Poor Things (2023)
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
I’m 35 and I’ve watched a lot of movies. Beginning in 2008, Karina and I would go to the Chicago Film Festival annually. I imagine we saw close to a hundred festival films during our time together before we broke up in 2018. My exit was neither honest nor brave. It was October, during the festival itself, and we had our tickets for a few films. One of which was for Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite. As you’d imagine, with a freshly open lesion of a breakup, she wasn’t especially keen to attend the screening. But I did. My mind wandered and I can’t tell you much about the film because it’s associated with that painful memory.
It’s 2023 and I close out the festival by attending a screening of Lanthimos’ new film, Poor Things. It’s a cloudy, windy, yet unseasonably warm Saturday and out of habit, when I’m depressed and in my head, I made the long walk from Logan Square to Lincoln Park. I took a reprieve at a bar where they remembered me from the day before. It’s crowded and I’m working on the NYT crossword on my phone, sipping on a farmhouse ale, waiting. The sun set sooner and I was early, in line for the film, reflecting on the past. I thought a lot about Karina during the screening. It’d be a shame to be the same person as I was in 2008 or even 2018, and watching this film, about an infantile Frankenstein-esque woman emerging from the watchful eye of her keeper, only to experience the world for all its ebbs and flows, spoke to my experiences in unexpected ways.
I’ve often remarked how I got it all flipped. My 20s were largely insular. I’d spend weekend evenings watching movies at home in our tiny studio apartment. It was stifling and so I acted out, thinking I can find an outlet for all this repressed sexual energy elsewhere. And for a little while, there was excitement. A sense of expanding my limited horizons with people that could show me something new. And more importantly? I didn’t have to be the Daniel Nava that I thought was uninteresting or stagnant. I was me, but also not. These acts of deceit felt liberating, and in that I could throw away my integrity and ethics because for the first time since I was a teenager, I felt something.
Poor Things continues Lanthimos’ fixation with the contradictions and double-standards between the sexes. We first observe Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) as she’s jumping off a bridge. She’s been reanimated by Dr. Goodwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who removes Bella’s brain and supplants it with that of a baby. The initial passages find Bella lallating, with Stone committing to the silliness with unrestrained fervor. The opening chapter is shot in stark black and white, giving a compelling James Whale-esque vibe that extends beyond the obvious Frankenstein reference points. Perhaps it’s Dafoe’s scarred Dr. Baxter (whom Bella refers to as God) that immediately summons the memory of Boris Karloff, but there’s a sweet, reverential quality to these initial passages that had me curious of where Poor Things was going. As Bella slowly emerges from her mind’s infancy and begins to take on the qualities of a teenager (experimenting with her sexuality in blunt terms), she’s confronted with the possibility of courtship. Dr. Baxter advocates for a young, timid physician named Dr. McCandles (Ramy Youssef), to which Bella absent-mindedly agrees to marry. However, she’s offered the possibility of escape from Dr. Baxter’s confinement by lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). He’s a smooth-talking leech that persuades Bella to join him in Lisbon.
It’s 2018 and I’m 30 and I have an apartment all to myself, now with half the furniture. The place resembled a dorm. The last thing Karina wrote me was a list of things I might consider buying now that she’s out of the house. So I splurged for the first time in my life. There was no need for deceit because now I could sleep with anyone, ethically. My reptile brain rationalized that it was okay to explore and open myself up to new experiences, yet I yearned for the consistency that I had for 12 years prior. The contradictions piled up internally and left me more confused, wanting everything; an impossible, positively juvenile desire. They call this boy math now. I found important, loving partnerships that lasted for a couple seasons, but when things got serious, I jettisoned onto the next hookup, relationship, etc. Late nights out, closing bars at 2am, sex on the first date, delving into polyamory, drugs, more alcohol; I was a 30-year old living out my 20-year old fantasies.
Bella’s journey to Lisbon with Duncan is a carnal escapade. The term of choice here is 'jumping on each other,' as Bella discovers the joys of embracing her hedonistic sexuality. She fucks. A lot. And while Duncan’s sexual prowess is of notable calibur, even he can’t keep up with Bella. And so, in between these sexual respites that find Duncan comically snoozing, Bella takes it upon herself to explore the world. Whether it’s indulging in more than a handful of Pastéis de Nata in one sitting or simply refusing to bother with the banalities of polite society, Lanthimos goes for the low-hanging fruit by examining the contrast between the opulent and disenfranchised. It’s funny, but obvious. It’s only when Duncan kidnaps Bella, transitioning from Lisbon to a cruise ship, does Lanthimos expand on the conceit of his ideas and the film really becomes something more profound.
Duncan initially warns Bella of falling in love with him, but it’s Duncan who lusts after Bella’s eccentricities. Boy, is it easy to confuse quirkiness with uniqueness. I speak from well-cataloged experience. Duncan’s kidnapping of Bella is a not-so-veiled attempt to confine and control her, but it’s on this cruise ship that Bella interacts with a cynic named Harry (Jerrod Carmichael). What follows is an incremental understanding of the world around her, a kind of awakening that goes beyond sexual and into the existential. And it only serves to divide Bella and Duncan further, demonstrating the inherent gap between their ambitions and interests.
While I see aspects of myself in Bella, I also share a particular kinship with Duncan’s oafishness. He falls for what’s different yet is too preoccupied with losing Bella rather than merely enjoying the time they have together. The two have strong “but I can change him/her” energy, but it’s Bella who acknowledges that the relationship cannot work and instead follows her own path. Consider Poor Things to be Greta Gerwig’s Barbie for the kink community.
As Poor Things reaches its conclusion, Bella’s history catches up with her; she has failed to escape the inevitably of being reduced to a series of salacious details. It’s 2023, and sometimes (all the time) I feel like a certain Twitter thread serves as the story of my relationships to others; a story of the intersection of my life that’s constantly getting updated and revised without my consent. The partners that I’ve hurt over the last five years have their stories to tell, but these fables stem from the painful gulf of contending with what was and what should have been. Which is to say that the same people that you spend the time talking about the future with, composing acrostic poems at night, being told that they’ll “marry the fuck out of you,” being “all in,” etc., function as… sweet nothings. Pieces of yourself left to the ephemera. One of life’s great lessons is recognizing that anything worth having has its price. I dabbled in life’s uncontrollable passions and saw that passion recede into the past. What Bella gets at the end of Poor Things is the gift of wisdom and self-respect. I think I’m lurching toward that, slowly.