Poor Things
Entry updated 12 May 2025. Tagged: Film.
Film (2023). Element Pictures, Film4, Fruit Tree, Searchlight Picture. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Written by Tony McNamara, based on the novel Poor Things (1992) by Alasdair Gray, itself very loosely based on Frankenstein; Or, the New Prometheus (1818 3vols) by Mary Shelley. Cast includes Willem Dafoe, Vicki Pepperdine, Mark Ruffalo, Emma Stone and Ramy Youssef. 141 minutes. Black and white/colour.
In his flamboyant Billion Year Spree (1973), Brian Aldiss argues that the history of science fiction begins with Mary Shelley. It is not necessary to surrender wholly to this enjoyably forensic simplification in order to grant that Frankenstein; Or, the New Prometheus (1818 3vols) constituted a significant response to the early years of the nineteenth century, a geiger counter sensitive to the transgressive turbulence of change of those decades (for more on that period as a cradle of science fiction, see Fantastika; Ruins and Futurity). Central to the tale is of course the manufactured Monster, who is not in fact mentioned in the title, and who is perhaps too new even to be given a name in the text itself; but whose revolutionary threat – for he threatens to become in fact "the new Prometheus", a role the Baron lacks the nous to assay – is conveyed with utter clarity through his mastering the Enlightenment "heights" of human civilization by eavesdropping on Homo sapiens at work and in conversation, and by his eloquent espousal, having swiftly learned how to talk and read, of his democratic claims to be a citizen of the world by virtue of learned merit.
For a United Kingdom just beginning to recover from the not dissimilar threat of Napoleon (whose Waterloo in 1815 may have seemed only a blink ago), Shelley's radical presentation of her Frankenstein Monster as an aspirational meritocrat might well have awoken nightmares beyond Horror-In-Sf, the Gothic SF titillations that it would soon contribute to the still inchoate SF Megatext: but it was soon to be de-tongued. Within a year or so after Frankenstein was released, theatrical melodramas (see Theatre) featuring a mute, grotesque, Golem-like Frankenstein Monster began to appear; it was this half-wit toothless version of the monster, later to be adopted more or less holus bolus in the popular Cinema, that stood in for Shelley's Promethean figure until the end of the twentieth century, with the possible exception of Peggy Webling's drama Frankenstein (1927); Donald E Glut's The Frankenstein Catalog (1984) cites something like 2600 significant references to her novel up to 1982, almost all of them to safely and grotesquely inarticulate creatures, almost none of them threatening to convey what might be thought of as the submerged secret message of sf: that it is not that hard to be human. That any hard-working crittur can do it, a tabula rasa can do it. That we are not that special. The emperor has no clothes. What is far more difficult is to achieve goodness (which is to say necessary disappointment).
At the close of Shelley's novel, the Frankenstein Monster disappears into the Arctic wastes, having seemingly exhausted his substance in causing the death of the pusillanimous Baron who created him; and leaving the stage, ultimately, to Boris Karloff (see Frankenstein; Bride of Frankenstein). It might be speculated that – taking advantage of the fact that Shelley's Slingshot Ending fails in fact to show us any dead body Under the Sea – later authors (see Sequels by Other Hands) might have given us (and sf history) a monster who survives and continues to makes revolutionary claims for natural justice; but none seem to have been composed. As a Thought Experiment it might be possible to imagine a version of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) featuring a transgressive, hugely articulate Captain Nemo who – still igneous with rage at a world that refuses him justice – surfaces like some monster from the depths to beard the imperium. But the misprision of Frankenstein as an essentially harmless shocker (and the negative impact of that misprision on the failure to recognize Fantastika as a forum as well as a cluster of modes of entertainment) were not of course so resolved. One relatively inconsequential tale, the very late Steampunkish Frankenstein: The Illuminatus Complex (2012 chap) by James Murray, may be the closest the genre has come to literally instantiating this imaginary.
If it is plausible to think that hints of a contrarian understanding of Frankenstein have ghosted the public monster over the past century or so, that understanding clearly surfaces in Alasdair Gray's Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer (1992), which is a reincarnation of Frankenstein rather than a sequel as such, and in Yorgos Lanthimos's delirious film rendering of Gray's harsh Glaswegian tale (for more detail see Alasdair Gray). Both are set many decades later, around 1890. Neither manifestly blows the gaff; Gray brusquely lists Shelley as simply an influence among others, including Poe (see above), and the film itself never in fact explicitly cites either Shelley or her novel: the connection perhaps being too obvious to point out. But what is clear is that their absorbing interest in Frankenstein; Or, the New Prometheus, which both book and film exudate through every pore, lies in the transgressive message of the novel, not in the sensationalist depiction of a made monster.
At the same time, in both novel and film linking cues provide a sense of familiarity; though Gray is stiff-necked about any community of influence, Lanthimos seems easy about laying in associations (including some Easter Eggs that may be almost imperceptible). Dr Godwin Baxter (Dafoe), a hugely more sympathetic Mad-Scientist figure than the Baron whose creation of a new human he effectively repeats, has all the same himself been horribly stitched together and experimented upon by his (unseen) father; in Lanthimos's hands the deformed, scarred doctor almost comically resembles the theatre/film monster whose apotheosis – Boris Karloff (1887-1969) in Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), both directed by James Whale – is here both humanized and made plausible through storyline and mise en scene indications that Poor Things is set in a kind of Alternate History, a roseate Steampunk late nineteenth century whose central Power Source, horses excepted, seems to be electricity.
