Poor Things

Poster for Poor Things. Image source: CelebMafia.com

Poor Things (2023), starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, and Mark Ruffalo; screenplay by Tony McNamara, based on the novel by Alasdair Gray; directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos' film version of the novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, is a bit like a postmodern Bride of Frankenstein. In the opening moments of the film a young woman in Victorian dress commits suicide by leaping from London's Tower Bridge into the Thames. [1] We learn later that her corpse, still warm when pulled from the river, is revivified after receiving a brain transplant from her own unborn baby. We then follow the adventures and misadventures of Bella (Emma Stone), who has a child's rapidly developing consciousness housed in an adult woman's body.

Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) in Poor Things. Costume design by Holly Waddington.

Godwin Baxter, the doctor who reanimates Bella, is portrayed in the film by Willem Dafoe. In a brilliant touch, his face is criss-crossed with scars, a visual correlative of the novel's hint that his famous surgeon father Sir Colin "had manufactured God by the Frankenstein method" (p. 274). Baxter is himself the product of an experiment [2]:

Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) in Poor Things. Prosthetic design by Nadia Stacey.

In the novel, Baxter says of Bella that she

'has all the resilience of infancy with all the stature and strength of fine womanhood  Her menstrual cycle was in full flood from the day she opened her eyes, so she has never been taught to feel her body is disgusting or to dread what she desires. Not having learned cowardice when small and oppressed she only uses speech to say what she thinks and feels, not to disguise these, so she is incapable of every badness done through hypocrisy and lying—nearly every sort of badness. All she lacks is experience. . .' (Poor Things, p. 69)

Virtually every man she meets wants to exploit the beautiful but naïve Bella for his own sexual gratification. But Bella has her own agency, not to say wilfulness. Eager for the experience she lacks, she abandons her earnest fiancé, Baxter's assistant McCandless (Ramy Yousef; for no clear reason, McCandless is renamed Max in the film from the novel's Archibald) and runs off with hedonistic lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). In the novel, Bella reports in her letters to Godwin and Max that she frequently "weds" Wedderburn; in the film, instead of employing this cleverly apposite pun, she calls sex "furious jumping."

A child's brain in a woman's body is the misogynistic Wedderburn's erotic ideal. (And not only his, of course: the position of women in Victorian society is largely one of enforced childlike dependence.) Wedderburn tricks Bella into boarding a ship bound for the Mediterranean in the delusional hope that he can control her better onboard. But despite his best efforts he cannot prevent Bella from learning about the world through reading, conversation with cynical fellow passenger Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael), and direct experience. And with experience comes, as it does for all of us, the bitter knowledge of deceit, injustice, and cruelty: the immense suffering that humans, and the social and economic systems we've created, cause other humans.

Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) in Poor Things.

When the ship makes port in Alexandria, Bella disembarks and is thrown into an intellectual and emotional crisis by the extreme poverty and misery she sees. This crisis awakens her moral conscience and her outrage. When Wedderburn finally gets lucky in the ship's casino, the unworldly Bella hands his winnings to two of the ship's crewmembers to distribute among the poor. (Of course, they only distribute the money between themselves.)

Bankrupt and thrown off the ship in Marseilles, Wedderburn and Bella make their way to Paris. There Bella encounters the madam Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter; in the novel her character is named Madame Cronquebil). Bella discovers that in Swiney's brothel she can earn money working only 20 (unpleasant) minutes every hour, and can spend the rest of her time as she chooses. In the brothel she is befriended by fellow prostitute Toinette (Suzy Bemba), who introduces her to both the principles of socialism and the joys of sapphism.

When Bella returns to London, unwelcome revelations await her. From Baxter she learns the horrifying truth of her origin. And then her wedding to McCandless is interrupted by her former husband Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott; the character is named Aubrey in the novel), a general in Britain's imperial army. With all the power of money and the law behind him (and aided by Bella's desire to learn about her past), he takes her back to the life that as Victoria Blessington she so desperately wanted to escape. She soon discovers why.

