Consider the thinking experiment — put the brain of a newborn baby into an adult woman’s body and let it grow. How will it perceive itself and interact with the rest of the world? Will it be a Frankensteinian Thriller, a political satire, or a romance of the most peculiar kind?
This is the starting point of the movie Poor Things, by which I was awed, overwhelmed, offended, delighted, and enchanted in a Stockholm-ish way at the same time. I stayed up late until 3 am, my mind hustling with thoughts, my heart overbrimmed by emotions, and hence determined to write about it. In the following sections, I will talk about elements in the film that I find intrigueing, and will try my best to weave in the events in chronological order.
Feminism#
The film touches on many important themes, but even though it centers around the growth and adventures of Bella, an unorthodox woman, it is largely not about feminism. The topics that we see in feminist literature usually include the scarcity of resources and opportunities for women, the invisibility of their labor and voice, and the violence imposed upon them either through conformity or explicit exploitation. In those works, women cry out “But I am a human” but are rarely heard, a sad reflection of the real modern world.
On the contrary, Poor Things strikes me with the sheer absence of the aforementioned elements. I cringed with fear as Bella walks out of the hotel room with anachronistically short skirts or talks about sex in the most blatant way. I prayed silently - please don’t let her get raped or sent to an asylum. But none of my fears came true. She is treated with respect everywhere she goes, her beauty admired and her opinions valued. People answer her painfully honest questions, and endure her seemingly impudent behaviors with the most patience. It is a fairytale that could not diverge further from the reality of any historically marginalized group.
And of course, sex. Often times it is the very tool to inflict pain on women. In bad cases, sex is nothing more than the demonstration of the power of the privileged upon the underprivileged. There is no pleasure, but shame, torture, and objectification. In a lot of other cases, sex is … meh. Not many women reach climax by penetrative sex alone, and men are often not as efficient as they claim to be. The colorful rendition of sex scenes in Poor Things, the screams, the moans, the dramatic facial expressions, even in the setting of a French brothel, truly bewilders me.
As I drove home from the theatre, these were the two things that I was mostly confused about. I wondered if high-brow white men wrote the script, which turned out to be the case. That is why many female audiences find themselves offended by the film, as it seems to avoid talking about social and biological predicaments in the real female experience but is filled with male reverie.
However, the film could be seen as feminist from one angle — it experiments with the idea that woman is as much a biological truth as it is a social construct. Bella is raised by two men of science in a lab setting, therefore not exposed to any ideological concept of “the other sex”. Her mannerisms differ from those of any other female or male character in the film, because she thinks and acts entirely according to her own free will. She is not subject to any social norm that keeps one gender or class in their alienated position, hence antagonizing the hysterical male characters and eventually getting the upper hand. As Beauvoir formulates it, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”.
Humanity#
The film does not stop there. Apart from discussing the female identity, it questions what makes a human human. If you look up the word in the dictionary, it has two meanings as an adjective: 1. Of or characteristic of people as opposed to God or animals or machines, especially in being susceptible to weaknesses; 2. Of or characteristic of people’s better qualities, such as kindness or sensitivity. You will see that both definitions are put to the test in the movie.
When the human body can be segregated and put together again, in the same way that a dog’s head can be put on a chicken’s body, does it not make you wonder how exactly humans are different from animals or machines? In the case of General Alfie Blessington, his body is ultimately amalgamated with the brain of a goat, does that make him a human or a goat? One may have their own interpretations, but from the scene where the general is happily grazing bushes, the writer gives the answer — humanity comes from the mind rather than the body.
Given the same paradigm, we could deduce that Bella, who is made of the mother’s body and the daughter’s brain, can be seen mostly as a new baby from the start. She grows up following the same stages of child development — at first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. She demands food and comfort, learns to walk, explores around her to see how things work, and explores her own body. She grabs everything in her hands and experiments with it. Her days have no purpose other than exploring her surrounding world and making herself happy, and when her requirements are not satisfied, like any regular child, she screams.
