Poor Things, but nice things also

Behold! I have had a thought.

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A column

I was going to write about something else entirely this week but then the Guardian commissioned a number of people to talk about Poor Things and it annoyed me. They went to a lot of people! And not to me! All for the mere crime of “not being a film critic”, “not working for the Guardian as a staff journalist” and “not having expressed any thoughts on Poor Things on the public internet”! Honestly, whatever next.

I read all the short pieces everyone wrote and I agreed with some of them and really disagreed with others but, mostly, I thought that they were all quite frustrating because they danced around the issue but never made the point I was hoping they would. 

That’s usually the goal of cultural criticism, isn’t it? To read something and think “hah! This is what my brain had been trying to get at but they phrased it better!”. No-one quite got there this time. I guess it means I have to write it myself. Boo, hiss, and so on. My other idea can wait.

I went to see Poor Things at the cinema and I thought it was terrific, because it played with a question I’ve also been toying with for a long time: what if sex didn’t really matter? It’s one of my obsessions. When the New Statesman gave me a column, it’s the first thing I wrote about. 

I went to read the pitch I sent at the time, and, in it, I discussed “my personal thesis which is that feminism has just been sex obsessed one way or another for a very long time, and perhaps the best way forward is to work towards a feminism that considers sex to just be a neutral part of life. We're a long way off that right now, of course, but I do worry that the current fight between sex positive feminists and reactionary feminists means that we're yet again treating sex as The Most Important Thing In The World, which helps no-one - least of all women.”

My first thought here is that I could do with using more punctuation in my pitches. My second is that Poor Things successfully took this idea to at least half of a logical conclusion. Bella Baxter is a feral child in the body of an adult woman. She was brought up in a vacuum and doesn’t understand social conventions, because she has never been introduced to them. She enjoys having sex because it is an act that makes her body feel good.

In that New Statesman column, I called for “a feminism that is neither glib nor glum, that is realistic yet hopeful. What is this ideal world we are trying to build? One in which sex is largely irrelevant. We eat and we drink and we fuck; it does not need to be anyone’s business”. That is the world Bella Baxter inhabits. Crucially, it is the world she keeps inhabiting, even as the real world repeatedly attempts to reshape her.

Some reviewers have, as a result, called the movie masturbatory, and a frustrating slave to the male gaze. I found them dispiriting because they assumed that no woman, in any context, could ever develop such an untainted taste for physical pleasure. Only a man could ever conceive of unquenchable, joyful female lust. Is that really true? What a sad world we live in, if that is the case. What a sad indictment of our hopes for society, and for the generations of women coming after us. 

We, real living women, are and probably always will be crushed by the patriarchal structures that surround us. Our sexual lives are never entirely our own, and there is no level of agency we can have that will free us entirely from them. It’s a man’s world; we just happen to be fucking in it.

Bella Baxter escapes from confinement, about half an hour into the movie, and she enters this world we know all too well. A handsome cad takes her away and thinks he has hit the jackpot. There is a woman in his bed who will never tire of his urges. What breaks him in the end is realising that her own needs will always take precedence, and she is using him just as he is using her.

Perhaps more poignantly, he eventually realises that she enjoys sex but doesn’t care much about it. He cannot truly defile her, something he clearly was yearning to do from the moment he met her, because she doesn’t see any of it as shameful, or even important. There is a friction there - no pun intended - between an inherently patriarchal male lust, which is tainted by a desire to disgrace and subjugate, and a female lust borne solely out of physical need. He comes, again and again, but cannot reach true completion, because there is nothing he can take from Bella. In the end, he loses his mind, and she walks away whistling.

It is a fantasy, but I find it hard to buy that it was one made by men, solely for men. Yorgos Lanthimos is undoubtedly a man but few things strike me as more feminine than a longing to remain unscathed when life dictates that you must get hurt. Similarly, I would find it hard to look at this tension and conclude that men are, in this context, on the winning side. 

One half of the parties described here chooses not to assign any overwhelming weight to sexual experiences; the other is still bound by societal teachings and expectations. Only one of them emerges victorious. If there is a villain to be found in Poor Things, it is the way men, who did not grow up in a mansion hidden away from the world, were taught to live their lives.

Does this mean I would describe the film as a feminist one? It’s not a particularly interesting question, but it is the one that has dominated the debate online and in the press, so it is worth giving it some consideration. I want my answer to be “who cares?”, or maybe “does it have to be?”, but that’s probably not very satisfying. Instead, I may have to settle on “ish”.

Poor Things is a feminist movie because it asks us to consider what a woman would be like if she were freed from the shackles of a world ruled by men. It shows us Bella Baxter being delighted by the world and other people, herself and her body. It tells us that there is untold joy to be found in a place where women are allowed and able to be entirely themselves. It makes fun of poxy, stupid men assuming that women solely exist for their satisfaction.

At the same time, Poor Things wants us to believe that choosing to be free of shame means choosing to be free of harm, and consequences, and that is more of a stretch. Is it true that Bella, having never inherited any gendered and societal taboos, can go on to have uncomfortable, occasionally violent sex, sometimes for for money, without being hurt by it? I’ll be honest: I have no idea. I have inherited gendered and societal taboos. I don’t think I can answer that question. 

If I were to pick one side of the argument, I would say that non-sexual physical harms don’t always act as a deterrent, and are rarely traumatising. I do several sports which cause me to spend my life more or less covered in bruises, rope burns and calluses. I love those sports. I don’t mind that they hurt me sometimes. Were sex to be considered a truly neutral act, would some level of sexual violence be found to be more tolerable?

If I were to pick the other side, I would raise an eyebrow and ask: hey, wouldn’t that be convenient to men, if women could magically get over sexual assault and get on with their lives? Wouldn’t that assuage the guilt of a hell of a lot of men out there? Wouldn’t that be nice for them?

And that is where my “ish” comes from. I can see both sides. I think they both make sense, and so I can’t really come to any form of satisfying conclusion. Is Poor Things a feminist film? Maybe. Honestly, who knows. What matters more, in my opinion, is that it dredges up a lot of questions worth pondering, especially as a lot of them can’t be definitely answered. 

Bella Baxter is a tremendous character because there is, by definition, no-one like her, and I want to believe in her happy ending. She took on the world and she won, because she had not been moulded by it. It’s a comforting thought. Sometimes we all need a fairytale, even if we know we’ll never live in one.

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