Filed under: feminism, movies | Tags: Bechdel test, feminism, Feminist, movie, Poor Things, sexism, The Commune podcast
Despite my appreciation for Yorgos Lanthimos’ earlier work, I was not planning on seeing Poor Things. A lot of my feminist friends were not fans and I figured I could skip it. But then I learned that Kathryn Hunter was in it, playing a madam, and I got curious. (I worked with Kathryn on a show in London a while ago so she’s very dear to me.) So I watched it.
Apparently there was a whole conversation around whether or not this was a feminist film. (Answer: not.) But it is, as my friend said, some men’s idea of a feminist film. Which is really not the same. This is not to say that men can’t make feminist films. If Lanthimos made a bio pic of Gloria Steinem, maybe that would be a feminist film. (Though maybe not if he chose to focus exclusively on her relationships with men or only her Playboy bunny stunt but otherwise it would be hard to NOT make a feminist film about Steinem.) But while this film may pass the Bechdel test on a technicality (I think the conversation between Emma Stone and Kathryn Hunter was longer than thirty seconds and not about A man – it was about how to service men so… ) I’m not sure I’d give it the point. A film in which a woman is largely on her own in the world of men does not scratch any feminist itch of mine. Women working toward equality and the benefit of other women is the main criteria for that as far as I’m concerned.
The premise of this film is that a woman has had her brain replaced with her baby’s brain – so she becomes a child in a woman’s body. Subsequently, despite still being unable to walk in an organized manner, she discovers her sexual body and ends up going on a sex tour of Europe.
And I don’t want to seem like a prude here – she does seem to be having a good time and it’s nice that she doesn’t have a lot of sexual hang-ups – but it really is kind of a horrifying story when I think about it at all. The men in this story are all crazy for this child in a woman’s body. And this is how things work for a lot of pedophiles, isn’t it? Girls may look like women long before they have women’s brains. I had a woman’s body at fourteen but I was still a child then. A lot of teenage girls find themselves in that situation.
While it may seem like this character is an enthusiastic participant in her sexual life, can she really be, with the brain of a child? And all the men in the movie want to have sex with this child? I don’t know, man. That’s not my idea of feminism. I wasn’t so worried about this issue while I was watching the movie. I know Emma Stone is an adult and that she’s just doing some acting. (And won an Oscar for it, too. Congratulations.) While the film was happening, I was mostly concerned with the bizarro way her human development happened. She walks like a toddler but can write a letter? What kind of child develops fine motor skills before mastering walking? What kind of child gets into reading and studying philosophy before she can coordinate her body? And what kind of child goes from not being potty trained to frantic sexual interest?
I was so distracted by the incredible costumes and scenic design that I didn’t really feel the horrors of what this film was suggesting at the time, which now feels like, “You can have sex with a child if she’s in a woman’s body.” I don’t think we should be encouraging this idea. It’s bad enough out there for girls.
Apparently, the book upon which this film is based is clearly from the point of view of the young doctor, married to the child-brained woman. Then, at the end, the woman chimes in to say it’s all bunk and it’s just her husband’s fantasy after her brain injury. That character has also explicitly begun to work for women’s suffrage in the book. I tell you what, if there’s one thing that could have helped this film become even a little bit feminist, it would be to have the character actually work for women’s suffrage.
I suspect that those who are advocating for this film’s feminist qualities are part of the Choice Feminism generation. They’re the ones who believe that making sexy art with their naked bodies is a feminist act because they are choosing to do it. They think the pretty Frankenstein figure is feminist because she chooses to have a lot of sex. But can we really say she’s choosing it if she has the mind of a child? Is this really freedom? It makes me think about this community in New Zealand that I listened to a podcast about. In The Commune, what starts as an idyllic hippie enclave becomes a nightmare of child abuse and exploitation, all in the name of freedom. A charismatic leader preaching sexual liberation blurs the boundaries between adulthood and childhood so profoundly that his followers are slow to realize the damage that’s happening. They’re all so busy being free, they miss all the abuse.
The woman in Poor Things is someone who has endured a lot trauma and abuse and then has her brain replaced with a child’s, so all that trauma is erased. This feels like the biggest fantasy of all of them. It is a wish to be with a woman with no hang-ups, with no trauma in her history – a real liberated clean slate! Instead of building or even imagining a society that could support women’s liberation, this movie offers up a fantasy of an individual woman’s obliteration, to be her own clean slate.
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