When promoting his film adaptation of the 1992 novel Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos has often shown pride in his decision to centre the narrative around its female protagonist Bella, allegedly converting an epistolary novel told largely through male perspectives into a solely female-driven story, deploying all the magic of cinematic imagery to convey the world of the book as seen solely “through her eyes”. Willingly or not, this claim is an invitation (for some of us at least) to look more closely into the gender politics of Lanthimos’s adaptation, and to do so by committing the film critic’s sin of comparing it to the book. In this case, to compare is to gain particular insight into the filmmaker’s choices, and specifically into what he chose to observe with more transgression (to not say shock value), and what elements he saw fit to nuance, soften, or indeed ignore.
In Lanthimos’ dreary but fantastical steampunk-Victorian London, a medical student named Max McCandless befriends a solitary experimental scientist who appears to be a cross between Frankenstein and his own monster. This man is Godwin Baxter, and he introduces McCandless to a young woman living a secluded life in his home and laboratory, who exhibits intriguingly odd and developmentally inappropriate behaviour. He has named her Bella Baxter, and she is the result of one of his more extravagant experiments: he has resuscitated a dead woman’s body by replacing her brain with that of her unborn child. Ambivalent about the operation itself but clearly infatuated with its result, McCandless comes to successfully propose to Bella. However, in a less fortunate turn of events for him, the still mentally toddler-aged woman discovers the wondrous joys of self-pleasure, and is shortly afterwards persuaded into a “grand adventure” around the world by corrupt lawyer, and general scoundrel, Duncan Wedderburn. While discovering a Victorian world of confining social mores and seemingly transitioning through the developmental stages of childhood, Bella exhibits avid curiosity, effortless rebellion and a manic, open enjoyment of sex.
On the cruise ship on which Wedderburn eventually smuggles her in an effort to better control her fish-out-of-water ways, Bella is introduced to some liberal philosophical ideas by other passengers. In particular, she forms an attachment to another man, who leads her to witness a terrible example of the world’s misery in the city of Alexandria. Back onboard the ship, a deeply traumatised Bella responds to this experience by entrusting all of Wedderburn’s money to a couple of clearly untrustworthy crew members, who dubiously assure her they will hand it over to the poor retches she has seen. Because of this, she and Wedderburn arrive penniless in Paris, where he is driven further to hysteria by her announcement that she has begun prostituting herself. She abandons him to his distress, and this is the beginning of the French bordello phase of Bella’s life. She makes another friend, this time a fellow prostitute named Toinette, who introduces her to socialism.
Back in London, Godwin has fallen terminally ill, and charges McCandless with bringing back Bella before his demise. Upon her return, she reconciles both with her creator and her fiancé, the latter of which assures her he takes no issue with her now tawdry past, as “[her] body is [hers] to give freely”. However, their long-awaited wedding is then interrupted by Wedderburn and General Alfie Blessington, the husband of Victoria Blessington – the woman whose body Bella has inherited. Although this is the very first time she is hearing of her alleged past life and has never met this man before, she allows him, without protest, to bring her back to his stately house as his rightful wife. It is there that she finally discovers awful truths about her past, namely that she must have committed suicide to escape this man, who now plans to have her clitoris removed. After a scuffle, Blessington passes out and Bella is able return home, where she transplants a goat’s brain into her unconscious husband’s body. After Godwin’s peaceful death, Bella carries on his work at the house, surrounded by Max, Toinette, and her fellow living experiments.
Narratively speaking, none of this diverges much from the story presented in the novel – with a few crucial exceptions, a notable one being Godwin Baxter’s initial intentions in creating Bella. Indeed, book-Baxter readily admits to McCandless that his aim was to create a potential “wife” for himself, though he allows for (and in fact, dreads) the possibility that she might never love him back. In response, book-McCandless is horrified not only by the Frankenstein-like project itself, but by Godwin’s desire, and accuses him of carrying out the common but appalling male “dream” of a child’s mind in a woman’s body. But even while he is able to identify and denounce this particular form of misogyny, McCandless is far from immune to it himself, as his account of their first meeting perfectly encapsulates:
‘The woman stood and faced us, stepping unsteadily forward then pausing as if to keep balance. Her tall, beautiful, full-bodied figure seemed between twenty and thirty years, her facial expression looked far, far less. She gazed with the wide-open eyes and mouth which suggest alarm in an adult but in her suggested pure alert delight with an expectation of more. […]
She flung both arms straight out towards me and kept them there.
