Poor Things Is Not A Feminist Empowerment Fantasy. It Challenges Such Fantasies

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos): ****

            Detractors and fans of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things agree. For the film to be a success, it must be a tale of feminist empowerment that represents all women’s liberation.  You might find this litmus test surprising and strange if you don’t enter movie screenings wondering “is this movie feminist in a way that applies to all women—yes or no?” But then you are not familiar with film criticism and social media discourse. People in this arena hilariously and frustratingly claim to believe most films are reactionary, maybe three progressive pictures have ever been made, and the artists they engage with passionately don’t share their political sympathies. And yet, the way these critics treat new and confounding art betrays how little they believe such mantras. They assume because it features a woman who changes due to relationships with men, sexual trysts, and awakening political consciousness, a work as gonzo, irreverent, sardonic, and playful as Poor Things aims to be a feminist empowerment fantasy. They don’t consider how narrative, images, sound, and craft mix to organically and naturally express its true ambitions. They don’t let the picture unfold in front of their eyes and speak to their souls. They dismiss or venerate based on if it upholds the correct messages.  

            It’s a shame such writers judge Poor Things based on how it fits into a box of their expectations. The picture is compelling precisely because it flummoxes any requirement to be a feminist story that can apply broadly. Instead, Lanthimos’ work unnervingly suggests one person’s journey towards empowerment and freedom cannot stand in for another’s, that freedom and power enrich us because they are our own.

            Protagonist Bella Baxter’s (Emma Stone) backstory alone frustrates using her evolution as a blueprint. Taken from the Alasdair Gray novel, Bella is the Frankenstein-like culmination of ghastly experiments from her adopted dad Gowdin (Willem Dafeo). Godwin found her mom’s body after she attempted suicide while pregnant with Bella. For the sake of science, Godwin took Bella’s brain and placed it inside her mother’s body to reanimate the corpse. With the help of student Max McCandles (Ramy Youseff) and Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperdine), Godwin keeps Bella inside a cozy London home, lets her do what she wants, and collects data on her. The problem those judging Poor Things’ utility to women face is not only is Bella’s life one no other woman has lived, but it is one no person can live even in the overarching details. How can all women find Bella’s liberation from Godwin’s constraints empowering when no one can be born of immoral surgery, exist in a mismatch between child brain and adult body, and grow up imprisoned like her? How can any woman think Bella’s transformation from such a unique background is feminist?

            Some could object Poor Things severs Bella’s origin from normal human ones so anybody can project themselves onto her burgeoning independence. Indeed, Bella’s maturation after she gets whisked away from Godwin’s home by horny lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) shockingly and joyfully echoes formative moments of growth many people, including this cis straight Indian male author, encounter. However, what Poor Things evokes from these formative moments is not universality, but specificity.

           By alienating Bella’s backstory from a typical human’s, the relatability of her experiences becomes vivid. However, by the time these experiences finish unfolding and become part of her life with an unusual past, they feel as distinct as her background. Poor Things, then, emphasizes how non-reproducible Bella’s common experiences are, how only she can think of, process, and behave through them the way she does, and how they belong only to her. In turn, the film crystallizes how our similar experiences are non-reproducible, how only we could’ve gone through them the exact way we did in the exact circumstances we did, and how they belong only to us.

            I thought of an early sexual fantasy when Bella discovers pleasure, but I thought of my fantasy’s uniqueness. Nobody else could’ve dreamt of the same girl the way I did at the time and place I did. When Bella argues with Godwin about how she must travel the world, I recollected an argument with my parents about going to college. However, I remembered less how Bella and I resisted our elders similarly and more how she expressed her desire by saying “I’ll resent you forever if you don’t let me go” while I uttered “I have to cut the umbilical cord at some point.” When she dances, it brought to mind my first time letting go on the floor and how I did so with the company of close friends instead of strangers like her. As Bella discusses Emerson’s theories about the human condition, I traced my own intellectual development, which excludes Emerson and involves Roger Ebert, the American New Critics, Robin Wood, Plato, Aristotle, and Nietzsche, aesthetics to philosophy, beauty to wisdom (maybe). And I examined my own reckoning with privilege and how it isolates me from injustice while watching a nauseous Bella witness poverty, but what struck me was how different the protections provided by our privileges are and how divergent the vulnerable positions we found ourselves in were after confronting them.

 

          Poor Things’ comedy most contributes to the sense that Bella’s journey is not a template. Much of the humor comes from observing Bella plainly overcome men who try to exert power over her body. For example, her insatiable sexual curiosity reduces arrogant Duncan to a pathetic, tearful boy. When she works at a brothel, she turns her pervy male clients into jokes by twisting their sexual desires back on them. When Max attempts to take her as his wife, she outfoxes Godwin’s brilliant student with a cocktail of seduction and drugs.

