Angela Robinson (Pride pt. XX)

D.E.B.S.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

Good gay day to you all! I hope you’ve had a joyous, fulfilling, and safe Pride Month, my dear readers. Time really flies when you’re having fun, and yet seems to drag absurdly slowly when you’re just outside, sitting in the heat, with no Pride events to attend, after your evil, queer-coded president starts WWIII. I’ve tried my best to make the most of Pride this year, by watching films by queer filmmakers all month long, starting in the 1920s, and this week, ending in the early 2000s and late 2010s, and I feel like a better cinephile and a prouder ally for it. The queer filmmakers who started in early Hollywood existed in a shockingly progressive and accepting era, where sexual identities and gender non-conformity could be expressed and explored relatively freely. It’s odd, to think that Dorothy Arzner had more freedom in the 1920s than George Cukor did in the 1930s and 40s, and yet he still had more freedom than James Ivory did in the conservatism-imbued 1980s. And it’s still odd, in this day and age, that queer media is still picked apart and judged more harshly than any other kind of content—probably because the fear-mongering that Fox News does gets more clicks than the facts: like the fact that queer media, much like queer people, make up a relatively small percentage of what’s being made. Representation is a crucial part of building awareness, acceptance, and normalization in culture, for better or for worse, and though there are more LGBTQ+ characters represented today than ever before, the fight for equality doesn’t end with tenderqueer TV shows—unfortunately. The final filmmaker I want to shine a spotlight on this month has made a significant impact within pop culture, even though she doesn’t have as many projects under her belt. Tonight I want to celebrate the works of lesbian writer, director, and producer Angela Robinson, who, throughout the 21st century, has casually and quietly made massive waves in the world of queer art and media. Though there isn’t too much info about her on the internet, just scrolling through her media resume proves how impressive she is. Angela Robinson was born on Valentine’s Day in Chicago in 1971, and received her Bachelors in theatre at Brown University, before earning an MFA at NYU. In 1995, Robinson created her first short film, a black and white, lesbian vampire story titled Chikula: Teenage Vampire, which made the rounds at film festivals. She went on to make several more short films—The Kinsey 3, Ice Fishing, and D.E.B.S., which would eventually be extended into a major motion picture, but more on this in a moment. In 2007, pre-YouTube explosion, Robinson created an online series called Girltrash! which aired on ourchart.com and built up a sizable following, leading to a musical iteration called Girltrash: All Night Long, that won the audience award at the 2015 Paris International Lesbian and Feminist Film Festival. Angela Robinson directed the Lindsay Lohan/Justin Long vehicle Herbie: Fully Loaded, and she was also a writer on beloved television shows like The L Word, True Blood, Hung, How to Get Away with Murder, Wednesday, and most recently, Robinson signed an overall deal with Warner Bros. to create a show for the DC Comics character Madame Xanadu. Robinson has been with her partner, Alex Martinez Kondracke, for several years, and in 2009 Kondracke gave birth to their son. Like every director I’ve explored this month, Angela Robinson has not received the level of recognition and praise that, I believe, she really deserves, but tonight I want to at least correct my blind spots and discuss two of her most iconic, fabulously queer works.