“Give only one hand to new men, Bell,” said Baxter kindly.
She dropped her left hand to her side without otherwise moving or altering her bright expectant smile. Nobody had looked at me like that before. […] I surprised myself by stepping forward, rising on tiptoe, taking Bell’s fingers in mine and kissing them. She gasped and a moment later slowly withdrew her hand and looked at it, rubbing the fingers gently with her thumb as if testing something my lips had left there.’
This is very much the portrayal of Bella that is captured in the film – but the latter expounds on these childlike mannerisms, both by enlarging the contexts in which they can be demonstrated (for instance, by having Emma Stone simulate an overdrawn masturbatory orgasm with recognisably babyish oohs and aahs), and by extending their chronological duration in the story. Indeed, by the time book-Bella is galivanting around the world with Wedderburn, her letters do reflect that she is still learning to read and write, but her language around sex is anything but naïve. In fact, it is clinical and forthright in ways the Victorian society she had previously been sheltered from is too puritanical to accept. Lanthimos’ adaptation adds an unnecessary childish dimension to this, namely by repeatedly having her refer to sex as ‘furious jumping’. Why would Bella, who has spent her life so far absorbing Baxter’s anatomy books and being more steeped in science than society, fail to recognise, let alone name, the act of copulating (which is, more fittingly to her character, what she calls it in the novel)? And why should we find it sweet or in any way emancipating to see a woman participate in something she does not understand enough to properly name? Where Gray’s novel depicts an exaggerated figure of Enlightenment, wreaking havoc wherever she brings her knowledge and frankness about the human condition, Lanthimos’ Bella remains primarily a child in a woman’s body, and priority is given to scenes and language which make her seem ignorant and innocent.
In defence of the adaptation, one might say (and many people have, in fact, said) that this paedophilic undertone is meant to make the audience uncomfortable, even that it is somehow part of the film’s feminist discourse. And indeed, it cannot be argued against that it is both completely present in the book, and an important part of the original story. But here lies the crucial difference: for being so present in its scenes, it is not an important part of the film’s story. One cannot argue that ‘furious jumping’ is a comment on the male fantasy of a woman with a child’s brain and not simply an expression of said fantasy, when paedophilia and incest have been entirely cut out of the actual narrative. In the novel, Baxter is jealous of McCandless because Bella chooses him as a suitor instead of himself, and both are distraught by her choice to run away with Wedderburn, because the latter has entirely developed a relationship with the girl on his own, without even considering Baxter’s initial claim to her. Moreover, Bella has made the whole tug-of-war between her father and fiancé obsolete by choosing an entirely different man, thus horrifyingly suggesting to them both that she is no longer a child. The whole dynamic is a metaphor for the ghost of incest which looms over the traditional, patriarchal relationship between father and daughter, and most notably between an allegedly protective father and his daughter’s potential suitors.
One result of omitting this from the film is that the character of Godwin Baxter, as eccentric as he remains, becomes someone to which the audience can comfortably relate, a figure of isolated genius who has employed questionable means towards a noble goal, that is to save a woman’s life. Similarly, McCandless is practically turned into a saint, his possessiveness all but inexistant as he tells Bella her body is “hers to give freely”. Book-McCandless’ epistolary account of Bella’s strange but, to him, very appealing childish sexuality is not only simply adopted by the film as a true account of her experience, it becomes the central subject of the story, the essence of Bella’s character. This gives for an even more uncomfortable experience than the novel, all while removing the topic our discomfort is supposed to be about. The metaphor is kept, but it’s wholly absorbed by the victim and her behaviour, while the guilty are transformed into gentle, if misunderstood, patriarchal benefactors.