I've mentioned a few of the differences between the novel and the film above; there are many more, large and small. A very large one is the ending, which in Tony McNamara's screenplay is entirely rewritten. Gray's book is also set in a recognizable version of the historical 19th century; the film's elaborate production design by Shona Heath and James Price places the characters in an alternate world that gives us an ironic distance from the action. In a steampunk Lisbon, aerial trams whoosh by on cables; Alexandria looks like an Arabian Nights fantasy; and Madame Swiney's Paris brothel could have been designed by an erotomaniacal Antoni Gaudí.

Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter) watches from the doorway of her brothel as Bella approaches in Poor Things.

But the most significant difference is that the movie's focus is mainly on Bella's personal development rather than, as in the book, her awakening to the necessity of political action to bring about social change. In Lanthimos' movie Bella decides to become a doctor because, as she tells McCandless, Baxter's surgery is the place where she is happiest. In the book, it is because she discovers from Baxter that the city in which she lives is filled with "stinking, overcrowded rooms where you will find as much huddled misery as you saw in the sunlight of Alexandria" (p. 196). Bella studies medicine in order to combat the miseries of poverty by treating the sick, giving women the knowledge and means to control their own fertility, and fighting for basic measures of sanitation and public health. As she learns, "prevention of disease was more important than cure" (p. 198).

The novel has a multilayered metafictional structure that would be very difficult to realize on film; perhaps the production design is Lanthimos' attempt at recreating Gray's distancing effects in a visual medium. Purporting on the title page to be edited by Alasdair Gray, the novel opens with an introduction by him describing the discovery of the volume among boxes of discarded law office files, and closes with his "Notes Critical and Historical." In between lies the text of a memoir of which only one copy was ever printed. Written by Archibald McCandless, M.D., and intended for the eyes of his wife Victoria, it tells the story of Victoria's transformation into Bella. The memoir is followed by a letter from Victoria McCandless to her grandchildren disputing and complicating her husband's version of her life. She points out,

He has made a sufficiently strange story stranger still by stirring into it episodes and phrases to be found in Hogg's Suicide's Grave with additional ghouleries from Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. What morbid Victorian fantasy has he NOT filched from? I find traces of The Coming Race, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Trilby, Rider Haggard's She, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes and, alas, Alice Through the Looking-Glass. . .He has even plagiarized work by two dear friends: G.B. Shaw's Pygmalion and the scientific romances of Herbert George Wells. (pp. 272-273)

Mild spoiler alert: The movie has a happy ending of sorts, with Bella finding fulfillment by creating a polyamorous intentional community around her. Although in The Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx and Engels wrote of a revolutionary society "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all," Alasdair Gray's ingrained pessimism as a Scotsman, socialist, and student of history doesn't permit him to end on a note of merely personal contentment.

One of H.G. Wells' "scientific romances" is The War in the Air (1907), written just a few years after the Wright Brothers' first flight. Set just a decade or two after its publication date, the novel depicts aircraft as decisive weapons in a world war launched by Germany. As major cities are bombed into rubble, a global financial collapse and a virulent plague lead to the complete destruction of industrialized society. At the conclusion of the letter to her posterity, Victoria McCandless writes,

H.G.'s book is a warning, of course, not a prediction. He and I and many others expect a better future because we are actively creating it. . .H.G. Wells' warnings should be heeded. But the International Socialist Movement is as strong in Germany as in Britain. The labour and trade-union leaders in both countries have agreed that if their governments declare war they will immediately call a general strike. I almost hope our military and capitalistic leaders DO declare war! If the working classes immediately halt it by peaceful means then the moral and practical control of the great industrial nations will have passed from the owners to the makers of what we need, and the world YOU live in, dear child of the future, will be a saner and happier place. (pp. 275-276)

The letter is dated "1st August, 1914."

---

1. Alasdair Gray's novel is set in 1880s Glasgow, not London.
2. In the novel, Godwin is described as being "a whole head taller than most" with a "big face," "ogreish body" and "thick limbs" (p. 13); visible scars are notably absent from this description and from Gray's illustrations.