The film Poor Things, which explores the growth of a character named Bella Baxter, who possesses a baby’s mind but an adult woman’s body, has caused a division among cinema enthusiasts: Is Poor Things a feminist masterpiece or a sexual fantasy catering to the male gaze?
‘A middle-aged straight man’s fantasy about nymphomania’
Samira Ahmed, presenter of Front Row on BBC Radio 4 and trustee of the Centre for Women’s Justice
I wanted to enjoy Poor Things. Emma Stone is a terrific actor, Mark Ruffalo a genuine good guy activist playing a cad. Hilarious! But Bella, Stone’s character, has an infant’s brain – and the consent issue for a woman with learning difficulties is a blazing red flag. She embarks on a “voyage of self-discovery” which leads, quickly, to an insatiable desire for sex with as many men as possible, one of the oldest abuser myths. In the 1970s, pornographers jumped on the women’s liberation movement, claiming sexual liberation was essentially never saying no.
As a work of fiction, Poor Things can explore anything it likes, but it is not feminist. Just because a woman chooses to do something, does not make the act feminist. Feminists challenge the patriarchal system in which women’s choices exist. Prostitution has always been romanticised by men in fiction, but it remains overwhelmingly the male exploitation of poor female bodies. Men – always much older and sometimes with visual deformities (raising questions about the degrading treatment of people with disabilities) – use Bella’s body without any attempt at foreplay. She is bound and gagged in a scene played for laughs.
The feting of Poor Things – a heterosexual middle-aged man’s fantasy about nymphomania, with the flimsiest covering of “satire” and a tagged-on message about female genital mutilation being “bad” – merely confirms that feminism still has a long way to go.
‘It is not promoting paedophilia’
Charlotte Higgins, Guardian chief culture writer
To ask the question “Is Poor Things a feminist movie?” strikes me as a category error. No, I do not think that I will be basing my feminist manifesto on this film any time soon. I might as well think of Medea, the magnificent character of Greek myth who kills her own children, as charting a practical path to power. Poor Things – an adaptation of the late Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, itself a version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – is a fable.
It is not a handbook advocating the transplanting of a newborn’s brain into the head of a recently deceased adult woman, nor is it promoting (as some have suggested) paedophilia. Its relationship with realism is pretty heavily signalled from the off – as in, a distant one. You have never seen a person like Bella Baxter. You have also never seen a living creature composed of half a goose and half a dog.
‘Desire, will, interest, passion – expressed by constant sex’
Zoe Williams, Guardian columnist
Poor Things asks you to imagine a female sexuality that hasn’t been painstakingly formed by society and its arsenal of explicit rules, unspoken expectation, overt violence and the covert control of shame. And now imagine male sexuality with those levers taken away. Stand well back and see if they can get along.
I want to say that, even if I’d hated the politics, I still would have loved the experimental conviction of Stone’s performance, the virtuoso disintegration of Ruffalo, the pitch-perfect everyman Ramy Youssef – and who doesn’t love Willem Dafoe when he’s missing digits (English Patient klaxon!). But it’s impossible to disaggregate, just as it wouldn’t be possible to separate the meaning from the aesthetic, or its humour from its heart.
From the minute Stone discovers masturbation at the dinner table, then recommends it to a cranky maid, her wild and enchanting performance is pure Jungian libido (desire, will, interest, passion) expressed through libido the way Cosmopolitan uses it (having sex, constantly). Schematically, Willem Dafoe’s transplant surgeon is Frankenstein with a more lurid backstory. Mutilated himself, he thinks he can play God (it perhaps didn’t help that Bella calls him God), and his creation destroys him, except does it? Bella is more like a fire than a monster, though – destructive, heedless, purifying, warming, incredibly fun to watch, particularly in a mad tango with Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderburn. Her spell in a brothel is the most honest pass at the question, “What does sex work look like stripped of internalised stigma?” I’ve seen in ages.
The film has a pretty confronting opening: the visionary professor and his biddable assistant discuss Bella as a sexual entity, a proposition essentially, while she’s non-verbal. There will be people who won’t walk through that as allegory, will see it as straight wish-fulfilment of a toxic patriarchy (adult body, tabla rasa brain, the perfect cocktail of woman) and that’s a pretty high-stakes ambiguity.
If it were a mainstream film, thinking, “Will people take this as a fable about pleasure and constraint, or as a, psychically speaking, paedophilic fantasy?”, I would run a mile. I would cut my losses and remake National Velvet. Maybe I’m taking it too seriously, but the courage of the film, as it leapt from one gender-flashpoint tightrope to another, struck me as a cultural renewal.
‘Its pseudo-feminism reminded me of Barbie’
Shaad D’Souza, writer
Poor Things gave me a sense of deja vu: didn’t this film already bludgeon me with its pseudo-feminist credentials over the summer? No, I was just thinking of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which featured a similar plot, an overwhelming reliance on fish-out-of-water humour, and a similar propensity for didactic, simplistic morality. In both films, a woman created by men goes on a quest for self-determination and meaning, realises she hates the horrors of the “real” world, and decides to settle for a sense of slightly enlightened equilibrium back in her cloistered old world. In both films, I found it astounding that the surface-level allusions to feminist ideals were greeted with such outsized praise.
Poor Things reminded me of the Tumblr-level gender politics of my high school years, which dictated that a woman’s power is inherently linked to her anatomy and fucking as much as you can is a source of uncomplicated liberation. There’s nothing particularly wrong with those ideas, but Poor Things makes no effort at all to complicate or question them: “furious jumping” becomes Bella’s raison d’etre and, for a period, her vocation. But it’s only ever a backdrop to her studies of philosophy and socialism, rather than something that interacts with them directly.
Some of my favourite films are women’s stories by men. But Poor Things struck me as self-congratulatory and fake deep, obsessed with its own radical approach to a female coming-of-age story. It feels like Barbie for people who thought they were a little too smart for Barbie, but still want their discussions of gender politics served up to them in neat little inspirational speeches. At least Barbie could, theoretically, provide a child with some basic level of feminist literacy. Poor Things, I fear, only serves to reaffirm the values of smug adults.
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