Poor Things: How the Lessons on Screen Translate to the Classroom

 Poor Things, Emma Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Teaching

Poor things was highly recommended by a friend who is interested in odd, offbeat ways of depicting the human condition – and if there is a little bit of the macabre mixed in, he is all about that.  So, I was braced as we entered the theater to watch it, especially as the trailers were generally for horror films and films that were more focused on violence than I am generally comfortable with.

When the film began, we entered a world that was both familiar and strange.  It was Englandish, and located somewhere in the post-industrial revolution/ pre-automobile age but with enough odd colors and weird vehicles to let us know that what we were seeing was surreal.  We watched a woman plummet off a bridge – it was a suicide, surely, but so beautiful and serene that it was hard to imagine the violence that must follow the fall.

If we were buffered from the visceral in the opening scene, we were not in the second, where a gruesome surgery – or perhaps post mortem – was being conducted in an old timey operating theater with groaty students watching on and commenting negatively on the surgeon’s work – a surgeon who had clearly survived multiple injuries of some sort to his face, leaving him scarred.  The one student who regarded the surgeon with reverence was invited to join the surgeon in part of his work that was taking place in his home.

One of the advantages of setting this piece, which could have been set in any century, in the late 19^th, was that there is a clear caste system in place – and there are servants in the home, observing what is going on and normalizing the odd and bizarre things that are occurring.  Another helpful thing was to watch this film a second time – that friend I referred to above is reluctantly teaching a class on Freud with me and we assigned it in the class.

As is often the case, when I have assigned something in class that we have already seen, I ask the reluctant wife to watch it the second time with me.  This time, when I asked, she was willing.  But her experience was very different than mine.  She saw the film much as she had the first time.  I did not.  I cry at Coke commercials – I am sentimental and easily thrown off my game.  She is clear eyed and “objective” about many things.  I saw this the first time with anxiety for all that might befall the naïve girl at the center of the drama.  She saw it like I did the second time both times – that the naïve girl at the center of it all was, from her first moment on screen, self-possessed and capable of handling anything that was thrown her way. 

So, we are introduced to a physically awkward girl (who is in the body of the beautiful woman who jumped from the bridge; this version of her is Bella Baxter played by Emma Stone) who is the surgeon’s ward.  She has little language, spasmodic body movements and she engages in apparently uncontrollable fits of rage when she doesn't get her way; breaking plates with no interference from the surgeon, whom she calls God (Short for Godfrey  Baxter, played by Willem Dafoe).

The surgeon also has a home operating room where we are exposed to the blood and gore of the operating theater again – and to our heroine’s apparent comfort in being in this space and observing and childishly imitating some of the surgical procedures, mangling corpses in the process of doing that.  The student who has followed the surgeon into this space (Max McCandless, played by Ramy Youssef) is assigned the task of observing and recording the girl’s (child’s? woman’s?) progress in such things as learning language.

The student, like the audience, is curious about the state of affairs that brings the girl to be in the state that she is in.  The surgeon/professor has no interest in bringing him up to date – merely assuring the student that his observations are part of doing cutting edge research and moving science forward – just as the surgeon’s father did before him.

It becomes clearer that the girl is some kind of monster that the surgeon has locked into his home, much like the various animals that he has stitched together – a chicken with a pig’s head, for instance.  He is preventing this girl from seeing and interacting with the world.  When she becomes completely unhinged in her efforts to know more, he sedates her and, as the assistant carries her to bed, the assistant sees her naked breast.  We see that this stimulates him – and perhaps it stimulates us, but we recoil at this thought.  The student (and we) can’t be attracted to this monster – to this woman child – that, in itself, would be monstrous.  She is barely sentient.  To desire her would be perverse – it would be somewhere between pedophilia and bestiality.  He can’t desire her…

But, of course, he does desire her.  He confesses as much to the surgeon after first checking to see if the surgeon has his eye on her.  The surgeon reassures the student that the surgeon’s father’s experiments, in addition to leaving him with visible scars, left him with a rare kind of impotence that needs extraordinary power to overcome. The surgeon goes on to clarify that while it is physically impossible for him to have sex with his child/creation, the moral impossibility is not the issue.  We live, inside this house, in a post-moral world, then.

At about this time, the girl discovers sexual pleasure -fittingly enough, as it were, with a fruit (could it be an apple?) at the dining room table.  She immediately wants to share her discovery of this pleasure with the house staff, and they are appalled, and then with the student.  The student resists her attempts to pleasure him or be pleasured by him, and asserts his Victorian morals insisting that such behavior could occur only if they were wed.  He has brought his morality into the house.

Not long after this, the student and the surgeon decide that the student should wed the girl.  To move this forward, they hire a dashing but shifty lawyer (Duncan Wedderburn, played by Mark Ruffalo) to draw up the marriage contract.  The lawyer, enticed by the interest of these men, discovers the girl and takes her off to have the adventures that these conspiring men have locked her away from (though God does give his assent).  

Wedderburn's immorality is selfishly oriented – he will do what feels good to him, even though he, as a lawyer, knows the rules that others must abide by and informs them of that, even as he chooses to personally ignore them.  What he finds puzzling about Bella is that she functions without awareness of the rules - she works solely on impulse.  Even when he explains the rules to her - she has no meta concept of rules, so she follows the particular rules - says the words he says she must say, but violates the spirit in which the rules were given, apparently unknowingly.

