What the hell did I just watch.
That’s the first thing that went through my mind last night after watching “Poor Things,” the Yorgos Lanthimos movie that just won Emma Stone an Oscar for her portrayal of Bella Baxter, a scientifically resurrected Victorian woman on a quest for adventure and sex. Mostly sex. Lots of it.
The second thing that went through my mind was, “Why, Emma, why…”
Given, Stone’s performance was excellent. Definitely deserving of the Oscar. But that’s not the problem. The film itself is the most grotesquely misogynistic thing I’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever. The film is loaded with graphic sex scenes, most of them featuring Stone bouncing off one partner after another and working her way into a breathless, panting orgasm. The first few times it’s shocking, but as it goes on, it gets less and less so, until it borders on insulting. And mind you, I don’t have any issues with graphic sexual scenes, but at some point… it’s like one too many potato chips. You’re done with it and you want to close the bag.
Initially, I wrote “Poor Things” off as a very quirky porn flick, without the cum shots. I mean, there’s something every porn film must have, and that’s cum being shot all over a woman’s face, while she pretends to like it. I’ve yet to meet the woman who does. It’s a male fantasy that women just love that slimy jam in their eyes and up their noses, and honestly, unless we’re trying to make a baby, cum is just something we have to mop up, and then sleep on the wet spot it leaves behind. (Men never sleep on the wet spot.) We’re not in it for the cum, guys. Get over yourselves, and your pearl jam too.
Since Bella never had to blink any cum out of her eyes, and no penises or vulvas made close-up cameo appearances, you can’t really call this a porn movie. Maybe a porn movie edited down to an R rating for Netflix sensibilities, but not truly porn in its current form.
It took me nearly a whole day to clarify what my negative, angry feelings about this movie were all about, and slowly, as if coming into focus on an old school SLR camera, with a lens that you have to turn to make the image clear, it came to me: Poor things is nothing more than beautifully costumed misogyny. The blatant disdain for women runs between every single line, in this story, written by a man, and directed by a man. No coincidence then that Bella Baxter is The Perfect Woman: A beautiful, thin, young nymphomaniac with no inhibitions, and best of all — a baby’s brain. Literally. The mad scientist she calls “God” snatched a woman’s body after she’d thrown herself from a bridge just before she died, as part of his ongoing animal experiments, connecting the head of one animal with the body of another. Dog with duck head, and vice versa, in a reheated mashup of “Island of Dr. Moreau” meets “Looking For Mr. Goodbar.”
He “raises” Bella – the baby brain in the woman’s body – but sadly, cannot make use of her as a sex toy because he’s a eunuch. So he finds her a partner, but before they can get married, Bella is seduced by slimeball Duncan Wedderburn, with the goal of having his own personal mindless nympho. However, Bella’s unquenchable sex drive and naive nature are his undoing. She ruins him sexually and financially, and he abandons her in Paris, where she discovers men will pay for sex, which she finds to be the perfect arrangement — she gets the sex she craves and money too. Perfect arrangement, right? Well, it doesn’t take too long before all the disgusting pigs who come in to the brothel and bounce on her and boink her from behind over and over and over sorta take all the joy out of being a baby-brained nympho.
Alas, however, in all of Paris, the only financial path for her is prostitution. Gee, we’ve never heard this storyline before, right? Ripped right from reality, too. Prostitution and sex trafficking still today is what some women must do to survive. It’s great fun and entertainment for the customers… not so much for the women who are cornered into it. All that said… what a sad, tired, worn out storyline. But, we’re all just virgins or whores anyway, right? So, in male-dominated Hollywood, who cares? You know, the same Hollywood that denied director Greta Gerwig and actress Margo Robbie Oscar nominations for the blockbuster film, “Barbie, which specifically spotlighting a patriarchal society! Even though Ryan Gossling, who played Ken, got a nomination! Oh, the irony. Or, maybe that’s just some real-life misogyny playing itself out in real time.
When Bella hears news that “God” is dying, apparently she’s made enough cash spreading her legs to get right back home, quite well-dressed too, and her original suitor still wants to marry her. What a guy. However, just before they can say I do, Duncan Wedderburn slides into the room with the husband of the woman whose body Bella now inhabits, and he demands his “property” back. Even though Bella can’t recognize him because she has a baby’s brain that never saw him before, she limply goes along with it when it the trappings of wealth factor in. Because all women will overlook anything to get money, right? Besides being virgins or whores, we’re also shameless gold-diggers. We all spread our legs for a financial payoff, right? Whether it’s serial customers or one “master”?
Just this much is enough to make me vomit.
But wait. There’s more.
In order to keep his wife’s notorious sexual appetite under control, the husband arranges to have Bella drugged with chloroform to be poured into a cocktail and while she is out, a surgeon will perform a clitoridectomy on her to “solve the problem.” He even shows him the nifty little device that will snip that pesky little bud right off, labia too, sew her up, and make her a nice, neat little baby factory for her husband. Before you gasp at the preposterousness of this idea, bear in mind that this procedure was done on women in the Victorian era to stop them from masturbating and decrease their interest in sex. And I’m sure it worked. Nothing kills the hornies like having your clitoris sliced off. How convenient to set this story in an era when this practice didn’t raise eyebrows. And here you thought it was for the beautiful Victorian costumes.
Bella catches wind of this plot and turns the tables, throws the cocktail in her husband’s face, grabs his gun, and exacts her revenge on him in a way in which “God” would approve. This single plot point, along with Bella’s alleged “sexual freedom” has some people (mostly men) trying to paint this pig as a feminist movie. It is not. It is still a pig. And its name is “misogyny.”
To put an even finer point on this, we’re living in a time when women are losing their right to control our own bodies. Beyond the whole outrage of pregnancies from rape or incest, our normal, natural sexuality is threatened, and curtailed, with the prospect of having an unplanned pregnancy that we cannot terminate. The state of Alabama recently declared fertilized eggs to be equivalent to a baby. How long do you suppose it will be before birth control is illegal, to protect all those babies that would have been conceived? To stop all the pre-abortions? You scoff now. Just wait. Meanwhile, the fathers of those unplanned children are completely off the hook, and free to plow the land elsewhere.
Ever so slowly, we are pivoting back to a time when women will have no rights or purpose other than to bear children, to serve as nothing more than fetal incubators, or, as Margaret Atwood so aptly wrote in her novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” nothing more than “two-legged wombs.” But for now, as long as we can still be baby-brained nymphomaniacs — “two-legged pussies” — it’s all good.
Right?
They should make a movie about that.
Oh wait.
They just did.