In December 2023, Yorgos Lanthimos released his critically-acclaimed film, “Poor Things,” starring Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo. The film has recently found a resurgence in cultural discourse after sweeping at the 2024 Oscars this past month, inevitably creating a simultaneous resurgence in its controversy. Viewers have criticised the fact that Stone’s character, a woman whose brain was replaced with that of her own fetus, is subject to sexualization and sexual encounters while still at the cognitive stage of a child. Later on in the film, once reaching a mature level of cognition, she begins working in a brothel. One particular scene was banned from theatres in the UK, in which a father brings in his two young sons to watch him and Bella have sex so they can “learn.” Some go as far to say that due to this, the film is “anti-feminist,” “pedophilic,” and worth boycotting.
The scenes are undeniably uncomfortable to watch. Stone’s character, Bella Baxter, goes from throwing tantrums like a toddler to being pursued sexually by Ruffalo’s character within the span of a couple of minutes. Within the context of the film as a comedy, it feels especially alarming, as if the viewer is supposed to laugh at sexual abuse. But determining the film as insensitive or unwatchable is reductive, and demonstrates a wider trend of cultural consumption that assumes realism as the pinnacle of artistic quality.
But determining the film as insensitive or unwatchable is reductive, and demonstrates a wider trend of cultural consumption that assumes realism as the pinnacle of artistic quality.
“Poor Things” is a surrealist film. Merging Frankenstein with steampunk aesthetics, it constantly reminds the viewer that the reality of Bella Baxter is not our reality. Living with the eccentric scientist, Godwin (Willem Defoe), who “birthed” her, she is raised alongside mutant animals, such as a goat with the head of a duck, or a chicken with the head of a bulldog. Interactions between characters are most often outlandish and unrealistic. No one bats an eye when Godwin burps out bubbles, or when Bella (mentally, a child) aggressively stabs a cadaver’s eyes with scissors while maniacally laughing. The film’s costume design reinforces this not-quite reality. Despite taking place in the 18th century, the fashion of the period is distorted with an unusual modern tint. City landscapes of London, Lisbon, and Paris are redesigned with retro-futurism; Lisbon’s over-saturated horizon includes tram-gondolas that float above the oddly shaped architecture below.
Bella encounters this world in the body of a fully developed woman who has sexual urges, but interacts with it the way a child would. Without the polarizing cultural discourse that surrounds sex in our world, Bella understands it strictly as something she enjoys sensually. Is Lanthimos arguing that sexual interactions with children should be condoned? I highly doubt it. It is just another layer in the surrealist elements of the film that denaturalizes our own reality and conceptions about social interaction. Yet some viewers could not get past this, framing their understanding of the film through our society’s sensibilities and criticizing its amount of sex scenes.
I recently watched ‘Prometheus,’ a 2012 sci-fi space film famously brimmed with engaging symbolism and some laughable plot holes. One scene involves a previously infertile woman giving herself a c-section via automated surgical tools in order to abort an unwanted alien fetus, stapling herself up, and continuing to run around the spaceship with seemingly little discomfort and without informing anyone on her research team of what just happened. I found myself disparaging how unrealistic it was; c-sections are painful and involve serious recovery, for one, and also, I would assume the possibility of bearing an alien baby would be of interest to a team of scientists. But then again, the very premise of the film is not based in our reality. Why do I accept the fantastical elements of the film, such as an alien impregnating an infertile woman, but deride her emotional response? Why do people accept the aesthetic and comical surrealism of Poor Things, but slate the way the film treats sex?
Why do people accept the aesthetic and comical surrealism of Poor Things, but slate the way the film treats sex?
It seems there are aspects to the consumption of art that cannot evade the expectation of realism. Realism as an art form emerged largely in the 19th century, as a reaction to the preceding overarching influence of romanticism. The aim of realism was to depict “objective” reality, whereas romanticism was considered too idealizing. In literature, it meant a move away from collective moral didacticism towards complex depictions of individual character interiority. Not coincidentally, simultaneous to the popularization of realism during this period was the birth of individualism. Following the industrial revolution and the preeminence of capitalism in England, John Stuart Mill argued that a focus on individuality should be considered a form of moral expression; that the betterment of the self would thus better society (i.e. utilitarianism). This, paired along with the rise of the middle-class and the growing possibility of social mobility, resulted in a social milieu that associated one’s individual utility with one’s moral worth. The self-made middle-class man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to rise in society became the new ideal. Realism correlatively became the vessel to depict this ideal.
Interiority is king; when we consume art, we want to see characters undergoing the same optimization of self that we aspire to.
Understanding realism within the framework of individualism and capitalism can help us understand why we love it so much. Self-care, self-made, self-worth – all words floating around our cultural sphere, all related to the optimization of one’s being. We are conditioned to be obsessed with ourselves, with the individual and all of its emotions. Interiority is king; when we consume art, we want to see characters undergoing the same optimization of self that we aspire to. Suspension of disbelief is limited to the aesthetic or inconsequential; sacrificing what we might consider to be innate human nature is incomprehensible. How often do we laud a book, a film, or a piece of visual art for accurately representing the human condition?
We only sympathize with what validates us. We want characters to think and feel as we do. Our attribution of “good” or enjoyable art occurs when characters become individual humans. If we cannot realistically humanize them, we cannot sympathize with them. If we cannot sympathize with them, then we feel nothing. And what is art without feeling?
So as we watch Bella Baxter’s ceaseless sex scenes, it is difficult not to subconsciously beg for a glimpse of her interiority that would mingle well with our fixation of self, as a film usually would. But that is not the point. “Poor Things” does not exist to cater to our cravings for emotional realism, nor should it. Watch it for what it is: art.
