the years. So I’m not hostile to video games or even video game violence. But I am hostile to the sort of misogyny that Sarkesian is calling out.

So why do I think you shouldn’t go see this film? Because you’d be giving money to a movie that has decided to embrace one of the most disturbingly misogynist tropes in modern storytelling, and in so doing, you’d be rewarding Hollywood for sinking to this level and encouraging the use of this device in more films. Hollywood obsessively reproduces whatever sells, and if this film sells well, it will encourage more Hollywood movies to delve into video game misogyny. There is, of course, already talk of a sequel; the studio seems to be hoping for a franchise. Avoiding this film would be a small gesture, but honestly, this movie isn’t good enough on its merits to justify your money anyway. Wait until it comes to Netflix, and then watch something else instead.

Want to Know More?

Don’t see this movie. Read the book instead; it’s much better. Here’s the Kindle edition of Dracula

Stefan Pascu has written a couple histories of Transylvania, so if you want to learn about the region, you might try his A History of Transylvania. However, I haven’t read it, so I can’t really vouch for it.

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