So, this will be a coming of age film.  And the twist here is that this woman is her own mother.  She is the woman who fell from the bridge – what we didn’t know is that the falling woman was pregnant.  She wasn’t quite dead yet when discovered by the surgeon.  He removed her brain and, in a Frankenstein like manner – or in an homage to the movie Get Out – he took the infant’s brain and implanted it in the mother.  We have moved from a Wes Anderson surrealistic film to the horror genre.

When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, she was pointing out the horrors of the modern world.  We were gaining power over life and death, but we didn’t really know what came along with that power.  In Get Out, Jordan Peele was asking us to think about the ways in which white people have colonized blacks and used them to achieve a certain kind of immortality.

Poor things seems to be asking us to consider what it means to discover ourselves living in a world where we can allow ourselves to become, physically/surgically, whomever we desire, though there are consequences associated with that.  Godfrey, as a result of his father’s experiments, cannot digest food without assistance (in addition to being impotent).  The girl is growing into her adult body at a rate that is highly accelerated over the normal developmental arc, so she is naïve in the ways of people – she is too trusting (we might think of The Invention of Lying where people trust each other because no one realizes they can lie).

The girl’s sexual appetite, unfettered by social inhibition, is tremendous – and her ability to feel the loss associated with a sense of attachment is limited.  She is thus able to sample the fruits of this highly evolved society without having to kowtow to the norms that have led to its construction.  She is, in a word, as free as a modern woman is promised to be – as free as Duncan Wedderburn pretends to be.  She can sample and critique what she experiences without deference, guilt or second thought.

Then she runs into some philosopher’s when Wetterburn has tried to sequester her on a cruise ship.  The philosopher exposes her to the poor – and she feels guilt at her privilege.  When Wedderburn wins big at the roulette tables, she hands the riches to the cabin boy to take them to the poor – and we know that they will never get there.  She and Wedderburn somehow make it to Paris after they are thrown off the boat for being unable to pay there way – she becomes a prostitute – which breaks Wedderburn’s heart because he has, against his better angels, fallen in love with her.  She learns a great deal as a prostitute, and earns some money to boot.  She returns to England to marry Max – the surgeon’s assistant – after she learns that God is dying.  Max has apparently been on his own journey and he is now ready to acknowledge that she is her own person.  Bella makes a brief detour at the altar to see for herself what mother’s relationship with her father was like (in my first viewing, I was confused by this, not understanding that she was exploring, not being highjacked).  She discovers that it was awful enough to make her mother want to commit suicide, serves her father his just deserts and begins studying to become a surgeon, just like God.

Throughout the movie, Bella is discovering things for herself and using her own language to describe those things.  Sex becomes “furious jumping” in her lexicon because she has discovered it and described it rather than having learned about the concept from someone else with all of the freight that goes with that.  So, while on the first pass I thought this film was about the freedom to surgically define ourselves, it seems to be a thought experiment that is as old as John Locke and one that Freud tried his hand at: what would the primitive, the unschooled, make of the world if they were not confined by morality?  More importantly, how would they act in the world?

Freud’s vision, in Civilization and Its Discontents, is that civilization – the moral strictures of society – impinge on us and create a malaise (another translation of discontent).  We are first and foremost sexual and aggressive creatures, and we have to inhibit these drives in order to live with each other – creating an essential unhappiness.  Poor Things explores this question in novel ways.  It seems to be asking, “What if we could keep the joie de vivre that the infant and young child has – our delight with the world – and express it as an adult?  What would it look like to engage the world with childlike wonder through an adult’s eyes?”

Of course, this movie is asking another question as well.  What if the individual who is gifted with this is a woman and not a man?  And, further, what if this woman is more like the Reluctant Wife than like the Reluctant Psychoanalyst?  If we have a clear eyed, self-confident girl growing up at lightning speed to become a self-possessed woman, what would that world look like?  The world that she inhabits at the end of this film is an Edenic garden, filled with monstrous creatures who seem quite content – even including her father who has quite literally been put out to pasture.  This Eden is not the closed space her father envisioned for her, but a launching pad, so that she can become a physician and learn to engage in the healing arts.

This movie raises all kinds of other intriguing questions – but one that my reluctant co-teacher and I were quite satisfied by was that a group of undergraduate students, having spent a semester reading Freud, could wrestle with those questions and address them in pertinent fashion in an hour and a half conversation.  Some of them were still uncomfortable with the premises presented and felt a bit squeamish about what was being presented – but they could see the virtues of the questions being asked, which felt like a giant leap forward from where they were at the beginning of the semester.  Those who had been more adventurous from the get go used Freud to expand on the film – but also used the film to interrogate Freud.

So one of the central questions being asked, both in the film and in the class, is about the centrality of the role of sex – or furiously jumping – in the life of the individual.  We remembered a scene near the end of the film, when Bella is in the home of her biological father who thinks of her, because of her body, as being his wife, and he, frustrated with her recalcitrance towards him, is clarifying that he will have a surgeon perform a clitorectomy on her.  She considers this threat as if it were a proposal, and she acknowledges that her sexual desire, which she equates with curiosity, is somewhat of a burden to her, but then she decides that, on balance, it is better to be drawn into the world than to shrink from it.  This seemed like a good note on which to end the class.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.