Despite recent claims that the Academy Awards excluded women from coveted categories — claims made by none other than #Hillary Barbie — the nominations suggest an unprecedented appreciation of films made by or for women.
Sure, Barbie’s Greta Gerwig is missing from Best Director, but four out of ten Best Picture nominees are female-centric films. The one topping nominations, director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, is a subject of fascination. By nominating Poor Things for 11 awards, the Academy has implicitly endorsed the vision of womanhood in a film true to Mary Shelley’s source material. In grafting the Sexual Revolution onto Victorian England, Poor Things, like Frankenstein, creates a frightening amalgam.
If the film industry offers a glimpse into our culture, then Poor Things indicates that we’ve ridden this wave of feminism to its peak.
Though the characters are hedonistic, the film itself is secretly prudish. If Poor Things wins big at the March awards show, then the Academy will, perhaps unwittingly, embrace a return to traditional values. (READ MORE from Shelby Kearns: Let Kids Drop Out: Why Compulsory Education Harms Even the Most Gifted Students)
On its surface, Poor Things celebrates women’s sexual freedom through its heroine, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone).
Bella is the creation of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), or “God,” and the pair reside in a futuristic Victorian England. She has an infant’s brain in a woman’s body, so Godwin charts her progress as her motor skills and cognition rapidly shift from child to woman. To control the experiment’s variables, Godwin gives Bella a cloistered existence in his home and lab, making her a blank slate unshaped by social convention. Before Bella is even mature enough to consent to marriage, Godwin promises her to his sensitive apprentice Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) — one of her few contacts with the outside world.
The marriage plans are thwarted by Godwin’s lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a dandy who takes after Shelley’s friend, Lord Byron. With prurient intentions, Wedderburn invites Bella on his travels, and she eagerly accepts to see what life is like outside the Godwin home.
As Wedderburn and Bella traverse colorful, steampunk versions of Lisbon, Alexandria, and Marseille, the result of Godwin’s experiment is revealed. Godwin never poses this question, but the film seems to ask the audience, “What would women be like if they weren’t controlled by men?”
One reading suggests that the uninhibited woman would have sex like a man.
Bella has such an appetite that it even surprises Wedderburn, whose confessions suggest that he doesn’t stay with anyone longer than three months. Wedderburn is so intrigued with Bella that he decides to marry her, but to his chagrin, she takes on additional partners. What follows is a lengthy second act of sex scene after sex scene.
Poor Thing’s supposed celebration of Bella’s sexual freedom has polarized critics. One review in Slate sees “a kinky delight,” while Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién considers the sex scenes part of a male fantasy — albeit one with admirable craft — that gazes upon Bella’s body with no interest in her interior life.
Though the takes in Slate and Vulture diverge, they share an assumption: Poor Things conflates sexual experience and enlightenment. Bastien says as much when she notes the transition from black and white to full color, perhaps a stylistic choice showing that Bella is in the dark until shrugging off sexual restraint.
What the critics miss, however, is a searing indictment of the Sexual Revolution. The look and feel of Poor Things imply that not all Bella’s choices are good, and they’re not all her own. Like other Lanthimos films, Poor Things evokes the uncanny, disgust, and what young people call “cringe” through wide-angle lenses, a dissonant score, and shots exposing the body’s every nook and cranny. In other words, sexual freedom can be ugly.
Those encouraging Bella’s appetite reveal their self-interest, including the brothel owner who temporarily employs Bella and tells her that “[a] woman planting her own course to freedom” is “delightful.” It reminds one, for example, of how late Playboy founder Hugh Hefner supported birth control and abortion, as Louise Perry astutely observed in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. People who support casual sex without consequences often have something to gain, including, in Hefner’s case, a steady supply of girlfriends 60 years his junior. (READ MORE: These Policies Could Help Vulnerable Women Who Are Turning to OnlyFans)
Poor Things, then, is arguably more evocative of Mary Wollstonecraft than Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft, Shelley’s mother, has reentered the feminist imagination thanks to legal scholar Erika Bachiochi’s The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (2021).
Bachiochi argues for a return to the first wave of feminism ushered in by Wollstonecraft with her 1792 treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Wollstonecraft’s feminism, Bachiochi writes, held men and women as equally rational and thus equally dignified. Contrary to the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s and the accompanying ideology of second-wave feminism, the equal rights of men and women didn’t exist so that women could act like the most vicious men. No, Wollstonecraft thought that equal rights enabled men and women to exercise equal virtue, helping both sexes fulfill familial obligations. In prioritizing the family, Wollenstonecraft hoped to forestall fatherlessness, a phenomenon that has risen to epidemic proportions.
With its pro-family undercurrent, Poor Things makes a journey of its own from the third (fourth?) wave of feminism to the first. The film begins as a sex-positive Frankenstein but has an ending that would please Wollstonecraft. Yes, Bella makes unconventional choices, and the final scene shows her lounging on the lawn, clinking martini glasses with Toinette (Suzy Bemba), the friend and lover who she met at the brothel. However, Bella also makes a decision that’s radical in today’s anti-marriage culture: she retreats behind the walls of the Godwin home with her betrothed, Max. To paraphrase a Victorian concept, Bella is the angel with a crooked halo in the house.
For all its raunch, Poor Things is most at ease with Bella’s quiet and relatively chaste domestic life. By the end, Lanthimos has dropped the warping camera lenses and replaced the grating score with a triumphant chorus. At last, Bella’s enlightenment has arrived.
Poor Things’ critical acclaim could mean that the Academy is similarly awakened to the problem with the Sexual Revolution: its false promises undermine marriage and family, the ultimate sources of happiness. If the film industry offers a glimpse into our culture, then Poor Things indicates that we’ve ridden this wave of feminism to its peak, and it’s about to come crashing down.