Due to our upright stance, we humans are born premature. During the first couple of years of our lives, our feet cannot support our bodies properly, our arms too feeble to defend what we want. The adults who take care of us are therefore crucial to our survival and mental development. Bella, on the contrary, is like a fawn that can escape from the lion the minute it is born, for she already has strong limbs to begin with. She is always able to put up a fight whenever she feels challenged, and her guardians have to use the help of chemicals to calm her down, a technique she picks up all too easily — soon she can outwit them with the same thing.
Another interesting question that the movie poses is whether humans are innately cruel. Before she leaves the Baxter household, Bella has no sympathy towards humans or things that she is not familiar with. She has no concept of what is right or wrong, but would smash the face of a dead human body, and kill a cute happy frog just for fun. These plots seem to be telling us that humans are born cruel. But we see her change as she ventures into the world. She starts to feel the happiness and sorrow in other people, and becomes more aware of her own actions. She would later read Rousseau, become devastated by the inevitability of cruelty, and cry in anguish for the lower-class people in Alexandria. Education and experience make her more kind and sensitive. So is humanity nature, or is it a social construct?
Pilgrimage#
As Bella escapes with Duncan to travel the world, the visuals turn colorful, and the movie enters a new chapter—a rite of passage. She separates from her guardians, withdrawing from her status as both daughter and lab specimen, and is beginning to find out who she is.
Her incentive is simple — to see the world. Duncan appeases her as much as he can, providing her with the pleasures of sex, gourment, sight-seeing, anything that middle class could enjoy. She encounters city, seascape, music, dance, fight, violence and friendship, a multitude of human experiences. But so far she has only seen the fun side of the world yet.
One stop at Alexandria changed that. For the first time in her life, she sees a world plagued with disease and hunger, a people trampled by class. She returned heartbroken from the short excursion, her joyous innocence gone. What does she do now? She accepts that suffering is real, and uses Duncan’s money to make it better, only to be deceited by the ship crew. As most things are, affirmative actions are complicated.
Now that the money is gone, Bella and Duncan are stranded in Paris without means to survive. After Duncan walks away with her emergency fund, Bella seeks employment at a brothel and starts working as a prostitute, without knowing or caring how other people would perceive her action. I immediately thought of Fantine from Les Miserables, who in order to provide for her daughter turns to prostitution, which ultimately leads to her tragic death. It is lamentable that even in the early modern period, women had few means to make a living outside marriage and sexual exploitation. But for Bella, this is only an experiment.
She quickly discovers that men come in all shapes and sizes, and sex is not always pleasant. She no longer has any free will on whom to sleep with, or to be treated in a way that she likes. That’s when Madame Swiney becomes another mentor in her life. The elder woman teaches her that when she has no power over the situation at hand, the only way out is to push on. She offers her hot cholocate but bites her on the earlobe — feel the pleasure, feel the pain, be a real person, don’t be numb. That’s exactly what Bella keeps doing, experiencing life truthfully. She has her unique way, too, by making it better.
She tries to change the system by proposing that they, the sex workers, should decide which client to take on. And when that’s vetoed, she tries to make the work more fun. “Before we start, how about you share a childhood memory, and I tell a joke?” She asks the clients, treating them as real humans rather than sources of income, and hoping to be seen in the same way in return. So does it surprise me when she starts to participate in progressive activities? Not at all. Accept things as they are, and try to make it better. That has always been the core trait of Bella.
At this point she has already seen the world, had enough self-awareness and sophistication, and cleared difficulties consistently in her own way. It is time for her to complete the last stage of the pilgrimage—she reconciles with her past, and re-enters society with her new identity. This time, she has the power to make things right.
Father#
While we know little about Bella’s mother, there are two father figures for her in the film, the asexualized maker and foster father, Godwin Baxter, and the evil macho biological father, Alfie Blessington. As we come closer to the end of the movie, Bella revisits the father-daughter relationships with these two characters.
Alfie symbolizes the manipulation and violence of the patriarchy. He attempts to take her as his possession, manages how she talks and behaves, and abuses his power over her body. He apparently has a long history of mistreating Victoria, Bella’s precursor in the same way, resulting in her suicide and Bella’s inception. Like in many movies that we have seen before, she outmaneuvers and kills him.
