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celestial-depths · 3 months

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Poor Things and Born Sexy Yesterday

(spoilers for Poor Things)

I stumbled on a discussion on whether Bella Baxter from the movie Poor Things (2023) is a representation of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope coined by video essayist Pop Culture Detective, who defines it as a mostly fantasy and sci-fi adjacent trope of a regular human man falling in love with a beautiful, otherworldly woman who, through some plot quirk or another, has no knowledge of social norms and no sexual or romantic past. Even though he is brutally average, he is able to win her love simply because he is the first (human) man she connects with and thus everything that's basic about him is impressive to her. Some examples of the trope given by Pop Culture Detective in his video essay are Leeloo from Fifth Element (the physically grown yet mentally child-like alien creature who falls in love with a taxi driver in a wifebeater) and Madison from Splash (a clothes-aversive mermaid who thinks that Tom Hanks is the most enchanting man in the world). I love Pop Culture Detective's work, and the Born Sexy Yesterday video essay was a cultural reset in my personal history. I saw the video when it premiered six years ago, but it has never fully left my mind, so of course I immediately thought of it when I saw Poor Things a couple of weeks ago. The movie certainly touches on the same themes that the Born Sexy Yesterday is made of. However, I think that the movie is an intentional subversion and a satire of the trope rather than a sincere execution of it.

The main character of the movie Bella Baxter starts out as a grotesquely literal version of the trope, as she is literally a newborn in the shape of a conventionally attractive woman who is being actively shielded from the influence of the outside world. She has the brain of a baby salvaged from the fresh corpse of a deceased pregnant woman, planted inside the skull of the reanimated body of the aforementioned woman as an experiment done by the unorthodox doctor Godwin Baxter. He keeps her locked inside his house and controls every aspect of her life, so when he invites the young doctor Max McCandles to join his research, McCandles is served what is essentially the perfect Born Sexy Yesterday experience: an exclusive access to a beautiful and naive young woman who is in a prime position of being groomed into whatever her keepers wish her to become.

Or so they would think.

A sincere Born Sexy Yesterday would be fully fascinated by this power dynamic and probably leave her here to be romanced by McCandles for the rest of the film. The audience would be expected to assume McCandles's perspective and indulge in the fantasy of falling in love with the untainted woman who has neither the life experience nor the critical thinking skills needed to question him.

But, fortunately, the movie doesn't remain here. After the first act, the movie switches its point of view from McCandles to Bella and starts putting her experiences to the forefront. She starts developing interests that absolutely do not align with the wants and needs of the men around her, and she begins to learn things that clash with the essence of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope. Soon, she has grown into a headstrong, independent, sexually experienced, intellectually curious woman who had zero interest in entertaining the whims of men and who intends to live fully for herself and herself alone: an absolute antithesis of the clueless and subservient blank slate the trope would require her to be. My reading of the film is that it's an intentional satire and an autopsy of the BSY trope and the gender politics that gave birth to it. It criticizes the men who entertain fantasies like it by making them look like absolute losers, urging us to ponder on what the hell is wrong with these creeps who see nothing wrong with drooling over a woman who is mentally a toddler instead of their intellectual equal.

The movie also reads as a critique of how women are socialized into a patriarchy. Godwin treats Bella just like a possession of his. Her body and her life are completely under his control from the moment she is "born" (another act in which neither Bella nor the woman she was born from had any say in), which isn't dissimilar to how a lot of fathers view their daughters. He wishes to keep her under constant supervision until the end of her life, until she protests and gets him to change his mind. When he asks McCandles to marry her, the two men treat the proposed marriage as a contract between the two of them rather than as a contract between McCandles and Bella herself. Again, this isn't too different to what marriage between men and women has meant throughout history.

McCandles is romantically interested in Bella even though he is fully aware of the fact that she is mentally a child. He seems to be looking forward to starting a sexual relationship with her after they are wed, as if the seal of marriage would make the intellectual disparity between them any less iffy. This bears resemblance to the way men in the real world prey on young girls with little to no sexual experience and whose brains are not fully developed because they're easier to control than grown women. I don't think that McCandles's hypocrisy is lost on the film. He agrees to marry Bella almost in the same breath as expressing his desire to keep her safe from other men, as if his desire to bed a person who is intellectually at the level of a five-year-old was any better than theirs.

