Poor Things Review: Libido over Liberation
By Claire Schnatterbeck
Poor Things (2023), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, takes the viewer into a world that resembles a Salvador Dali painting more than our own, where every detail is crisp and not-so-slightly unsettling. This eccentric, Victorian-Era aesthetic take on Frankenstein—with its own share of allusions to Rime of the Ancient Mariner—follows Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) as she navigates her monstrous (re)birth and journey towards self-discovery.
Her story begins in the mansion of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). An archetypical Dr. Frankenstein, Baxter—who Bella calls God—creates her by reanimating the corpse of a pregnant woman with her fetus’s brain implanted into her body. He employs Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) as an assistant to observe her development. As Bella develops, so does her desire for exploration. Although she becomes betrothed to Max, she decides to run away with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a seductive con man who gives her the opportunity to explore the world and her burgeoning sexuality. Along the way, she meets many different people, gets exposed to many new ideas, has a lot of sex, and starts to live apart from the men who seek to control her before eventually finding her way back home.
One could interpret this story as a critical commentary on the suffering and male manipulation associated with a universal conception of "womanhood," however, it doesn't seem to make it past the Second Wave. While the visuals are simultaneously alluring and disturbing—with textures reminiscent of A Trip to the Moon or a quilt at your grandmother's house—its aesthetic charm overshadows the surface-level message of female liberation. While the viewer cannot look away from the absurdity of the gore and the beauty of the colors, Lanthimos seems to be looking away from the messy or disturbing bits of “womanhood” and liberation.
Bella finds herself opposite a slew of men who seek to control her destiny. Her creator, God, is a father figure who keeps her locked inside to mitigate the dangers of the outside world. Max is an innocent (pre-sexual) male companion who is mesmerized by her naivete and developing mind. Duncan is a passionate lover but no match for her adventurous spirit and strides toward independence. In addition to characters played by Jerrod Carmichael and Christopher Abbott, these characters seek to manipulate Bella. Her ability to overcome their attempts to control her is presented as enough to label her journey as liberation.
Actual feminist liberation is more than just liberating the mind through education or the body through sex without shame; it also creates actionable change to remove systemic inequalities. This is where the movie falls short. Despite Bella’s wishes to “change the world for the better” and use her experience to do good, she perpetuates a cycle of gore for the sake of revenge. While she fills her mind with Emerson, her claims to learn from the world in order to do good seem self-serving, as she has no notions of what she is going to do to actually change the world. She goes against norms by having sex for her own exploration and satisfaction but still ends up participating in systems that perpetuate female oppression for those less privileged than herself. In the end, Bella is relatively harmless…minus the body horror.
This year, the simplified, aestheticized universal suffering of womanhood is a popular theme. An obvious comparison is Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig), whose feminist critiques are delivered explicitly and directly to the camera by America Ferrera. That is not to say that the movies are ineffective or that Bella is simply a “girlboss” archetype—both films are a feast for the eyes and incredibly fun—just that they are easily consumable for audiences. They only break the glass ceiling aesthetically. The offensive, uncomfortable parts of female liberation—that is, the decentering of men and whiteness—are largely untouched and instead replaced by the model of a strong, independent woman.
