In Poor Things the titles are wraiths of letters, floating, emaciated, fading away, like the beings that preceded and are then drawn out of the corpses under the doctor Godwin Baxter’s knife and training. The letters suggest an ever-fading life and substance, the tension between man’s skeleton through arrogant aspiration back to its reversion into bone. This theme recurs in the film’s intermittent black-and-white evocations of Victoriana which cast the film both in our current times of colour and our stripped past.
The end-credits are too small to read. In context, they are the sign of the maker, the creator, at once stretching the limit of his art but falling short of fully realizing it. We aspire to spirit but lapse back into being things. The skeleton persists. The bone outlasts the spirit, however remade/reborn. Whatever richness of being we intend we revert to poor things. Thus Dr Baxter is both the practitioner and the victim of patriarchal perversion.
Hence to the mutants that derive from Dr Baxter’s craft and genius. Weird animals, like a four-footed goose and a pig-headed chicken, scuttle through the scenes, as if too normal to warrant a close-up. His steam-engine carriage pretends to be drawn by a fake horse-head, as if the industrial revolution were but an inflection of the idea that man stays beast.
Similarly hybrid is the genre-basis of the plot. A female Candide strides through the story of Frankenstein’s bride against the urban landscape of a retrospective futurist Verne (the air balloons, that vehicle, etc).
The innocent afoot is Bella. Baxter created her when he took the body of a maritally oppressed suicide and implanted the brain of rhe baby from her womb. She bears his surname because he made her, in a non-sexual paternity. That's an echo of Mary Shelley's scientist, bent upon -- and bent -- creating life without woman, creating life "by this hand." That phrase echoes through his lab, in masturbatory hubris. We watch the current Bella creature blossom syllable by syllable from impulsive inarticulate into the new, independent feminist. Given physical being by the mad scientist, she on her own discovers and asserts her humanity and rights.
Her “I must go punch that baby” anticipates her turning from instinctual impulsiveness to effective social order.
The doctor’s seamed and resewed face evokes Dr Frankenstein’s monster, whom Shelley imagined ("conceived"?) and Hollywood multiplied. The Victorian context is reaffirmed by the latent William in Dr. Godwin’s name. Like this Baxter, William Godwin was himself apparently not comfortable with conventional heterosexuality, as Kara Hagedorn has demonstrated.
The legitimate freedom of nonbinary sex is also exemplified by Bella’s lesbian affair. That begins in the brothel that also introduced her to the conflict and exchange of power in human sexuality. Those mutant animals and machines universalize this liberty of the nonbinary.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s new feature is so rich, complex, probing and untrammelled that one reluctantly hazards any reading upon a single viewing. So I’ll wait, this current venture my wraith, a presence but not fully bodied.