When Bella chooses to leave Godwin's house to explore the world, the two men immediately replace her with a new experiment, showing that they were never truly interested in her as a person. They wanted the eternal baby, the thing that they can cage and control, and not the person who can think and learn and disagree with them. This exemplifies how disposable women are when they no longer serve their limited purpose in a patriarchy, and how replaceable people are when they are primarily viewed as bodies to be used. (Sidenote: I do think that Godwin and McCandles eventually learn to appreciate Bella for the person she is and that they both grow to be better people by the end of the film, but I still attest that these two are total creeps at least by this point of the movie.)

And then there's the supreme loser of the movie: the sleazy lawyer Wedderburn, who slithers into Bella's life and convinces her to run away with him. He is the darkest example of the kind of person who is drawn to inexperienced women like the ones represented in BSY movies - a predator who finds pleasure in the prospect of getting to corrupt and consume an innocent. He intends to take advantage of Bella and abandon her once he's gotten his fill only to find himself choking on his prey, who turns out not to be the malleable, naive creature he thought her to be.

This is the point where I think the movie goes from simply critiquing the BSY trope and everything it represents to successfully subverting it. The characters who embody the BSY trope don't really evolve. The movies they appear in are not really interested in their inner worlds and individual experiences beyond whatever serves the interests of the male protagonists. These characters are projections of male fantasies, so there really isn't a way for them to exist without centering men. This is not the case with Bella, who quickly grows into her own woman who is only tangentially interested in the men around her.

The bright side of Bella's condition is that she isn't just unaware of the ways of the world, but that she's also unaffected by the years of patriarchal conditioning that most normal women are burdened with. She literally has no shame, no internalized misogyny, no history of crushing blows to her sense of self-worth, and no looming knowledge of societal norms society. She has skipped the part in life where she is constantly bombarded with demands to make herself smaller and more palatable, to hate herself, to think of her body and the way it finds pleasure as something disgusting and abnormal, to treat other women as competition, and to think of herself as so much less important than men that she must pursue their validation beyond all else. Because of this blessed defect, she is free in a very rare way.

Wedderburn absolutely cannot handle that. When Bella first gets to know him, he paints a flattering picture of himself as a proud social deviant who gleefully eschews the rules of polite society. However, when faced with the actually deviant Bella, who flatly refuses to obey and center him, Wedderburn is revealed to be a phony. He is not a genuine libertine. He does not want to live in a truly free world with a free spirit like Bella, because he is a pathetic, insecure little man who only likes women in scenarios where the power balance is stacked against them. In my opinion, this is a direct shot fired at the BSY trope and its average enjoyers: if your ideal woman is someone who is many steps behind you in terms of mental capacity and experience, you are quite pitiful and would not stand a chance in an equal playing field.

It's hilarious how Wedderburn loses his mind when Bella starts exhibiting the kind of behavior he himself has proudly displayed earlier in the film: having multiple sexual partners, keeping sex and feelings separate, not falling in love with him or treating him like he's special, dropping him once she's had enough of him, and generally living life in an unconventional way. Again, the movie is pointing out the hypocrisy in men who fetishize inexperienced women while bragging about their own sexual conquests.

The part in the movie where Bella becomes a sex worker delivers the final blow to whatever is left of the BSY trope in her story, because the trope relies on sexual exclusivity and the fetishization of virginity. By having many partners and gaining lots of sexual experience out of her own free will, Bella stops fitting the ideal of the untouched woman who can be deflowered and exclusively possessed by the male protagonist. Also, through the conversations between Bella and the other sex workers, the movie finds another way to address the politics behind certain men's sexual fantasies of women - such as pointing out that some men enjoy sex with women more the less the women themselves enjoy it. It's a stray observation that the movie doesn't get deep into, but it has its place in the tapestry of the general theme of what desire reveals about people.

