Poor Things (2023) and the Proto-Woman

I have adventured it and found nothing but sugar and violence.

Yorgos had previously used the alien and synthetic to highlight the strangeness of Man's folly, but in his recent collaborations with Tony McNamara (The Favourite and Poor Things), his signature style has morphed to become more expansive, drawing from other contexts to explore the darkness of human nature by other means. 

In The Favourite, Yorgos used the Victorian display of wealth and grandeur as its main device to call attention to the absurdity of polite society. In Poor Things, Yorgos expands upon this idea, this time using the fantastical strangeness and whimsy of its fairytale-like setting to not only comment on restrained society but also on the role women are expected to play.

Bella is the rapid development of a woman in a non-controlling patriarchal context; Base impulse evolves into rapid acquisition of knowledge and world experience through her first-hand encounters of worldly vice, uninhibited by the prevailing male public opinion. In the movie, women are sexual objects and exist only to be controlled or to toe the line. Bella is the liberated woman that has complete agency over every bit of her actionable existence, moulded by exposure to grief, death, sex and blood and not a controlling hand. 

The men in the movie exist to demonstrate the male perspective. Duncan and The General represent the male attitudes of entitlement on different scales, the emasculated individual and his attachment to the system vs. the institutional desire to control. Both respond in drastic means upon losing control over what they think they hold power over (Duncan through sex, General through power). Even Godwin and Max are complicit in the male way of thinking through the very act of Bella's creation, robbing a woman of her choice and agency based on their own ideas of scientific development. The only male in the story who doesn't answer to some hidden agenda is Jerrod Carmichael's Harry, a cynic who has seen the horrors of the world and the one who exposes Bella to them.

The world of Poor Things is twisted and beautiful, grotesque viscera rendered in pleasant yet striking shades, spiteful words sung in dulcet tones. But is that not life? We gasp in wonder and horror and awe over and over til the sun sets and rises and sets again, a beautiful disaster made and engineered by ourselves. 

fantastic fantastic i love you yorgos

Originally posted on Letterboxd on 26th January, 2024