Let’s begin with the famous, fun, downright foundational film that kicked off Angela Robinson’s career, her 2004 triumph D.E.B.S. D.E.B.S. is a story and concept that Angela Robinson would draw comics of when she was in college, and after receiving a grant from POWER UP to make it into a short film, it became a hit at festivals, even Sundance. It caught the eye of then-president of Screen Gems, Clint Culpepper, who liked the short so much that he greenlit a feature-length version with a stacked cast and a decently big budget. The film follows a group of young women who all attend a clandestine paramilitary academy called D.E.B.S.—Discipline, Energy, Beauty, Strength—where they gained acceptance by earning top scores on a secret test embedded within the SAT that records one’s aptitude for espionage. The four D.E.B.S. we follow are the proud squad leader Max (Meagan Good), the slow and naive Janet (Jill Richie), the French, cigarette-smoking Dominique (Devon Aoki), and Amy (Sara Foster), who earned the perfect score on her test—though she dreams of being an artist, not a spy. They live in a sorority-esque house with an invisible forcefield surrounding it, and Janet has more annoyance than panic in her voice when she asks Amy, “Have you seen my gun?” At D.E.B.S. academy, the formidable Ms. Petrie (Holland Taylor) and Mr. Phipps (Michael Clarke Duncan) run the show, and materialize out of nowhere to give a gravely serious PSA: Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster), the infamous international superspy who has killed every agent who has ever tried to take her down, is back in town. Our group of D.E.B.S. are tasked with surveilling this mysterious and deadly criminal, who has plans to meet with a mysterious, deadly blonde, Ninotchka Kaprova (Jessica Cauffiel), at a forebodingly chic restaurant. The D.E.B.S. have a bird’s eye view of their target from their suspended-in-the-air stakeout, chit-chatting. Dominique smokes a cig (constantly), Janet looks somewhat engaged with their task, Max is geeking at the fact that they were chosen for this mission, until Amy says, “I broke up with Brad.” And when Brad (Geoff Stults), a fellow superspy pops down Mission Impossible style from even higher up, Amy says, “I just want more.” Turns out there are love troubles all around: little do the D.E.B.S. know that down below them, Lucy and Ninotchka aren’t meeting to discuss any nefarious plans, they’re on a blind date—and it’s not going well. Even with the coaching her partner in crime Scud (Jimmi Simpson) gave her—where she lamented, “Ugh, I can hold the whole world hostage but I can’t go on one, stupid date?” and Scud responds, “Because love is harder than crime”—Lucy just really isn’t enjoying herself. Well, not until the D.E.B.S. give away their location and have to chase Lucy down, and through some cartoonishly clumsy spy-work, Amy and Lucy quite literally fall into each other’s arms. Amy and Lucy immediately hit it off and have a fun, energetic chemistry that Lucy is intrigued by and Amy is terrified by. Lucy basically promises not to kill Amy if she agrees to go out with her sometime, and Amy daringly agrees. Amy was already writing her senior thesis on her analysis of Lucy’s psyche anyway, and Lucy suggests she comes straight to the source for her research. As Amy theorizes, “my central hypothesis is that because you’re a woman in this male-dominated field, you have to overcompensate by being more ruthless and brutal”, but through some sneaky dates and a cheeky little kidnapping scheme that ends up draining federal military funds (honestly, good), Amy learns that there’s a lot more to Lucy. D.E.B.S. already sold itself within the first five seconds of it, when we first see these school girls with assault weapons, and with its Totally Spies! aesthetic, premise, and attitude. But it just continued to win me over as it went on—as the soundtrack proved to be impeccable, as its remarkably casual lesbian love story blossomed, and as the humor continued to make my jaw fall on the floor, particularly anytime Scud spoke, and when Janet tells Amy “Everyone thinks you’re a hero but you’re a slut. A gay slut.” The early 2000s were inundated with peak chick flick cinema, so much so that I suppose D.E.B.S. just got lost in the shuffle, because as I watched this with my mom, we wondered how the hell we missed this. The writing is fun and self-aware, the mini skirts are everything, and the fact that a lesbian courtship is at the center of this story, and yet the central issue between them isn’t homophobia but a semi-rational fear of falling in love with a criminal, is honestly revolutionary. And the fact that a black, lesbian woman dreamed this up and got to write and direct it herself in, in 2004, is a miracle. D.E.B.S. is one of those candy-colored, femme-centric, hyper-girly films that is way more clever than any simple-minded, dick-flick-loving viewer ever gave it credit for back in the day. It is simultaneously ahead of its time, and yet no one would have the guts to make it today. Just like Clueless, Legally Blonde, Josie and the Pussycats, and so many more that I could name, D.E.B.S. was not given the respect and love that it deserved upon its release. It took time, evolution, and critical feminist perspectives for films like these to be properly appreciated. It has a 42% on Rotten Tomatoes, and while many (notably male) critics said all kinds of unfair things about this movie, Peter Travers’ review in Rolling Stone really stood out to me, “You might think there’s no downside to a movie that peeks up the skirts of babes in micro-minis, but writer-director Angela Robinson’s dimwitted satire is libido-killing proof to the contrary.” Imagine going into every movie-watching experience assuming that a film was made specifically for you, perhaps on account of there being hot women in it. And then, when the movie doesn’t cater to your specific fantasies and standards of cinema, you are so upset that your review for Rolling Stone sounds like its coming from the deflated voice of a man with blue balls and not a celebrated critic with a respected voice. Could never be me, but this is the same kind of ridiculous scrutiny that the subject(s) of our next film faced, all the way back in the 40s, because misogyny doesn’t die, it merely reinvents itself.

