How Immature is Poor Things?

I saw a movie for perverts and I liked it.

Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

Poor Things is a 2023 movie directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, who also directed The Favourite, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Lobster, and (my personal exposure to him), Dogtooth.

So that alone might give you a sense of what kind of vibe this movie has.

Poor Things is the story of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a recently dead woman who was reanimated by a mad scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Godwin’s house is mostly populated by his own creations – pug-chickens, dog-geese, and other ridiculous hybrids – but his most ambitious work is Bella herself. However, Bella does not have the brain she was born with – Godwin reanimated her by using the brain of the fetus she was pregnant with at the time of her death. Because of this, Bella has the body of a young woman, but the coordination and understanding of… well, a baby. 

Because of this, the movie is largely concerned with the process of watching Bella grow up. Godwin loves Bella as a daughter and is concerned about her being exposed to the world, and largely keeps her hidden away – under the less-emotional excuse that she is “an experiment” and has to be controlled. But the reality is, Bella isn’t an experiment. She’s a person. Godwin’s initial attempts to clip her wings (keeping her inside, marrying her off to an assistant) fail, and finally makes his peace with the fact that Bella does have a right to go into the world and learn about it – with mixed results. Instead of marrying assistant surgeon Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) right away, Bella decides to go on an adventure with cad lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo).

Bella is not bound by the same inhibitions as other people. She has no inherited ideas about what is good or fair or right – she just takes things at face value. She doesn’t understand etiquette or social graces. In one particularly hilarious scene, when told that polite ladies say things like “Marvelous” and “How delightful,” she employs these in conversation with a woman whose father is dying. The implications are clear – in a world where women are expected to be reserved, distant, vapid, and pleasant, Bella doesn’t know how to perform womanhood to the standards of the day. More to the point, she generally doesn’t care. Bella cares about what she can see, feel, and touch – “evidence based,” she says, echoing her father. And a lot of the dumb things people around her care about just aren’t evidence-based. 

I experienced this movie as a goofy, frolicsome fairy tale. It’s absolutely hilarious and the comic performances are top-notch. Emma Stone is the best she’s ever been. When she’s not speaking, her facial expressions are naturalistic and believable reactions of a toddler observing the good and the bad of the world around her. When she is speaking, she delivers her toddler-esque lines with perfect fluidity. The rest of the cast is excellent, too – Mark Ruffalo is particularly good in a more comic role than we’ve usually seen him in, and Willam Dafoe is convincingly paternal and kindly even underneath his formidable makeup. 

But then of course, that’s not how everyone experienced this. 

Oh My Gosh There’s So Much Sex in This Movie

An insane amount of this movie’s runtime is Emma Stone getting absolutely railed or having no clothes on. This is not a movie you want to watch with your parents. Fortunately, I saw it in a largely empty theater with a good female friend (not my grandfather, which, while it’s comparatively much less graphic, made Oppenheimer a weird experience). 

Now, here’s something I want to be clear about: I don’t think not liking Poor Things means you inherently don’t have a game spirit towards movies, or are a prude. However, having so much of the movie center on explicit sex is going to create some really varied reactions among people. What exactly does all the sex mean, if anything? Is it immature and male-centric, or is it something else?

On the critical side, we have Angelica Jade Bastién, who writes:

But there’s a corroded spirit to the story, like it’s intermittently possessed by an edgelord who’s unaware most women menstruate, and an early-wave white feminist who believes having sex is the most empowering thing a woman can do… In many ways, the film demonstrates the limits of the modern cis-male auteur’s vision for and about women — particularly their sexual selves. Watching it for any sort of feminist revelation is akin to craving the salty chill of the ocean and the spray of a wave upon your face, and having to settle for resting your ear against a curling seashell, listening to only the echo of what you truly desire…

But Poor Things makes the fatal mistake of thinking the only thing interesting to a liberated woman is herself…That Bella’s quest for self-discovery is obtained primarily through interactions (sexual and otherwise) with men is a tell.

