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“Poor Things”
“Poor Things” in the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman brought back to life from the brink of death by the brilliant and unorthodox daring scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she's lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.
At the beginning of the film, Bella is a prisoner in the house and wears very Victorian looking blouses, but never a complete outfit. Bella doesn’t have any shame or trauma, or even a backstory. She's not raised by a society that's putting these confines on women. Bella draws things from the men she meets, from the women she meets, from the environment she's in, from what she's eating. Her character has never been told that there’s anything wrong with enjoying sex or the freedom to do whatever she wants when she wants. She's like a sponge. From being trapped at home, she goes to Lisbon on a romantic voyage with her lover. On the ship, she's met with a constant desire to escape. Then Alexandria are her younger years, where she sees the world as a messed-up place. Paris is her exploration of sexuality, where she pushes herself as far as she can before she returns home. Bella’s representation of woman sexuality is more in line with today’s landscape rather than thirty years ago. She's able to explore sex without feelings of guilt, which makes her a modern heroine. It feels like an unlocking and acceptance of what it's to be a woman and to be brave and free. Socially, you're so wired to think, ‘do people like me? She's not thinking about that.
Alongside themes of sexuality and social constraints comes the exploration of the male character's need to control Bella. Dr. Godwin Baxter is a brilliant, traumatized scientist, and a lonely man who wants to push his science and his art as far as it can go without a care for society’s rules. Baxter has his own journey as well. He starts out trying to possess her in a way, to parent her in the only way he's learned through his father. But you see that he kind of matures through his interaction with her. And eventually he comes to understand that he needs to let go and let her experience the world, and he's really supportive. Baxter also comes from an experiment, and he’s quite literally scarred by what his father has done to him. When Baxter brings Bella back to life, she becomes more than just an experiment to him, their relationship is not easily defined. Baxter hasn’t loved before, but he accidentally loves Bella, cares for her deeply and sees something of himself in her. There's an intelligence, curiosity and aliveness in Bella that he maybe wishes he could explore in himself. They're father and daughter, scientist and experiment, and even soul mates in a way, though not in a romantic or exploitative way. It’s not a simple relationship to categorize. The dynamic is being worked out over the course of the film through Bella’s discoveries. At a certain point, Baxter realizes she has to go out into the world, but he’s selfish and needs to go to a higher love.
Their relationship reaches a crisis point when Bella decides to leave home with Duncan Wedderburn. Duncan embodies toxic masculinity. He’s controlling, insecure and has a deep alpha male mentality. When Bella decides to leave London with Duncan Wedderburn and travel to Lisbon, she leaves with the mind and outlook of a young girl. Lisbon is her first time out in the world, and she wants to consume and experience everything, revealing in all the possibilities it has to offer. The danger with Duncan is that he just come across as a cad. As a ladies man who has been with many women, when he unexpectedly falls in love with Bella, it ultimately destroys him. She’s the perfect woman for him if he would just let her be herself. She’s rebellious, she’s game, and she makes him feel something, but his need to control kills the relationship. Under every raging narcissist is a really broken, vulnerable person, and Bella just cracks him open.
A bittersweet catalyst in Baxter and Bella’s relation's hip is the introduction of his student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). Max is a poor-disheveled student who's clearly in awe of his professor, who has offered him an opportunity he can’t refuse. He has a gentle and friendly energy, but we also see an edge of darkness that he wants to let go. Part of the draw for Max is that he has lived a very sheltered life, and Bella seems safe, and very pure for obvious reasons. He’s a character that grows and whose moral compass shifts as he encounters Baxter and Bella. There's a rawness about Bella which attracts Max, she really speaks to something that any person is probably trying to regain. She's a modern woman in this time, and she gets to retain that human curiosity that we all had at a young age. It really shows the multitude of what is thrown at women from a young age. Bella gets to experience that from a different vantage point and then pick it apart and demolish it.
Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) is someone that Bella meets at a key point in her journey on the ship. So far, she thinks that people are good, which comes from a place of privilege. Harry broadens the scope of the world. He shows her poverty that she didn’t know existed in a way that's juxtaposed to the very wealthy as a spectator sport. Harry is a cynic, through his life and career, his viewpoint has narrowed, which is why the scenes with Bella work so well; the juxtaposition of her naivety to his prejudices. When he takes Bella to Alexandria, she's confronted for the first time by mankind’s inhumanity to poverty. When he takes her to Alexandria, her soul shatters and her entire life changes. It's her first trauma and leads to some very important decisions in her life. Bella’s eyes are opened to the monstrous part of society when Harry takes her to Alexandria, and she sees the impoverished slum dwellers. This is the only time we see Bella as a representative of her social class and as an upper-class woman. There are really souls in the world that are pure and nonjudgmental, and you oscillate between thinking that they’re naïve and also wishing that you could have that freedom.