            For skeptics, this lightheartedness downplays the trauma and violence men inflict on women in Bella’s position, making her quest for liberty and empowerment a joke. Again however, these authors grade Lantimos’ art on a test it does not try to pass. They don’t consider that Poor Things wishes to present Bella’s transformation as a joke. In her nonchalant victory over male opponents, Poor Things needles the notion that any film can show what a woman’s escape from patriarchy looks like. The film acknowledges that in a world designed on the safe environment of a film set, with a pre-planned script, performed and directed actors, and edited narratives, any depiction of a woman battling an abuser, creep, unjust family expectations, or oppressive gender roles is stripped of true risk. Yes, no real woman will find it as easy as Bella to gain power and freedom, but this holds for any comparison between a person and a character. That’s because when a woman encounters a man following her in the street or making an aggressive advance at a bar or harassing her after dumping him in reality, she cannot script his actions, direct his behavior, and cut away from his possible punches. Poor Things’ comedy highlights this cinematic limitation, indicating the film does not care to craft a “realistic” feminist depiction of freedom and power. Rather it scrutinizes why we even hope for such an impossible goal. What value is feminist fiction about women discovering independence and strength when any woman will find attaining these needs harder than what such fiction shows? What do people looking for power and freedom against the bonds placed on them by society or themselves dream will come from simplistic, pre-arranged, and hollow visions of liberation and empowerment?

           Poor Things might overstretch such lampooning. When Bella returns to London, she stays with her biological father Alfie (Christopher Abbott). Alfie, thinking Bella is his wife because her brain is in her mother’s body, imprisons her to keep her from leaving again. The Alfie subplot carries the danger, physical threat, and potential trauma for Bella she neutralized easily earlier. It’s awkward seeing Bella in precariousness when the film had delighted in her nimbly overcoming catastrophe. More peculiar is how no complexity, originality, or freshness exists to Alfie; his motivations, mind, and behavior feel like those of a typical male brute.

            Perhaps, Poor Things wants this finale to be sterile? What better demonstrates the hollowness of boilerplate narratives about women overcoming plight than to present such an unvital one? However, even if purposefully predictable and boring, this subplot grates because it is part of Bella’s vibrant, mercurial, and hilarious journey. Despite being based on a literary work, Bella had felt unlike any character seen before. Emma Stone’s humorously childish and mature performance, Lanthimos’ warped direction blending her outer world and inner transformation, and his relaxed screenplay made Bella feel like a person being invented through celluloid.  To supply a fresh, whole, and rich figure a turgid subplot causes her to seem flat and bland near the end, like she could be the stand-in for feminist empowerment and liberation the work’s critics desire.

           Such dullness also stings because it tips the film’s attitude to those who wish to reckon with the horrors women experience so that they can find peace and happiness against them from one of amusing scrutiny to meanspirited cynicism. The work’s pointed questions about how spectators hoped art would improve their lives and society devolve into a bitter rebuke of viewers for even yearning for affirming, uplifting, and ennobling art.  

            The picture’s lasting images threaten to reinforce such nihilism. However, when contemplated further, they produce something enervating. The picture inspires through a counterintuitive artistic choice, taking Bella’s path to an ambiguous end, one in which her earned emblems of freedom and power also seem to be symbols of oppression and comfort. After Alfie pulls out a gun, she tussles with him, leading him to shoot himself. Bella, armed with a dream to help people by becoming a doctor, saves Alfie but switches his brain with that of a goat so he no longer poses a physical danger. Afterwards, she sits in Godwin’s courtyard, living in a manner that could be interpreted as liberated and empowered or compromised and entrapped. She’s on her way to healing people by utilizing Godwin’s privilege, reputation, and wealth, products of his cruel scientific experiments which have shielded her from others’ suffering in the past. Bella even hearteningly continues her dad’s nightmarish work when she parents his final ghastly creation Felicity (Margaret Qualley) and violates her ethical oath to do no harm by brain-swapping Alfie and the goat to limit male threats. Yet Bella acquiesces to patriarchy despite trying to resist men’s prying eyes when she puts on a façade of being married to Max so she can avoid scrutiny for her romantic life with fellow sex worker Toinette (Suzy Bemba). While Toinette by her side reveals Bella’s freedom and power lead to another’s escape from exploitive labor, this triumph is dimmed by the fact that Toinette is the only sex worker from Bella’s brothel living with Bella, suggesting that the luxurious, happy life Toinette enjoys might be conditional on remaining Bella’s partner.

            To critics, this ambiguous, uneasy end will seem like clinching evidence the work is confused about what freedom and power are. To aficionados invigorated by the Alfie subplot, Poor Things’ ending may seem an edgy rejection of the potential for liberation and empowerment. What such interpretations miss is how the ending works in concert with Poor Things’ achievement: its vision of the distinctiveness of Bella’s life, the inability to reproduce her journey. In light of this accomplishment, I wondered if my similar experiences to Bella’s cannot match hers, then why would I think I could be an expert in her liberation and empowerment; if how I went through similar experiences cannot help me fully know how she went through them, how can I know how she would feel, think, and behave while discovering freedom and power. How can I judge if she’s truly independent and strong on the inside in the work’s final images? Who am I to say a fictional figure or a real life person is not truly free and powerful because they are providing concessions to the world, accepting necessary imperfections to make the ideal tangible, especially when I am not free of ideological traps or empowered against my demons? And what gives me the right to assume an individual conquering such traps and demons would lead others, including me, to do so?

            The above questions are not meant to defend Poor Things, but convey its experience. The art is not a feminist fantasy that uplifts all women. Rather, it challenges such stories not because it claims independence and strength are impossible, but because it demonstrates that we cannot know what any individual’s freedom and power look like. Just as any life is too specific, contradictory, messy, and rich to be duplicated, to be fully grasped, so is any free and strong life. The only person who can say if Bella is liberated and empowered at the end is Bella, based on her emotions within. And even that internal experience, as we are aware, is everchanging. Poor Things, then, does not mock our desire to be free and strong. It disturbingly and energizingly asks: what do liberty and power look like to you? How do you know what they look like is what they are?