David Davis

this is not a review of "Poor Things"

This is not a review of Poor Things (2023), which I hated. These are just some notes, with errors and misrememberings and things like that. Sorry if I got anything wrong. I don’t super care.

Willem Dafoe’s Godwin is Frankenstein and Emma Stone’s Bella is his monster. God resurrected beautiful Bella’s dead body, along with the brain she was pregnant with when she jumped off a bridge. Born-again Bella is a big baby who must re-learn how to walk, speak, and reason—a “lovely r- - - - -,” in the words of Ramy Youssef’s Max, God’s pathetic assistant. (I will be talking about ableism shortly, but the use of this word is not what makes Poor Things uniquely ableist¹.)

In any case, Poor Things reassures us that Bella is not a r- - - - -. As her doctor daddy observes, her physical and intellectual development happens at an astonishing clip. As Bella becomes someone who can speak in full sentences, walk on her own, and masturbate with round fruit (??), she is granted the dignities accorded to real persons: after she violently resists God’s assignation of Max as her husband, her father gives her permission to go off on a sex vacation with bad-boy buffoon, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, always good for a comic turn).

With Bella’s journey, Poor Things reveals itself to be both bildungsroman and picaresque². Together with Duncan, she travels the world and discovers the joys of fucking, the evils of capitalism, the suffocation of polite society, the tedium of sex work, and the pleasures of autonomy, which as we know are rare for any woman, especially one with a mind of her own³. After a lot of adventures and cool full frontal⁴, Bella returns home for God’s deathbed and her marriage to Max, which is interrupted at the last minute by Alfie, her first brain’s husband, an evil man who almost succeeds in castrating her⁵. Luckily, spirited Bella gets the better of him. She goes back home to Max, watches God die in his own bed, and, in a heartwarming turn of events, decides to carry on her father’s important work as a grave-robbing baby re-animator⁶ (??).

The final scene of Poor Things includes at least three of God’s Frankensteins. There is Bella, her successor, Felicity (Margaret Qualley), and Alfie, who was for some reason not murdered, as he should have been, but instead kidnapped and brainswapped with a goat. Felicity is not a prodigy like Bella; Alfie is ruminating on the lawn. Ha ha! Unlike Bella, they are stupid.

My beef with Poor Things isn’t in the delight it takes in the behavior of stupid people, or not exactly. As much as it disgusts me, the use of people with intellectual or cognitive disability as props and punchlines is not exceptional, in cinema or elsewhere. But such low-hanging fruit becomes hypocritical in a film that fancies itself a feminist hero’s journey. After insisting on her own sexual agency, having a political awakening⁷, and doing sex work, through which she encounters gay sex and socialism through another worker, Toinette (Suzy Bemba), Bella makes her treacly return home to enter adulthood via heterosexual marriage, an estate big enough to require servants, and the continuation of her father’s legacy as, again, a grave-robbing baby re-animator.

As we can see from Bella’s happy ending, her experiences have shaped her—and rattled the men around her—without really disrupting the balance of power. Which is fine. Not everyone is a freedom fighter. Most of us are just out here living our lives. (And I think it’s neat, and not nothing, that Poor Things permits Bella to be a prostitute that rejects shame or censure.)

But ultimately, the class consciousness garnered on Bella’s perverted adventures doesn’t really take her anywhere; it tempts us with socialist whoredom, but not any socialist behavior, by her or any other whores. Her return to God’s luscious steampunk manse is triumphant but empty: Toinette has dumped prostitution and Capital to join Bella in perpetuating God’s legacy; Max, the guy who thought fucking a two-week old in Emma Stone’s body was sexy, will assist; the maid who cares for Felicity is served a drink on a tray, an empty signal of equalization that doesn’t negate her status as proletariat; and Alfie, who has been sentenced to the life of a r- - - - -, as Max might put it, for his vicious brutality, lows or brays or whatever it is that goats do.

I hated Poor Things because I felt condescended to. Its bawdy grotesqueries, its sex and violence, are merely shocking or titillating, rather than interesting. In its transgression for the NPR crowd, it’s giving self-serious Barbie (2023), with (somehow) more baby talk, or, as I said on Twitter, girlpower Forrest Gump. I don’t think Barbie was a better movie, but if I had to choose to watch one of the two again, I’d pick the doll—and I hated Barbie, too.

If my claim that a movie with such lively action is boring seems disingenuous to you, I’m sorry. It’s just that Poor Things insists that the nothing it has to say is something, and a progressive something like that. But in the bygone tradition of the Grand Tour, Bella’s hero’s journey—from which she returns changed, but ready to embrace more of the same—lacks emotional resonance. It’s little more than prolonged slumming, shot with a fisheye lens.

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1. Although I do think it’s an interesting screenwriting choice, given that this kind of language (mental retardation, etc.) did not come into popular usage until the mid-twentieth century, which is, I think, notable in a Wes Anderson-esque steampunk that seems to situate itself as Victorian—that is, in the nineteenth century. Pay attention to anachronism; it is not random.

It just occurred to me that this film is based on a novel, so the use of “r- - - - -” may be carried over from the original text. I’ll never know, because I shan’t read it. Nevertheless, it’s still a choice.

2. Is that a thing? Sorry if not.

3. Even if it is actually her baby’s mind.

4. I’m not being sarcastic. I love when movies don’t treat sex scenes like plutonium.

5. I mean this in a sort of Freudian sense, but also in a literal one, because Alfie wants to cut her clit off in order to curb her promiscuity. I think I’m remembering correctly that the Victorian steampunk doctor he hires uses the acronym “FGM,” which is hilarious to me. Anachronism is not random, but it is sometimes really stupid!

6. I just realized that Bella’s first name was Victoria. Victor Frankenstein…Victorian England…anyway.

7. Bella discovers the existence of an ambiguous global underclass, to which she tries and fails to give some money before sort of moving on. Knowing they’re there is all the growth that’s needed, I guess.