The brand-new human being Godwin has made seems, in this disjunctive but enabling context, anything but "monstrous"; his surgical creation of Bella Baxter (Stone), by transplanting into the decorticated body of a woman who had just committed suicide the brain of her about-to-be--born daughter, is mainly horrific in words. At the same time, ostensibly terrifying echoes of The Bride of Frankenstein, where the monster created is of course female, surface through a shot-by-shot channelling of the sequence where the fused brain and body of the bride-to-be are galvanized into conjoined life, with Elsa Lanchester (1902-1986) literally electrified by lightning bolts into a pharaonic Art Deco version of She: prefiguring Bella's effect on sexually insecure males (which is to say all males in Poor Things except Godwin himself, whom his father has effectively eunuched). Godwin is of course named after Mary Shelley's actual father, William Godwin (1756-1836); Bella grows up calling him God, a loving nickname: Godwin shares nothing of the original Baron's pusillanimous horror at the being he has (ethically speaking) fathered.
These jokes and implications, which are perhaps optional, do not distract from the unpacking of the central thread of story, which is a Bildungsroman, an epic of the education (see Education in SF) and coming-of age of a romantically intense young being, a forked stick, a tabula rasa. Poor Things is most notable – perhaps it is more accurate to say, has been most noted – for its depiction of Bella's sexual education (see Sex), a subject-matter and narrative essentially eschewed by Shelley, who (prudently in 1818) does not draw directly upon her own precocious sexual adulthood. Bella's first stumbling steps as she learns how to guide her body (a process she shares with Lanchester's version), and the intimate exploration of her physical nature, which she undertakes with all the dawning pleasure of a tabula rasa finding the Garden of Eden, is accompanied by considerable (though tempered) nudity. Emma Stone's accomplished rendering of nakedness as both casual and entirely her own business seems – in the highly loaded field of discourse of 2023 – successfully to represent a comically heightened but in fact entirely "natural" phase in her self-education, totally lacking in Taboo or shibboleth. The male gaze, much in evidence here, seems obedient. Fucking with Bella – what she calls "furious jumping" – is at her beck. Against Bella's intense radiance of being – she seems at times to simultaneously resemble Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) and Ozma of Oz (see L Frank Baum) – the men who appear in Poor Things seem to fit the title more than the film's actual protagonists. A Martian viewing Poor Things might ask why males were not simply terminated after intercourse, to put them out of their misery.
But Bella's sexual hegira, though it governs the storyline, has been plunged into as part of as part of a larger education in learning how to be human. As noted above, the fact that civilization can be learned is the transgressive heart of both Shelley's novel and Poor Things. Like the actual Frankenstein Monster, the fledgling Bella acquires at great speed a civilized idiolect and lexicon (see Linguistics), in her case initially from God her mentor/creator, and then, also at speed, from her lovers and associates, who are often intermingled, and soon masters a language capable of analyzing the troubled nature of Western civilization from (as it were) within: "We" (a disinterested colleague tells her) "are a fucked species." Her journey towards understanding that he may be right, along with an increasing grasp of the dysfunctional nature of sex in the male of the species, brings her eventually back to God's garden, wiser ("I am a flawed, experimenting person") but not less joyful, as the film ends in a comedy ménage.
The long trip to that ending is intensified through some remarkable experiments in commercial cinematography. Poor Things was shot almost entirely on sound stages, giving Lanthimos and his cinematographer Robbie Ryan unusual visual control of exteriors in particular – beginning in a penumbral Gaslight-Romance North London – which are shot through fish-eye lenses, so that the world appears as curvilinear as a labyrinth, an entirely natural mappemonde for Bella to trace. The action begins in black and white, not settling (mostly) to colour until Bella has experienced her first orgasm; this shifting from one stock to another, along with a visibly theatrical mounting of most shots, conveys a sense of a narrative rhetoric intrinsic (for instance) to Baroque opera, where action-packed black-and-white recitatives are punctuated by emotion-drenched colour arias. The world successively revealed – as we follow Bella's learning curve from London to a magical ship in the Mediterranean, to Alexandria and climactically to Paris, and finally back to London – is Steampunk minus industrial fuming. The gracioso compliance of the populous Cities on view (with Balloon buses much in evidence, see Transportation) seems directly to reflect the late nineteenth-century visions of urban paradise created by Albert Robida, a world bathed in electricity like aether, with engorged crannies occupied by figures out of Gustav Klimt (but also Salvador Dalí), a École-des-Beaux-Arts world suffused with Arabian Nights.
The sense of intoxicated distanciation conveyed through all this filmcraft does encourage an occasional sense that Bella has been conceived more as the chatelaine of a pantomime récit (with bracing sex) than the revolutionary Feminist Gray's novel clearly presents. It is of course true that Poor Things is a kind of joke, but the Bella incarnated by Emma Stone burns through the embracive film-chef legerdemain of its making (Stone won several awards, including an Oscar, for her performance), and she tells us a different joke. She tells us she is Captain Nemo. [JC]
links
previous versions of this entry