Next I watched Angela Robinson’s 2017 film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, which details the (mostly true) fascinating history and subversive love story behind the comic book hero Wonder Woman. The film introduces us to William Moulton Marston, a professor and psychologist credited with inventing the systolic blood pressure test and (along with his wife, Elizabeth) an early prototype for the polygraph test. We are first introduced to Marston (Luke Evans) in 1945, at a tense meeting with the Child Study Association of America, where a very serious woman named Josette Frank (Connie Britton) is interrogating Marston about the ethics and lack of decency in his new, smash hit comic book character Wonder Woman. But before he gives his testimony, we flashback, long before his most successful creations were born, when he’s a professor at Harvard Radcliffe College in 1928. Marston has some really wild, really cool ideas—especially for the 20s—and he goes over his theories with his students. He developed the DISC theory, which asserts that: Dominance produces activity in an antagonistic environment, Inducement produces activity in a favorable environment, Submission produces passivity in a favorable environment, Compliance produces passivity in an antagonistic environment. Marston also posited that there is a masculine notion of freedom that is inherently anarchic and violent, and an opposing feminine notion based on “Love Allure” that leads to an ideal state of submission to loving authority—a concept that would be a major tenet of Wonder Woman. As he lectures, a smiling blonde sits watching in the rows, and a stern-looking brunette watches from a spot closer to the professor. The blonde is Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), a bright and bright-eyed student, and the brunette is Elizabeth Holloway Marston (Rebecca Hall), the professor’s wife. Elizabeth is just as intelligent and capable as William, and has aided him in the majority of his research, but the sexist heads of Harvard won’t make her an official professor. When Olive becomes the Marston’s research assistant, everything falls apart then falls into place then falls apart again, not just when William falls in love with Olive, but when Elizabeth does, too. This is more than just a sexy throuple, the entanglement of William, Elizabeth, and Olive proves to be a brilliant and fruitful partnership that resulted in the solidifying of the lie detector and the invention of one of the most famous comic book heroes of all time. The conversations between these three clever individuals were more than just academically stimulating, they were sexy, engrossing, and funny. And though Christie Marston, the granddaughter of Elizabeth and William Marston, claims that Olive Byrne and Elizabeth had no romantic relationship, if they ever had these well-informed debates surrounding existentialism and eroticism, it’d only be natural (to this critic) if these conversations ended in a love affair. And regardless of how intimate these two women were with each other, the fact that they both had children with Marston, all lived and raised their kids in a home together, and Elizabeth and Olive continued to live with each other, well past Marston’s death, for decades until one of them passed away, is quite unconventional and significant. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this movie—I’m not the biggest comic book person and I really haven’t heard many people speak about this one—but Professor Marston and the Wonder Women was an incredible, exciting, and endlessly interesting and fun, even though it left me in tears. It not only deepened my appreciation for Wonder Woman, but it validated some of the kookier theories and ideas I had when I was in college and discussing similar themes in my feminist film theory classes. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women was released the same year as Patty Jenkins’ movie Wonder Woman, starring former IDF member Gal Gadot, and I gotta say, Angela Robinson’s film is not only the better Wonder Woman story, it’s an immensely more empowering film. I’m still disappointed by Gal Gadot and Patty Jenkins’ depiction, wherein Chris Pine was forced to make dick jokes while Wonder Woman did a cheesy makeover montage. I’m a DC fan, though I’m not necessarily a diehard Wonder Woman fan, but out of the movies that came out in 2017 regarding this character, only Angela Robinson’s interpretation really seemed to respect this fictional but important pop culture figure, and gave a titillating history lesson in the process. Well, my dear readers, though I have exhausted all of my thoughts on these two films for now, I will never be exhausted of my love for the LGBTQ+ community. I enjoyed this month’s crop of queer movies so so much, and I am already curating my queer double features for next year, but I hope you’ll read along the rest of these months as well—because, trust me, the months that aren’t June are filled with a fair amount of gay movies too. Until next time, farewell my D.E.B.S., wonder women, and fellow insufferable allies. 🫡