I’ve only reproduced a small part of Bastién’s argument here, and the whole thing is worth reading in full. In short, this is how I read Bastién: Poor Things is not an exploration of liberated female sexuality, but that of a child discovering sex. The way in which she discovers sex is centered on her longing for men – which, in a movie that is directed by men, seems self-serving. And this is a compelling argument to me. Is it weird that, in a story that’s about a woman going from child to human, so much of the story is centered on her discovery of sex with men? 

However, this is just not the way I experienced the movie. First and foremost, I don’t think this is a story about female sexuality. (What movie could possibly capture the length and breadth of that experience?) This is a movie about becoming an adult, and incorporating sexuality into adulthood. Bella starts out by discovering that feelings of sexual pleasure make her happy. She has no idea that this is supposed to be intimate behavior (she hilariously offers to help her cook masturbate – “it takes a minute!”) but learns a lesson that is actually a later-in-life discover for most women –namely, that she has control over her own body and can cause herself to have sexual pleasure. For a time, and during a period that is mentally her childhood and teenage years, this becomes Bella’s driving motivation – feeling good in her own body.

Sex becomes a duet instead of a solo for Bella when she meets Mark Ruffalo’s Wedderburn, who whisks her away and (for a time) entertains Bella with extravagant living and all the sex she could ask for. However, this introduces new complications for Bella. As much as she enjoys sex with Wedderburn, she doesn’t enjoy what Wedderburn feels entitled to as the man having sex with her – that he should have a say in where she goes, what she does, who she talks to, and who she spends time with. This is another part of Bella coming to have an adult relationship with sexuality – it doesn’t mean for her what it means for everyone else. Bella wants sex, but in a world where men feel entitled to more from their sexual partners than simply sexual access, Bella doesn’t always want what sex comes with. She learns that a good sex partner is not just one who makes sex fun, but one who can be counted on to respect a woman as a complete person.

Bella also learns to see sex as one part of life, and not all of it. For other women Bella meets, sex is actually not their sole motivation for life. For someone as immature as Bella, this is at first a shocking revelation when a sweet old woman named Martha explains to Bella that she hasn’t had sex in twenty years. However, while Bella thinks this is horrible, Martha is fine with this – she occupies her time reading and thinking. 

This begins Bella’s turn out from herself towards the world around her. Instead of focusing on what Bella can do for herself, Bella becomes interested in others around her. Bella attempts, badly, to intervene in poverty and suffering around her. She starts to become less interested in what she wants and more interested in the material needs of other people.

In other words, in Poor Things, sex doesn’t just represent freedom. It represents both good selfishness and bad selfishness. In the world in which Bella lives, some of Bella’s selfishness is actually appropriate self-advocacy. It’s good that Bella feels a right to her own pleasure. It’s good Bella resists the efforts to control her and to rob her access to pleasure. 

But sex also represents bad selfishness, and to some extent, immaturity. Bella’s fixation on pleasing herself starts to fade as she grows and becomes more concerned with the world around her and what she can do to improve it. Instead of using her time to have sex for hours a day with her lover, Bella becomes politically involved with local socialist circles, starts to study anatomy, and feels drawn to study medicine like her “father.” And when Bella finally does marry, she doesn’t marry for sex – she marries for companionship. Bella cheerfully describes her relationship with McCandless as “practical,” and yet McCandless also reminds her that he is in love with her and feels passionately towards her. That’s good – they’re going to need both practical smarts and friendship, as well as romantic love, to have a marriage between peers. McCandles is also a good partner for Bella in that he feels no sense of exclusive entitlement to her. Bella brings her female bestie/lover/fellow student Toinette (Suzy Bemba) to live with both her and her husband at the end of the film. While her continuing relationship with Toinette isn’t clear (perhaps they’re still romantically involved, though with Bella you never can tell), the implication is at least clear that Bella values female connections too, and values McCandles’ comfort with this. Toinette isn’t Bella’s sex idiot, as Duncan was. She’s a fellow revolutionary and scholar, and of course Bella would want to maintain a relationship with her. Adult relationships aren’t just about sex and gratification. They’re based on friendship, collaboration, and mutuality. Bella never loses her taste for sex – her primary victory in the film is over her domineering ex-husband who attempts to force her to have a clitorectomy. But Bella also loses her single-minded focus on sex, and by extent, her single-minded focus on herself. 

