"Poor Things" Bravely Asks: What If Frankenstein's Monster Was a Girlboss?
Yorgos Lanthimos' steampunk sex fantasy is filled to the brim with masturbation, misogyny, and the ghosts of mothers past.
The worst thing a person can be, according to Yorgos Lanthimos, is a prude. Amidst endless cycles of discourse about the function and necessity of sex scenes in movies, the Greek director and patron saint of horny sickos used the Poor Things press tour to go on the record as staunchly pro fucking on screen. “Sex in movies, or nudity – I just never understood the prudishness around it,” Lanthimos told The New York Times. His impatience with this type of puritanical pearl-clutching has never been clearer than in Poor Things, a veritable feast of bawdy impulses, naked flesh, and the shameless pursuit of orgasm. It’s the cinematic equivalent of shoving any aforementioned prudes into a locker and telling them to shut up, nerd.
Part Victorian fairytale, part coming-of-age story, and part European travelogue, Poor Things follows the transformation of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) from reanimated corpse piloted by a baby’s brain to self-actualized adult woman. Along the way, she earns a doctorate from Bone So Hard University. Her professors in the carnal arts are a murderer’s row of scumbags and creeps, most notable among them the lecherous lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (played by Mark Ruffalo, whose full-throttle commitment to a goofy accent rivals only that of Austin Butler), and her lessons revolve around the ideologies of pleasure, capital, and power. We’re talking sex in beds and on couches; on her back and bent over; pressed against walls and folded up like a pretzel; at a hotel, in a brothel, and on a ship. But for all the sex Bella has, she never seems to develop any feelings about it beyond coolly detached curiosity. The absurd path she takes to corporeality lends an air of the uncanny to her character – she looks and technically is human, but she might as well be born of a different species entirely. Bella’s origin story is as follows: Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), the movie’s disfigured Dr. Frankenstein figure, was himself a guinea pig in his father’s twisted medical trials as a child. As an adult, he steps into the role of perpetrator, no longer the victim, of such blasphemous operations. He finds the body of a woman who jumped off a bridge, cuts the baby out of her stomach and puts the baby’s brain into the suicidal mother’s head. Did I forget to mention that Poor Things is also part creature movie?
Once reborn, there are two Bellas – Bella the body, which engages in all sorts of “furious jumping” with anything that breathes, and Bella the mind, which just so happens to be housed in Bella the body because Godwin defied the laws of nature to make it so. No matter what her body does, her mind remains at a safe distance from the action, dispassionately and methodically taking notes on the experiment in progress. All the world is a laboratory, and the mad scientist worldview that she inherited from her creator and father figure (whom she calls “God”) remains perpetually intact. In other words, she’s hypersexual but not hypersentimental – a male fantasy first conceived by Alasdair Gray, the author who penned the novel of the same name, then reinterpreted by Lanthimos, and dreamed up anew by every man in the text who views Bella as an exotic curiosity to possess and exploit.
Poor Things is as much about men as it is about our heroine – how they objectify and infantilize her, how they try to strip her of agency, and how each and every one of them ultimately falls short of her expectations. Men are a never-ending series of closed doors shutting Bella off from the rest of the world and her own potential. They come in varying shades of disappointment, from the relatively well-intentioned (“God” and her cucked fiancé, Max McCandles, played by Ramy Youssef) to the irredeemable (Duncan Wedderburn and her body’s husband in its former life, Alfie Blessington, played by Christopher Abbott). None of them are a match for Bella and her indomitable will – in the end, she’s the last one standing, and any man who might have stood in her way is either dead, tamed, or had his brain supplanted by that of a goat. It’s supposed to be a satisfying conclusion, but it rings hollow. All the kooky sci-fi scaffolding in the world can’t distract from the fact that the ideas at the core of Poor Things could only be thrilling to a 13 year old in the first flush of a Tumblr-aided feminist awakening. I speak from personal experience – as someone who was raised on a steady diet of religious beliefs about feminine chastity and virginity, the greatest act of transgression I could conjure as an adolescent was swinging hard in the opposite direction and adopting the philosophy that the highest form of female empowerment is having a lot of sex indiscriminately and never feeling ashamed or conflicted about it ever. That’s all well and good in theory, but in practice it amounts to little more than naive self-delusion. Try to wear male sexual license as your own and you’ll soon find yourself facing all manner of consequences that men never do, especially as a non-white woman. It’s not a matter of bravery or ego or specialness – patriarchal structures are impersonal that way. Unless, of course, you’re Bella and therefore Not Like The Other Girls™. Even alone in foreign countries with no genuine allies, she never seems to be in immediate danger, and any attempts to punish her insatiable sexual and intellectual appetites are futile. The world of Poor Things is not so fantastical as to omit systems of patriarchal power altogether; it’s just that they’re only there to show us how easily Bella manipulate and overrides them. She’s impervious to the lived reality of womanhood and the body she inhabits, so her victory is a foregone conclusion drained of emotional impact. It’s not too much to ask that female characters arrive at their happy endings in a more compelling fashion.
