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It's about trust. I had a wonderful, wide-ranging, hourlong phone interview with Ms. Kreitzer recently, and she kept returning to that phrase. While I'd never before considered trust as a Kreitzerian theme, the more I ruminated upon it, the more powerful the idea became.
To understand the positioning of trust within Lasso of Truth, it is instructive to look briefly at Kreitzer's earlier works. In her Women Who Kill triptych-Heroin/e (Keep Us Quiet); Valerie Shoots Andy; and Self Defense, or death of some salesmen-trust is shattered to such a degree that it results in murder. Whether it is Valerie Solanas' conviction that she was betrayed by Andy Warhol in Valerie Shoots Andy, or Aileen Wuornos' claim that the murders she committed were an inevitable result of the violence visited upon her when she was a prostitute in Self Defense-that she was simply defending herself from future violence-we return to the issue of betrayal of trust, whether that is trust in another person or the social compact. In Kreitzer's 1:23, which examines cases of infanticide, she addresses the most fundamental trust in the world-that your mother will protect you and keep you safe.
Lasso of Truth posits a number of situations where, while trust is damaged or even broken, it is not shattered beyond repair. As well, the offending party feels remorse for what has been wrought. The authorial choice to engage with issues of trust and vulnerability in a more nuanced manner than in the works mentioned above results in Lasso of Truth being a deeper, more layered, and ultimately more resonant work than anything Kreitzer has previously written. The work, ostensibly about Wonder Woman, has as its dominant plot the adult life of William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman and inventor of the lie detector test. In addition to his work as an inventor and author, Marston is also a practitioner of BDSM, specifically bondage.
This disturbs The Girl, who says, "Sometimes you find something out that shifts your entire perspective. Makes you re-consider...