Finally, there's Alfie, who gives Bella (and us) an idea of the kind of life Bella's "mother" lived - as well as the kind of life Bella herself might be living had she grown up the normal way. It seems hellish. She'd be living under the tyranny of her awful husband, under a constant threat of violence, under absolute bodily control. Alfie wants to impregnate her against her will and to mutilate her genitals to deprive her of pleasure, and there's nothing that she could do about it because he is her husband and thus legally allowed to lord over her. She sees a terrifying glimpse of the role even privileged women like her have in this world: objects who exist solely for the pleasure of the men who own them. I would venture to say that the same description lies in the underbelly of the BSY trope.

I am happy that the movie doesn't take its sweet time to revel in the horror of this part of the story like so many other movies that address the oppression of women do. Instead, Bella stays with Alfie just enough time to say a hard and a well-informed no to his bullshit before getting on her merry way.

I think Poor Things is such a great example of taking a trope and exploring its implications in a way that goes beyond just pointing it out or parodying it by simply repeating it.

#poor things #yorgos lanthimos #bella baxter #emma stone #born sexy yesterday #pop culture #tropes #feminism #gender politics #movies #cinema #film #film studies

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femininemenon · 2 months

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from a never seen poor things anon, what do you hate about poor things? (ive heard its ableist...)

ok so before i get into anything, i would like to state that it was made by cis men (directed by a greek cis man, written by a scottish and an australian cis man). if it was done by cis women, i would still side eye it though. also, emma stone was a producer, so technically she had a say in just how much she showed of herself (the practicality of it you can argue but that would make this like an entire essay long).

what i can say, without spoilers, is that the movie reads like the study of "liberation" in the white feminist sense through white men's lense. if that's your thing (or choice feminism) then maybe you can put through yourself this. the writing is very much tony mcnamara (from "the great"; i knew it was him before i even looked at the credits) so if you miss his style of dialogue, then you will definitely enjoy at least that. the aesthetic is nice and you can tell that it took a lot of hard work, but also you have to tolerate a fisheye lense shot like every five minutes.

if you don't mind spoilers, then you can click "read more" - although i don't think i'm saying anything that hasn't been said before

i have to put out another disclaimer: i don't think you should only depict topics in a "HEY THIS IS A BAD THING!" manner or that you can only portray morally correct things, so i don't think this movie would have irritated me so much IF we had movies that dealt with similar topics in a more honest, more radical view (but like who am i kidding it's hollywood) or if people didn't hail this as barbie for ao3 like ???????????????? i mean i guess you lot are right about the white feminism…

the story begins with a pregnant woman killing herself (victoria, also played by emma stone) because she simply cannot tolerate the fetus/the idea of being a mother. the movie also implies that she was impregnated against her will by her husband. then doctor godwin baxter (willem dafoe) uses her for his "experiment" and he says, out of mercy, doesn't revive her but instead puts the baby's brain into the pregnant woman's and so bella baxter is born. this read as punishment for wanting to end a pregnancy (even though i'm sure it wasn't meant to) and that is just a really triggering to me. when bella learns of this later, it doesn't exactly have much of an effect on her though so all is jolly! not a single thing to ponder over! not the fact that her mom didn't want her and she killed herself, noooope. has no effect on her whatsoever!

so the premise of the entire thing is that we watch this baby grow in a grown woman's body. the movie is in b&w for a while because babies don't see color (about 4 months but we are never given a scale of her age) but her sexualization begins here already: one of whom she is betrothed to (so she never leaves the mansion) is max mccandles (ramy youssef) who also calls her the R slur (00:07:29,792 --> 00:07:31,625 "What a very pretty [R-slur]") and then duncan wedderburn (mark ruffalo). i'm not sure why that slur is resurfacing online and offline but i find it very disturbing, no matter what excuse people try to use. use any other word, literally. there is the question of adults who (if i'm not using correct terms, feel free to tell me) are cognitively challenged. is this meant to say something about them? does the movie not even want to entertain that people like bella in this stage exist and live their lives?