Lanthimos’ best feature film is The Favourite, which is like if Lisi Harrison’s The Clique was set in an 18th-century royal court and involved a lot more fingering. The joy of The Favourite is watching Emma Stone bounce off of Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz and deploy every last catty, seductive wile of hers to great comedic effect. Unfortunately, she gets considerably fewer scenes with other women in Poor Things. There’s a female lover, Toinette (Suzy Bemba), from the Parisian brothel where Bella dabbles in sex work. Toinette represents an advanced stage in Bella’s scholarly and erotic development (socialist scissor sisters) but she’s so thinly written that she barely counts as a character at all. If they’re meant to have a deep connection, it doesn’t translate.
Instead, Bella’s most significant female relationships are with experienced older women who have wisdom to impart. One way to read her European odyssey is a search for the mother she can never have, due to the whole living-in-her-biological-mother’s-reanimated-corpse quandary. And Bella does find maternal mentors along the way, like Martha Von Kurtzroc (Hanna Schygulla), a wealthy dame who nurtures Bella’s scholarly side and opens her eyes to a philosophical world beyond the physical pursuit of getting off, and Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter), Bella’s employer at the Parisian brothel who provides practical tutelage in labor and commerce. But only when she comes back home to London in the movie’s final act does Bella uncover the truth of her body’s previous life and the type of person her biological mother was: a sadistic asshole who delighted in tormenting servants and married a man more monstrous than any of Dr. Godwin’s unholy beasts. The ever unflappable Bella digests her mother’s inadequacies with characteristic composure, of course, and swiftly returns to her father figure’s home, work, and way of life. He (Freud) can’t keep getting away with this!
The scene from Poor Things that’s stuck with me the most is the one where Bella disembarks from the ship while it’s docked in Alexandria and gets an eyewitness look at abject poverty for the first time. A staircase that abruptly crumbles to dust long before it reaches the ground separates the tourists from the residents, and Bella despairs at her helplessness in the face of such disparity between the haves and the have nots. Visually, it’s one of the most striking sequences in a movie bursting at the seams with otherworldly spectacle. Narratively, it signals Bella’s coming to consciousness and politicization in the context of the world outside her bedroom. She begins to understand why people like Harry Astley (played by Jerrod Carmichael, who’s so miscast and forgettable in this that I forgot to include him in my list of bad men above) might retreat into nihilism and cynicism, even as she herself remains optimistic.
But there are limits to the change one person can enact, even for someone as extraordinary and idealistic as Bella. In this case, she tries to donate all of Duncan Wedderburn’s gambling winnings to the locals living in squalor via two untrustworthy crew members who take the cash for themselves the second her back is turned. What lesson can we glean from this neat little fable? Bella’s money and guilt can’t save anyone but herself, goes the movie’s logic, so it’s futile to attempt anything more ambitious than progress on the individual level. For all the risks that Poor Things takes in the way it looks (off-kilter camera angles and bulging fisheye lenses, whimsical color schemes, and lush costume design), the scope of the story’s imagination is actually quite limited. Everyone’s a “poor thing” in their own way, and whether they transcend their circumstances comes down to personal ambition, resolve, and a healthy dose of incivility. Back in London, Bella decides to continue Dr. Godwin’s surreal experiments on unsuspecting animal and human subjects – transforming, like “God” before her, from subject to surgeon. She becomes the man, taking his power and using it to enact revenge on the worst of his ilk, but stops short of upending the system that previously held her captive. Sheryl Sandberg would be proud.
I really felt the lack of female companions for Bella too and wish that Toinette (didn’t even remember her name til reading this lol) had been more developed. Great piece!
“In other words, she’s hypersexual but not hypersentimental – a male fantasy first conceived by Alasdair Gray … then reinterpreted by Lanthimos, and dreamed up anew by every man in the text who views Bella as an exotic curiosity to possess and exploit.”
THISSS!!! I had such issue with this film and your piece does a great job at explaining why. Very “male-feminist” critique of society that focuses solely on sex and sexual agency