Since the film ostensibly justifies its shock value by presenting itself as anti-conservative, feminist transgression, the fact that it chooses to soften those who are perpetrators of misogyny in its source material is obviously a problem – especially when this pattern appears in other elements of the film, namely in its treatment of prostitution.
In the novel, Bella believes that she had a past life which she is now unable to remember, and during which she must have given birth to a child (she imagines, a daughter), since this is the only way that she can explain the scar Baxter’s operation has left on her belly. This leads her to, at times, speculate about the whereabouts of this lost child, and how her life might have shaped out. While Bella is employed as a prostitute at the Parisian brothel, she hopes that her imaginary daughter, alone in the world without her mother, did not also ‘end up’ in such a place. And although she does adopt a less conservative view of prostitution than most of her contemporaries, as well as manage to gain some independence through this form of labour, she is also brutally disappointed by her madame’s exploitation of her as a worker, and has to stand firm against a medical inspector’s degrading treatment of her colleagues in the name of public health. But in Lanthimos’ film, Bella adopts a radically unnuanced and emancipatory view of prostitution, summed up in her claim “We are the means of our own production”.
Never mind that the phrase makes no sense, or that if it did, it should logically apply to all workers, at least those who carry out physical labour. Never mind that even then, the problem would remain that they do not profit from their own production, someone else does – a fact that is made plain to book-Bella when her madame steals her earnings, and is in no way made less exploitative by the absence of a hammer, or any other tools external to her own body. The purpose of this phrase is not to be effective as an empowering slogan of progressive feminism, or indeed to make sense at all. It is there to appease the viewer as he contemplates a woman being utterly subjected to men’s desires. If it breaks any barriers, it is those of progressive men’s guilt – and it all comes from Bella herself, the mouthpiece of her own dehumanisation.
All this being said, and despite these narrative differences, Lanthimos is right in stating that the central departure from the novel is the way in which the story is framed. Gray’s story is not only told from multiple perspectives, through letters, book entries and even newspaper clippings. It is also recounted by people who disagree with each other. By the end of the novel, one of these people is an older version of Bella herself, who claims that everything we have learned so far about her strange origins has been pure fantasy. She gives us an alternative account of how she came to be Godwin’s ward, complete with detailed and credible memories of her own.
Among other things, this doubt that is retrospectively cast over the entire story invites us to think critically about the male perspectives that have shaped it. Even if the essence of Bella’s origins as told by these men is not a complete fabrication, her last letter leads us to, at the very least, suspect some exaggerations, especially concerning her manic fondness of McCandless, and the twisted mixture of childish innocence and overt sexuality that is supposed to define so much of her character. For instance, this is how she describes first meeting her future husband:
‘Baxter and an awkward, ill-dressed lad whose ears stuck out entered from the lane. Baxter introduced us, but the boy was too shy to say a word, and this made me equally awkward. […]
While tea was prepared Baxter chatted pleasantly about university medical matters but McCandless was staring so hard at me that he said not a word in reply. Embarrassing! […]
When McCandless left he insisted on kissing my hand. In Sir Aubrey’s house this flowery gesture had never been practised even by our French and Italian guests. I was astonished, and probably stared at my fingertips afterward in a bemused way. Our visitor’s salivation was extreme, and I did not want to dry my hand or touch my dress with it till he was out of sight.’
In Lanthimos’ adaptation, no such ambiguity is expressed over this character trait that ostensibly presents Bella as a symbol of female sexual liberation, but also makes her so conveniently attractive to a particularly objectifying male gaze. In this sense, the director might not exactly be lying when he tells us that he took an epistolary novel told from multiple perspectives, and centred its story exclusively around the point of view of its female protagonist. But what he doesn’t say, is that to do this was to remove the novel’s narrative ambiguity, and to replace with one version of Bella Baxter’s experience – precisely the one that was depicted by male characters. The truth is that their voices are just so prominent in this adaptation, that their perspective is made fact, their desire has become Bella’s desire. And a parable about patriarchy, British colonialism and the excesses of science has been turned into yet another porn film destined for the straight male gaze, focussed on the woman’s reliably unfettered orgasmic experience.