Bella is fascinated by Martha Von Kurtzroc (Hanna Schygulla) when she meets her on the cruise ship. She’s an older woman who's dressed eccentrically for the time and is very independent, so Bella is inspired by her instantly. Martha is a Women’s Libber and emancipated. She’s wealthy and can afford to have certain thoughts and ideologies because she’s never been dependent on a man. In Paris, Bella reaches a pinnacle for her sexual and intellectual development. It all comes together there in a way, she truly decides on how to see the world and how she wants to live in it. Swiney (Kathryn Hunter) is outrageous and cruel. On the face of it, she’s the horrid Madame of the Brothel, but then she falls for Bella, and she wants to possess this extraordinary creature. With Swiney’s character, Bella ultimately understands that it’s not just men who try to control her. With the profession she works in and the assortment of characters that have come through her doors, Swiney assumes that she has seen every facet of womankind. When Bella shows up on her doorstep, it astonishes her. She’s amazed by this, kind of naïve genius.
After Bella returns home and starts to settle back and relax into this world — and the happiness of her existence, Alfred Blessington (Christopher Abbot) suddenly appears, and her whole backstory comes to surface. He’s a bit of a cunt, generally, but he still has a heart somewhere deep down, shrouded under a bunch of ice. He's very possessive in some ways, but he's been through war and has a lot of PTSD. While Alfie knows Bella from her former existence, he's, ultimately, seeing her for the first time. It's probably quite jarring for Alfred because he's catching her when she's become a fully formed adult again. To him, he probably actually believes this is her, and it's some farce, there's a lot of denial happening. His character admits that their relationship had not been an ordinary one. It feels like they probably had this sort of mischievous, very combative, but fiery relationship in the past.
“Poor Things” deals with the patriarchal tension through Bella’s eyes. Bella is not only the protagonist but also the foil for the male characters. It's her ability to remain true to her humanity and to use her experiences to discover a sense of purpose that makes her admirable. Her zest for life encapsulates the curiosity that humans possess and crave new life experiences. It's about the development and liberation of a woman who grows up in a very repressive male society. That’s a lot of the source of the comedy because her relationships with the male characters are very frank and quite exposing of the fear men have of women. The male characters are trying to control Bella in their own various ways, and she doesn’t even entertain it. She's just too autonomous. The film explores men’s views of women and the lens that they're put under, and how men believe women are there to serve them.
What would a woman be, if she were able to start from scratch? Alasdair Gray’s novel is immediately something very visually striking and complex, the themes, the humor, and the complexity of its characters and language. The book is packed with ideas about gender, identity, and even Scottish nationalism. You’re in this incredibly rich philosophical and political world, all while being hilarious. It's a story about a woman’s freedom in society. To imagine a world where your mind isn’t conditioned by growing up and being taught to be a certain way. But it's also a version of the Frankenstein story, inverting the classic story by making the monster’ a very perceptive, beautiful woman, and her love interests potential monsters. While the book is told from numerous points of view, the script gives Bella the central one. It’s Bella’s coming-of-age story, and it lives in a dystopian version of a Merchant Ivory film, with the idea of a grand tour. The script pulls on different mythologies and story tropes. The story is grotesque and visceral.
There's a different mentality around sex in Europe versus America. We can watch so much violence and pain inflicted on people in a mass way in America, but nudity and sexuality are shocking to us. With the liberation of social constraints, also comes the return to a child-like wonder of the world. It’s that draw to purity, to something that hasn’t been tarnished. A wish to possess something that maybe reminds us of whom we used to be and try and regain that innocence in ourselves. We're very cognizant of the sexual politics and how that relates to the present day. There are always those people in society that don’t have the look of the time. You could walk down the street now and see someone who looks like they’ve come straight from the 70s. We're exploring who those people might have been, and what if they thought differently? When reading about women in the Victorian times, she noticed it was often much more about what rules they should follow. Bella has no shackles on her, making her a wonderful character to watch and the perfect example of pushing back against what was expected in Victorian England.
“Poor Things” comes at a time that might offer some insight into the problems currently faced around the world. The times that we live in right now can feel particularly chaotic. Sometimes you want to look back in history and learn lessons from the past. This is a political film, and we've to recognize the feminist and socialist aspects. The endeavor of the novel and the film is to make the world a better place by not accepting the evils we've come to regard as normal.
Written by Gregory Mann
