Poor Things

Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film scathingly ridicules patriarchy and liberal ideas of progress in a highly stylised manner.

Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) takes to the dancefloor in Poor Things (Searchlight Pictures).

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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Suicide; Misogyny; Child abuse; Ableism.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Poor Things is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

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Based on the late Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things begins with the suicide of an unknown pregnant woman in Victorian-era London. The corpse is found by surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who replaces the brain of the deceased woman with that of her baby, before reanimating her. He subsequently acts as surrogate father to his creation, Bella (Emma Stone), who has the mind of an infant and must learn how to walk and talk within her unfamiliar new body. Dr Baxter recruits one of his students, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), to help him in rearing Bella and charting her progress.

Max comes to care deeply for Bella, and Dr Baxter has the two betrothed. However, Bella is becoming increasingly restless in her desire to explore both the world and her own sexuality. She absconds to Lisbon with the raffish, lusty lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Thus begins a journey which will also see her explore philosophical questions on a Mediterranean cruise with fellow passengers Martha von Kurtzroc (Hanna Schygulla) and Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael), and eventually leads to her working in a Parisian brothel for Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter).

Patriarchy and matrimony

Bella calls Godwin Baxter ‘God’, and this epitomises his role as her creator and as the setter of the parameters of her permitted cosmos. Poor Things thus captures the theological roots of patriarchy, and Dr Baxter’s relationship with Bella stands in for the patriarchy more generally: caring but also controlling, instrumentalising, sexually interested. He recruits Max to serve as his assistant in this work, and later literally signs her over to him to sustain this arrangement, illustrating the way patriarchy is reproduced through marriage.

It is at this point that Duncan Wedderburn intervenes and seemingly offers to consummate Bella’s yearning for sexual liberation – something Baxter surprisingly consents to. Yet Duncan’s rejection of the conventions of monogamy is incredibly partial, and he increasingly seeks to monopolise Bella’s time and attention, resenting both the broadening of her intellectual horizons and her own freedom to choose sexual partners. Ironically Max, who wishes to marry Bella and yet repeatedly accepts her autonomy to the point of her abrogating their arranged marriage, offers a more truly liberatory version of masculinity.

Bella’s sojourn with Duncan leads her, much to Duncan’s dismay, to the brothel. I would assert here that Poor Things is not principally concerned with sex work and sex workers as and of themselves.¹ Rather, they function as a device to highlight the social and economic position of women more generally. Bella realises that a more explicitly contractual exchange of sex for money is a more efficient use of her time and effort than the emotional labour required to massage a single man’s ego in exchange for the gift of financial security. It also illustrates men’s own contractional approach to sexual relations: utilising their economic power to ensure their unnegotiated, unimpeded gratification; to buy their way out of the need for consent.

Progress and experimentation

Poor Things also strongly counters a High Victorian liberal notion of inevitable progress, centred on scientific advancement, which is again deeply patriarchally rooted. Dr Baxter is externally scarred and internally damaged by his father’s own seemingly pointless and cruel experimentation upon him, and Bella is likewise a product of his own dubiously justified attitude to experimentation on the human body. This serves as a metaphor for the broader colonial mindset that treats the other as a blank canvas for implementing one’s own projects upon, the implications of which manifest during Bella’s journeys overseas.

Bella learns by imitating her father’s actions and internalises the quest for advancement that he and Max undertake through her, trying to make herself better by expanding her vocabulary, mastering social cues, seeing and learning more of the world. In the process, she hopes to make the world better with her. She is also driven by curiosity and a desire to experiment, particularly sexually, that comes into frequent conflict with those same parameters of improvement being imposed upon her.

Over the course of her travels, both Harry Astley and Madame Swiney seek in different ways to disabuse Bella of her faith in being able to improve humankind and its lot. It can be implicitly read that they do so from their own positions of marginality: Harry as an African American; Madame Swiney as a racially ambiguous, physically unconventional, older woman engaged in illicit economic activity.² Nonetheless, they also do so out of their own self-interested motives.

Bella learns from them, but continues her own intellectual trajectory and growth. She becomes increasingly concerned with moral questions as she strives to develop a systematic understanding of the world, ultimately embracing socialism through her relationship with a Black sex worker, Toinette (Suzy Bemba).³ Yet as she follows her adoptive father’s pathway into medicine, the outcomes of her experimentation and own ideas of progress remain ambiguous.

Unreality and hybridity

Poor Things is heavily stylised. It use of unorthodox camera angles, both black-and-white and expressive colour palettes, stage-like sets against obviously painted backgrounds, absurd technologies, theatrical acting styles, and frequent comical depictions of sex and violence, all give the film a strong aura of unreality. It nonetheless simultaneously evokes through them historically rooted categories of time, place, social class, and race. The combination furnishes the film with a universalist approach that nonetheless explicitly engages with a recognisable modernity, as Ewan Gibbs and Calum Barnes have highlighted elsewhere.

Moreover, Poor Things’ aesthetic centres on a cyborgisation of what it is to be alive, with the fusion of living creatures both with technology, and through technology with each other. This disrupts essentialist notions of identity: what it is to be yourself, to be a woman, to be a human. Its depiction of bodily hybridisation and modification also functions to at least partially challenge ableist and ageist ideas of what a body should look like, how it should move, whether or not it should be sexually active – even if this is somewhat undercut by the presence of conventionally attractive actors like Emma Stone, Ramy Youssef, and Jerrod Carmichael among the film’s cast.

This, however, does bring us back to one potential point of criticism of the film. The deliberately stylised depictions of sex work, physical ailment, and mental illness are mobilised to make visible and destabilise harmful norms governing gender relations, beauty standards, and the public sphere. Yet at the same time, doing so risks treating those discarded and disciplined by these norms, such as sex workers and disabled people, as caricatures, canaries in the coalmine, tools for the liberation of all. It does not take so seriously the actual existence of those groups in the world as is, nor the specificities and validity of their experiences.

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1. My thanks here to Matilda Fitzmaurice for our fruitful dialogue around this aspect of the film.

2. Kathryn Hunter, who plays Swiney, is of Greek descent and suffered life-changing injuries in a car accident when she was in her twenties. She has played men, animals, and disabled characters on stage.

3. At one point we are shown her reading Spinoza’s Ethics.