Godwin, on the other hand, is the nice, caring, spiritual father. A Frankensteinian creation himself, he suffers from merciless experimentations since a child, misunderstandings and smears following his whole life. While he lacks the courage to admit the atrociousness of his upbringing or fundamentally change his father’s ways, he brings something good into Bella’s childhood, love. He cares for her like any ordinary child, studies her with a mild curiosity, takes her out for picnics and reads her bedtime stories. He respects her decision to leave, albeit woefully, acknowledging that she is an independent individual. To show the importance of love and nurture, the film presents a good contrast between Bella and Felicity. The latter is born and raised in the same clinical environment but shows much less agility and intelligence than her beloved sister.
Godwin and Bella form another interesting juxposition — the father has a frightful appearance, but the daughter is quite a beauty; the father has a weak physique but the daughter is strong. She inherits the best part of him, the scientific mindset, and has far more courage than him to apply it everywhere in life. She is always able to face the truth, however gruesome it may be, and to find a way to make things better. When she finally announces that she wants to become a surgeon and put a goat’s brain in Alfie’s body, it seems like all the pieces are coming together. She kills one father and becomes the other.
Romance#
Given the abundance of kisses and sex scenes in the film, it is surprising how little it is about romance. There are three major heterosexual relationships, but none of them satisfy the core components of an intimate relationship, intimacy, commitment, and passion, at the same time.
First we have Max McCandles, the gentle-hearted, uninteresting fella and dutiful caretaker. While he ends up with Bella at the end of the movie, we know he is more like Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby, not that important. He offers a good narrator perspective and is a great prop to connect events together, no more, no less.
Then we have Duncan Wedderburn, a bourgeois hedonist. We audience like this character, but Bella does not. There is neither commitment nor intimacy in their relationship. She is honest about her intention when she runs away with him, which is to travel the world. However, Duncan cannot live with the fact that she has no intention to marry him, and it eventually drives him insane. They show little interests in each other’s minds; he does not comfort her when she struggles to understand cruelty, nor does she offer him solace when he goes bankrupt. Their connection is mostly carnal. When he can no longer keep up with her pace, they fall apart.
Let’s also skip Alfie Blessington because he is almost pure evil. The one interesting relationship, however, is the romance between Bella and another prostitute, Toinette. She seems the only character to be on the same page with Bella and genuinely curious about who Bella is. She contributes the only oral sex scene in the movie, participates in socialism with Bella, and goes to public postmortems with her, asking “this is where you go when you miss home?” No man has ever done that up to that point.
Epilogue#
So in the end, we see Bella live in her father’s estate with Max her guardian, Toinette her lesbian lover, Felicity her lab specimen sister, Alfie the human-shaped goat, and a lot of of animals that we find hard to name. The world is one big messy stage, and all the men and women are poor things. Maybe the only good way to live is— to be very very honest about it.
So in the end, we see Bella live in her father’s estate with Max her guardian, Toinette her lesbian lover, Felicity her lab specimen sister, Alfie the human-shaped goat, and a lot of of animals that we find hard to name. The world is one big messy stage, and all the men and women are poor things. Maybe the only good way to live is— to be very very honest about it.
All in all, I LOVE this film. It is a classic pilgrimage story where the protagonist sets out on a journey to find out who they are; it is the story of the hero of a thousand faces. We have seen it a million times before, Hercules, Odysseus, the Alchemist, the Golden Ass, Around the World in Eighty Days and so on. It uses an abundance of classic props and symbolisms, incest, patricide, metamorphosis, and so on. In these stories, the protagonists are always curious, determined, and sometimes sly. They are mostly instrumental, never very motherly, and usually do not have too many emotions to get in their way. And they are almost always men.
If you think of Bella as a better “man” who happens to possess a superpower known as empathy, does everything in the film not make sense now? Yes, Poor Things is a classic romantic hero story that does a good job of describing the human experience, which is written by men and played by a woman. And it makes sense logically because the protagonist never has to deal with puberty. The striking image of the female character, the obvious lack of femininity, and how that pisses people off (including myself), are just, amazing.