Sex, Work, Sex Work

This brings me to the other way sex is deployed in the movie – as sex work. When Bella’s first foray into charity lands her and Duncan penniless in Paris, Bella sets out to solve the problem by becoming a sex worker in the brothel of Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter). At this point in the story, Bella’s first encounter with poverty has turned her attention away from herself. She’s not working in the brothel because she can’t get enough sex anymore. Instead, as she didactically explains, her motivations are twofold – she’s curious about sex with men besides Duncan, and the work is easy enough that she’ll still have plenty of time for reading and study.

This is how Bastién saw this sequence:

She delights in becoming a sex worker in Paris, though she only shallowly interacts with another woman employed there. Neither script nor direction illuminates the shape of the patriarchal forces that brought these women here, and given the detail put into the visual components of the world, the lack of material context is glaring.

There is no denying that more depth and attention could have been given to the subject of sex work in this movie. (However, as in the case with Barbie, we should perhaps be careful that movies cannot be about everything specifically because they. are about women). Nonetheless: I simply did not experience this sequence the way Bastien did. For one thing, Bella voices displeasure at the patriarchal powers that order the brothel, as do her fellows. When told to line up for a john to pick a sex worker, Bella (and her friend, Toinette) argue the line up should be the other way around – the sex workers should pick the client, because then the arrangement will be enthusiastic. Madame Swiney shuts this down quickly, and tells Bella later that some men specifically come enjoying the experience that the women do not want to have sex with them. This adds more depth to the theme that will eventually become the prime focus of the third act – that Bella originally died while trying to escape a violent, controlling man, and finally overcomes him once and for all (by drugging him, shooting him, and then turning him into a goat – don’t worry, it makes sense in context). 

It would have been thematically richer, perhaps, if Bella had bought out the brothel at the end and instituted her own “the sex workers are in charge” model instead of simply sending for Toinette to come live with her. But I do think, ultimately, that the sex work in the movie does not simply represent sex. It represents the way Bella thinks about her time. Bella values using her time for discovery, and the brothel allows her to do this in three ways. First, she is using her time at the brothel to learn about the world, men, and power – just as she set out to do. Second, the brothel allows her considerable freedom to devote herself to study. Third, the brothel allows herself to avoid being tied to any one man. Instead of putting up with the whims of Duncan (who literally kidnaps her in one scene, and throws her books into the ocean in another), Bella doesn’t have to put up with a man in any context other than sex. The rest of the day, her time is her own, and not committed to the demands any man would place on her. 

Is this a romanticized view of sex work? Maybe? Perhaps the better question is, what other choice does Bella have? Bella specifically fled her father and betrothed because she resented the extent to which they kept her under lock and key. She fled her first marriage because her husband was a cruel, domineering man who wanted her for few reasons other than baby production. She fled Duncan because he resented her for growing and changing beyond being a sex-obsessed child. When Bella finally does return home, it’s on her own terms, knowing she can provide for herself and knowing that her experiences have made her more evenly matched for her father and intended. 

Ultimately, between sexual discovery and sex work, I think Bella’s story is about a lot more than sex, and the movie is – for all the sex in it – not really about sex. It’s about the way sex functions in the process of maturing, and the way in which this particular woman engages with sex in a world that wants to control her. Could this story have been told apart from the sexual content? Maybe. But it wasn’t, and the way it works in the story is ultimately, I think, more mature and rich than a simple male fantasy about a woman becoming an adult by taking a lot of lovers. It’s a story about self-actualization, learning to care about others, learning to have a mature relationship, and learning to see past the arbitrary and hypocritical limitations that society often places on people. And in that respect, it really does feel like a good fairy tale for our time.