i feel like i've only yapped about the plot SORRY. the rest of the story is bella learning more about the world, mostly through sex save for one philosophical stage on a boat (where we meet the one man who does not sexualize her! hurray! harry astley, played by jerrod carmichael). i don't think the sex scenes were like too explicit (i'm sure hbo had done way worse back in its day…) as people say they are. do i think it was necessary for the story? not really. yes, sometimes children are aware of sexual things but they should be educated (to prevent predators) and not engaged in such acitvities. as she was not educated, predators crawl over her like duncan. but it doesn't read like that, not to me. i think they tried to portray her as a willing participant and for you not to even question whether she wants it or not, and rather as "female empowerment" like okay…

and then comes the paris part (sex work/prostitution) which can be read in many ways. bella learns more through sex paid for by strange men, duncan slutshames her and she leaves duncan, decides to be a doctor. a lot of progress is made in this part and there are some good lines but one line just… meh (01:43:23,292 --> 01:43:25,583 We are our own means of production.) so that's something to keep in mind.

anyway, shenanigans ensue, she ends up back where victoria escaped from and the husband wants to also keep her in the house and impregnate her. maybe something about how you cannot escape the system meant to encage you? no idea. in the end, she doesn't kill the man but rather replaces his brain with a dog's. is this meant to read as revenge? against the husband or against the doctor? who knows. the doctor dies but at that point i was just sooo over it. in the end, bella takes over her first prison, the mansion, as she is now its mistress, but what does that say exactly? the system is good as is, any change will just land us in worse places and we just have to make our space in it?

#ask #anonymous #poor things spoilers #anti poor things

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teratomat · 2 months

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He was a man of unconventional mind.

POOR THINGS (2023) dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

#filmedit #poor things #willem dafoe #ramy youssef #godwin baxter #max mccandles #yorgos lanthimos

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editfandom · 2 months

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Poor Things, 2023

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theskyexists · 3 months

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Actually I want to say more. Because the film goes: she becomes a whore because she sees the sense of it and she is not disgusted or humiliated by sex. But then she realises and argues: I am disgusted by sex with some people (who are stinky), the world should be so that in this job I should be able to choose. Then Mrs Swiney manipulates her with truths and a certain worldview: choice shouldn't be the goal, experiences should be. Bella DOES gain a lot of insight into different desires and experiences lots of different things (humiliation degradation, is what Mrs. Swiney says but we don't really see it). She ameliorates the stinkiness with perfume. BUT Bella does realise that Mrs Swiney manipulates her, and she says: my empathy is turning into rage and despising others. This implies that actually, this work IS DAMAGING HER. Mrs. Swiney says that's good. You have to go through it and come out the other end. We never learn what is meant by that. Whether we should take her wisdoms seriously or as more manipulation. Perhaps going through it is Bella's meeting with Patriarchy personified in the form of her husband/father and shooting it in the foot then throwing away its brain? Meanwhile, while whoring she goes to meetings on socialism. She charges 30francs which isn't much. She never does unionise her workplace. She inherits money, a house, a doctor's practice. She becomes a doctor, and regains her upper class position. She always had an out.

But Max Mccandles and Bella have a talk and 'her body is her own to do with as she wishes' - the thesis of the film on sex. And Bella says to press the point 'cocks, inside of me, for money' - which is the subliminal thesis of the film: to untie a sense of disgust or humiliation from sex, even paid-for sex having not chosen her partner or deriving pleasure from it. Under duress. (Except not because SHE had an out)

The conclusion of the film on whoring then is, I guess, that even the most resilient and suitable woman will find it does damage, but it is not disgusting or shameful. Which is a bit of a contradiction, maybe. How then does it do damage. Why did Bella find her empathy turn to rage? But it's never taken any further. If she hadn't been called away, what would have happened? Nor does the film ever consider any other line of work for her when she experiments with being poor. And the conclusion on socialism is that of Harry's, the cynic. It doesn't do shit. Because Bella didn't do shit with it. Her landlady got away with it. But that's ok because she had an out.

