The recent Golden Globes ceremony offered a few surprises – none so tantalising as Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest cinematic achievement Poor Things (2023) winning the categories Best Film Comedy or Musical and Best Female Actor in a film Musical or Comedy (Emma Stone). Whilst nominated for 8 awards, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) took out only two minor gongs: Cinematic and box office achievement and Best Original Song (Billie Eilish).
The surprises continue as Jessie Tu notes here. More recently, this year’s Oscar’s nominations have overlooked Barbie with Greta Gerwig missing out on the Best Director category, and Margot Robbie also being snubbed for the coveted Best Actress Award.
It seems that critics and punters alike construct Barbie and Poor Things as rival films. Indeed they both foreground female sexuality and carry the message of female empowerment. However, as we have suggested previously as a model of feminist cinema, Barbie was a resounding flop.
The Mattel endorsed Barbie film fell flat when the final scene saw Barbie paying a visit to the gynaecologist, the inference being that she was to have a vagina implanted into her body. Far from being a humorous move, it reduced female sexuality to being a purely biological phenomenon. It suggests that Barbie — and by extension, all women — are only complete by having a reproductive capability. This brings to the fore the heteronormative nature of narratives that tend to construct female characters as deficient.
The difference between Barbie and Poor Things can in part be discerned through their respective beginnings and endings: Gerwig’s film concludes with Barbie’s vaginal implant whilst Lanthimos’ filmbegins with its heroine’s brain transplant. This contrast underscores each film’s focus: while Barbie hones in on the cosmetic world of sexy sculpted bodies, Poor Things explores the cerebral dimension of both sexuality and identity. In this way, Poor Things provides a far more complex and intelligent meditation upon women’s liberation, examining both the sensual and psychological dimension of our minds and bodies.
Importantly, Lanthimos’ film is indebted to Alasdair Gray’s 1992 book of the same name, a tome that pays homage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). As such, Poor Things is a rather weighty work of fiction that invokes a long history of storytelling going back to the 19th century. It also evokes countless cinematic versions of Frankenstein, including the famous Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Mel Brook’ hilarious Young Frankenstein (1974), the latter dramatising the implantation of an ‘abnormal’ brain within a corpse. Likewise in Poor Things, the heroine Bella Baxter is implanted with the brain of her unborn child: this leads to comical outcomes, especially when her unfiltered behaviour disrupts polite Victorian society. The many textual influences threading through Poor Things provides it with a narrative richness that is lacking in Barbie.
Significantly, too, this film’s questioning of boundaries, especially when it relates to the differences between humans and animals (but also humans and monsters) sets the tone for a narrative that asks us to ponder both the limits and possibilities of sexual identity. There is certainly a lot of graphic sex in Poor Things, but its sexual acts hardly define its sexuality, especially Bella’s as her sexual awakening is not confined to heteronormative forms of eroticism. In possessing the developing brain of an infant, she is a genuinely exploratory character whose experience of sensuality and pleasure is uninhibited by the hypocrisies of patriarchal society. Yet for certain male characters her sexual freedom is so unwieldy and threatening that she is deemed a ‘monster’.
There are many monsters in Poor Things: some are disguised, some are not; some are even beautiful. For instance, Bella’s creator, Dr. Godwin Baxter (who is resonant of Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein) looks like a monster because his face is all stitched up and his fingers are disfigured. He is, though, a very kindly father-figure to Bella, who she affectionately calls ‘God’. Bella too is perceived as a monster because she is a resurrected suicide case implanted with her unborn child’s brain. Despite the darkness of her origins, she is a delightful, funny character capable of great compassion. And then there are the countless mixed species populating Doctor Baxter’s estate who are other ‘poor things’, those who have survived his experiments. The brutish Alfie Blessington is perhaps the closest character of all to being a monster — his diabolical plan to mutilate Bella’s genitals exemplifies the depths and depravities of patriarchal violence.
Feminist critics have argued that Gray’s rewriting of Shelley’s gothic novel presents a ‘female monster’ whose physical abnormality lies not in her ugliness but ‘excessive beauty and sexual appetite’ (Papatya Alkan Genca, 2019). Certainly, one could argue that the ‘woman-as-monster’ trope is enacted in Lanthimos’ film, yet Bella’s vivid characterisation overturns this symbolic order by revealing instead the monstrousness of gendered violence. This is evident when she rejects her seducer’s marriage proposal, informing Duncan Wedderburn that over the course of their affair she had been engaged to the much kindlier Max McCandless. The outrage that this knowledge brings helps illuminate the monstrousness of male egotism. The spectacle of Wedderburn’s contempt is also a source of humour, exposing as it does the absurdities and indulgences of male vanity.
Ultimately, Bella’s ‘monstrosity’ disrupts our perceptions of what a monster can be. She pushes the boundaries of meaning-making to reveal how unrepressed female sexuality is typically constructed as abhorrent. In light of this, perhaps the true monster in Poor Things is not a character at all but a collective value system that undermines female agency. Monsters have a way of being more powerful when they exist as ideas and beliefs.
Stylistically Poor Things, with its “steampunk” aesthetic and fisheye lenses, stretches, distorts, and warps our point of view, encouraging us to embrace both the strangeness and novelty of existence. Notably, the fisheye point of view evokes Bella’s perspective as she once swam with the fishes when her corpse was dragged from the Themes. The distortion and expansion of this uncommon cinematographic choice, resonant of its heroine’s watery grave, encourages the audience to think differently — as if we are drowning creatures who have miraculously been rebirthed into a vibrant world of cinematic technicolour.
Unlike Barbie, Bella reaches beyond herself, beyond her awkward body in the pursuit of knowledge and autonomy. Her passionate questing toward this aspiration takes her to many places, including Paris where she becomes a sex worker. In this context, Bella is the consummate pragmatist, calculating that a lifetime of unpaid sex as a wife is much more oppressive than being a salaried working girl who services ‘Johns’ within ‘20-minute’ interludes. Of course, prostitution does not lead to sexual freedom; but her salary does, enabling her to enrol in medical school and become a surgeon in her own right.
In the end, Bella achieves self-actualisation by being courageous enough to rewrite the script of Victorian ‘womanhood’. She is also not afraid to be a monster — even if it means that she is despised by certain men and wider society. Perhaps not caring if one is a monster is true freedom? Barbie on the other hand is trapped within a heterosexist logic of representation that defines sexuality according to a lack versus plenitude dynamic. This is reinforced when Ken requires Barbie’s sexual affirmation, a scenario which may reverse the symbolic order of a woman needing male recognition, but it hardly solves the structural problem of inequality if either sex can be undermined.
Strangely, or maybe appropriately, it is through the topsy-turvy, distorted world of scary monsters and super creeps that Poor Things provides audiences with hope. Bella’s brave exploration of herself and the wider world proves that it is possible to write progressive characters who challenge convention and society.