Poor Us

Yorgos Lanthimos's Oscar-nominated movie isn't really about the past.

NB: This post contains a few spoilers from the movie Poor Things, including details which are not for the squeamish.

Let me tell you the precise moment when I lost all interest in Poor Things. It was when Emma Stone’s character, Bella Baxter, gets trapped in the lavish Victorian home of a man who is in some sense both her father and her former husband. Initially she finds him “interesting” (her favorite word) but he quickly turns out to be a sadistic tyrant who tortures the help for fun and wants to cut off Bella’s clitoris.

Up until that reveal, I was reserving any final judgment on this macabre little fantasia. Sure, director Yorgos Lanthimos seems far too pleased with himself throughout—what on earth is the point of suddenly cutting to an extravagant fisheye lens at random intervals? And why can none of these glamorous auteurs resist dragging every scene out for five minutes too long? But the central gambit, drawn from a 1992 novel of the same name, is actually pretty intriguing: once upon a time, there was a woman who viewed her own womb as an affliction and her own child as a disease (she called it “the monster”).

She was driven to suicide in a fit of loathing, at which point a hideously damaged scientist—instead of saving her life—used her as the test subject for an experimental brain transplant. Now the woman’s most feverish terror has become physical reality: her baby truly has taken over her corpse like a body snatcher, colonizing her hollowed-out skull.

Naturally it’s no accident that this scenario exactly reflects the most disgusting things that abortion maximalists say about “fetuses,” i.e., unborn children: that they are equivalent to parasites or squatters using their mothers’ bodies as forced life support. It’s not clear at the outset of the movie whether Lanthimos, in dramatizing this grotesque point of view, wants to endorse it or to expose its manifest absurdity. Fair enough, I thought, you’ve got my attention: let’s see where this goes.

Reader, I am afraid it goes nowhere good. Lanthimos has little to offer except the viewpoint of his deformed anatomist, Willem Dafoe’s Godwin (“God” for short, of course). Godwin was himself treated by his father as a kind of living cadaver, a test subject for all manner of nightmare experiments. He has the faintest awareness that taking materialism seriously turned his father into a freakish ghoul. But he still justifies and defends the underlying viewpoint that the world—including or perhaps especially the human body—is an object to be poked and sliced.

Bella adopts much the same view, treating her own body as a collection of parts to be calibrated in a globetrotting quest for orgasms. Turns out, if the flesh is just meat that lights up with feelings when you prod it, the prime directive is to maximize the good kind of stimulus—mostly by getting railed. Bella does pick up some ideals along the way, but they amount effectively to socialism and scientism. Enlightenment will have us spreading around economic wealth and generating technological power so that we can all, you know, get back to having orgasms. Because progress.

Obviously, as someone who thinks materialism is diabolically evil and philosophically stupid, I find this whole sordid mess ugly in the extreme. But I’m actually not going to rehearse yet again my reasons for believing that people aren’t prime rib and the mind is not a ghost—you can read my new book if you want more on that front. (See what I did there?) It’s probably pointless to answer this star-studded film with yet another old-man-yells-at-cloud tirade about embodied souls, and if I embarked on one then I would be boring you, which is what this movie ultimately did to me.

Instead I would like to point out how juvenile the film’s whole outlook turns out to be. It really is like a child putting on the appearance of an adult to play dress up, like the brain of an infant in the body of an Oscar-nominated movie. That’s why the handsome British imperial soldier turning out to be a secret ogre was the point where the whole thing lost me. Really? I thought: this character? Again? “What if I told you the polished and accomplished gentlemen of high Anglo-American civilization were actually the real monsters??” Gee Yorgos, no one has ever thought of that before.

The hypocrisy of Victorian aristocrats was a subject of fascination and minute analysis during the period, and it has been done to death ever since—often in books and movies much less confused than this one. These are the people who invented the telephone, perfected the novel, and revolutionized the world economy. Yes they were very, very flawed. Yes they made many, many mistakes. Blah blah blah.

Why are we so obsessed with them? They’re not paying this much attention to us! The whole thing feels like that scene in the Fountainhead, when the intrepid entrepreneur’s would-be tormentor says, “why don’t you tell me what you think of me?” “But I don’t think of you,” he answers. The fact that, in an era with its own desperate perils and breathtaking possibilities, we can’t stop scribbling cartoonish caricatures of 19th-century Englishmen, says far more about us than it does about them. The only reason we would spend so much time shouting incoherently at dead people is to avoid the dread admission that we have nothing interesting to say of our own.

Except of course “screw you, dad!” That we will say again and again, in 50 different ways, for two and a half tedious hours at a time. When yet another handsome hero turned into a knuckle-dragging troll, I realized suddenly what an utterly adolescent world Poor Things is set in.

Bella spends who knows how long splayed on the floor of a Parisian brothel and never gets so much as a wart. There is one brief suggestion that she should have herself checked out (you think?) but good news! Everything is a-OK. She gets told that socialism is about “making the world a better place” and says “then I am that too,” which gets a chuckle from us because we know it’s more complicated than that—except it’s not, apparently, because she remains committed to the cause and no further analysis of it is featured.

The whole thing takes place in what looks like a lavishly fantastical version of the 1800s, but is actually the detached and consequence-free world we envision for ourselves in the era of peak tech. Lanthimos pretends to be engaging with the past, but he isn’t: neither he nor screenwriter Tony McNamara shows interest in contemplating the moral tradeoffs, the physical constraints, the difficult realities of centuries gone by.

The movie operates implicitly from the assumption that birth control and artificial wombs—the real body horrors—have already rendered such problems as dependency and fidelity obsolete. Which is why Lanthimos is ready blithely to despise the people who had to work out painful and imperfect compromises without the aid of such advanced machinery.

Unintentionally, though, Lanthimos has revealed something: he has shown that the imagined utopia of endless sex and cheerful socialism involves tradeoffs of its own. The happy ending he devises for his heroine—sipping martinis prepared by her house husband while studying for an anatomy exam, surrounded by monstrosities created by tinkering with those further down the ladder of wealth and species—looks as horrifying as any nightmare scenario could be.

In that sense Poor Things is an unwitting argument for the Victorian era, at least as a preferable alternative to whatever carved-up, drugged-out techno-hellscape awaits us in the supposedly bright future if we really do commit to treating babies like parasites and bodies like meat. If anyone involved with this movie had an ounce of moral sense, it would be subtitled A Cautionary Tale.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

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