Her first act as an aspirational doctor (who are supposed to make the world a better place - that's the throughline) is cracking open somebody's skull and implanting a goat brain (throwing away the general's...most likely, killing him anyway). Something she called Godwin and Max monsters over and she doesn't even have the flimsy excuse of the general not wanting to live. Naturally, he is the patriarchy and would destroy them if they let him. Her grandfather and father and Max are doctors but their only interventions seem to be absolutely insane experiments. Not doctors really but scientists. what the hell is that message anyway. No message, I guess.

I CAN see the rage that she gleaned in whoring as culminated in shooting the patriarch who would imprison her again and violate and maim her body to curb her 'sexual hysteria'. But the whole thing about making the world a better place? Monstrous murderous interventions can be used for good? (Murder the right person?) Doctor as in doubtful morality. I don't know.

#my stuff #personal #vidi #poor things

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themosleyreview · 5 months

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The Mosley Review: Poor Things

What if Dr. Frankenstein's creation was a success? What if the Bride of Frankenstein's monster became an actual person? A young woman with accelerated mental development and wanted to venture out into the world to experience life and womanhood. Well that's almost exactly what this original story was and I quite enjoyed the breath of fresh air it was. We've seen the coming of age, adulthood and life dramas and comedies, but this one was more on the level of delivering not only that type of story, but also a dark comedy that would either bore you or fascinate you. There was a great deal of fantasy elements that makes for a visual feast as we explore the odyssey in which the main character embarks on. There were some thought provoking and very witty dialogue between a number of characters and they all had unique perspectives on everyday life that apply today, even though this was a period film.

Emma Stone delivers an outstanding and evolutionary performance as Bella Baxter. To see her develop mentally from child to adult inside a grown woman’s body, was done so tastefully and almost effortlessly. She captures that ever curious wonder of the outside world and all that is to be learned. Her observational presence and wonderfully blunt delivery of sometimes hilarious dialogue was exceptional. Bella's exploration into the world's beauty and horror was the type of pure character growth that was captivating and sorely missed in modern films these days. I enjoyed experiencing her journey into becoming a woman and finding her freedom. Willem Defoe was excellent as her caretaker, creator and father figure, Dr. Godwin Baxter. He was a mad scientist that truly has a tragic backstory, but he doesn't let that stop him. I loved that he had a unique look on life and his studies into true human development was fascinating. The chemistry between Godwin and Baxter was heartwarming and not your typical relationship at all. It was a paternal relationship that developed intellectually. Ramy Youssef was great as Dr. Baxter's apprentice, Max McCandles. He was a young and enthusiatic student and I loved his genuine care for Bella. He was one of the purest and gentle souls of the film. Mark Ruffalo delivers a fantastic and manic performance as the very charming and petty womanizer Duncan Wedderburn. From moment he's on screen, you get the characters' intentions and how shallow of a human is. I loved that his confidence slowly gets chipped away by Bella's unwillingness to be controlled by his overbearing nature. It was a great affair that propelled the film along and their chemistry was excellent. Jerrod Carmichael was also excellent as the realist, Harry Astley. He drops some truth bombs on Bella on the world view of the rich and the poor and how society functions as a whole. His words may hold weight, but they were conflicting nonetheless. Christopher Abbott was ruthless and despicable as Alfie Blessington. I won't spoil his character too much, but I will say that he was absolutely the disgusting version of a man in that time period and he really shows his motives quickly. He acts as the final narrative payoff to a plotline that was almost an after thought thanks to the amazing performances all around.

The score by Jerskin Fendrix was fantastic, whimsical and unconventional as Bella Baxter herself. It truly brought out the comedic tone in a number of great scenes and underscores the experimental nature of the story. I loved the score the most during the moments Bella was at sea. Speaking of which, visually this film was stunning and almost dreamlike. I am a sucker for the usage of black and white to evoke the sense of time, but here its a character. The transition to vibrant colors as Bella explores gives the film a burst of life and also informs you of the characters feelings. Director Yorgos Lanthimos has undoubtedly made one of the best films of the year and the cast all around deliver outstanding performances. This is a must watch on the big screen and I highly recommend it in Dolby for the colors. Let me know what you thought of the film or my review in comments below. Thanks for reading!

#poor things #emma stone #willem dafoe #ramy youssef #mark ruffalo #jerrod carmichael #christopher abbott

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