The World, The Flesh & The Devil
How Bella Baxter overcomes the patriarchal enemies of personhood.
‘Poor Things’ by director Yorgos Lanthimos is a modern masterpiece. Very few movies master many layers of complex psychology, social commentary, and spiritual insight. But to do it with such artistic flair and originality in a story that stays emotional and grounded is an enormous creative achievement, in no small part to the performance of Emma Stone.
I was annoyed that Stone won the Oscar for Best Actress and not Lily Gladstone whose performance in Killers of the Flower Moon was immense - her dignity and range in that role deserved an Oscar. But I hadn’t seen Poor Things yet, and I was wrong. Emma Stone makes this masterpiece possible, make the absurd human. makes the liberation of Bella Baxter tangible.
Lanthimos has often used absurdism in his movies but it is always rendered as normal within the story itself. This is a very different approach than, say, David Lynch who uses those elements to disturb, shock, and shift your emotions. ‘Poor Things’ is set in an absurd world, but those absurdities mirror the preposterous reality of our world, they are not to shock you, they are to orient you.
St. Thomas Aquinas describes The World, The Flesh & The Devil as "implacable enemies of the soul”. This is a common idea in Christian theology and Bella Baxter faces these enemies as characters who tempt and maneuver to get her to abandon her personhood, her soul, for their own means.
The World - Max McCandles is (on the surface) an ideal prospective husband, who loves her for how she makes him feel but wants to possess her and keep her from experiencing the world for herself, only through heteronormative patriarchy. He is normality, the world, the presumed way of being for her to be a wife to a gentleman.
The Flesh - Duncan Wedderburn wants to set her free into desire but only to the extent that she will be a means of fulfilling his desires. He does not need a wife. He is all sex and custard tarts. But when her desire and curiosity expand past him, he is driven insane with jealousy.
The Devil - General Alfie Blessington. The past, her prison, her chief abuser. While she has no conscious memory of her life with him, her body remembers and she goes with him to face her past. The Devil is the prince of this world. He represents the most devious, violent, and cruel form of patriarchy. She is also his daughter too, at least her brain is. This creates another level of evil. He demands her total subjugation and does not care at all that her inner self is not even the wife he once possessed. Pure entitlement.
Three prisons for the soul.
An obvious visual cue is the use of black and white scenes in the movie that represent a prison or at least a limitation of Bella’s personhood. I found it very interesting that black and white was also used in the place cards between locations/chapters. This is because the threshold of a new place presents a decision to be free or not. Every situation and place, no matter how advantageous for you, is only free if you choose to live freely within it.
This movie is as equally subtle as it is explicit, but the character’s names are an example of smacking you in the face with the obvious: Bella (beauty, purity of self); God (a kindly monster, making monsters); McCandles (home and normality); Wedderburn (herpes, chlamydia, gonorrhea - take your pick) and finally the triple-decker of General (violent, male power) Alfie (the movie epitome of male selfishness) Blessington (religious patriarchy).
When the ‘world’ comes to Bella (via Max) her instinct is to punch it in the nose. But when she sees the actual world for the first time, on the rooftop seeing the London skyline, she knows that the world is hers and demands to see it. She is constantly in conflict with ‘polite society’. What she wants to say, what she wants to do, how she wants to treat her own body is not polite. And politeness is the bricks that construct the prison of the world. God realizes eventually that he cannot keep her in his Eden if she is to have free will. And if she doesn’t have free will then the ‘empirical results’ will be wrong. So reluctantly he lets her go.
While Bella heads to the dance floor in Lisbon to express herself, Duncan joins her, in his mind, as a fellow free spirit but he constantly cajoles her dancing to his own rhythm and pattern. Duncan promises a new adventure but he kidnaps her and takes her on a cruise where she can no longer explore. It is there she recognizes the ‘blue’ that we see in the opening sequence of her suicide. “So you wish to marry me or kill me?”. The flesh promises freedom but it is its own kind of prison.
In overcoming the temptations she reconciles the parts of herself that are not fully developed. Her initial instincts are often violent. On her first trip outside of the house, she kills the frog as soon as she sees it. Two of the funniest moments in the movie are when she grabs the maid’s ‘hairy business’ and declares she must punch a baby. Both of these are played for laughs but they highlight a person that needs to grow and learn about the personhood of others. She makes a concerted effort to defeat her own inner cruelty. She begins by giving away Duncan’s money to the poor in Alexandria (the city of a conquering tyrant) and eventually achieves this growth via her time as a sex worker - those experiences give her an up-close look at desire, the grotesque and the repressed. She learns how to treat her clients with curiosity rather than disdain, making them share a memory, and committing to seeing them as human.
This is an idealized and dramatized experience of sex work for Bella’s development and to demonstrate she has no shame or loss of agency in matters. She is always in control. Sex work is not something she suffers through, it is something she chooses. The men in the brothel are bound by fetish, desire, and the subconscious. Bella doesn’t know how to repress what she experiences, only to receive it and synthesize it into growth.
There is also a comment to make about the madam who recognizes and, perhaps, even envies Bella’s agency. But the madam is part of how the patriarchy operates and will happily take a bite of Bella, whether that be her earlobe or her 10 francs.
This chapter is also the further exploration of her own pleasure, taking what she experienced with Duncan wherever she is willing to go. However, it is the experience of Sapphic love that satisfies her at the culmination of the pleasure experiences. She’s not going to experience anything more pleasurable. She conquers the prison of flesh to reach the maturity of the older lady from the cruise - what is between her ears becomes more interesting to her than what is between her legs.
Her empathy remains limited and gives over to the rage that stems from her repressed past. She is instructed by the Madam that this is a dark night of the soul and she must go through this to grow. It takes her back to London where she discovers her origins and considers her previous choice to kill herself. She channels her violent instincts, rather than repress them, into being a doctor - to “carve with compassion”. When she is presented with facing the Devil and the full extent of her previous life of torment in dark soulless rooms, she is brave enough to face it.
Nothing is more important in this movie than the interior life which is represented numerous times as images of brains and organs appear throughout. There is also the Freudian undertone to the key relationships Bella forms which can be represented as
Super Ego - Max, the best available version of a man, though still inadequate for Bella until she has grown to the point where she is the one determining the nature of their relationship.
Ego - Duncan, the base instincts of masculinity that make a man stupid. (He’s a lawyer who can’t even spell)
Id - Alfie, all that is repressed in men makes them violent and cruel
The film wisely punctuates the possibility of an Electra complex (opposite of the Oedipal complex) and any sexual relation between God and Bella by making God incapable of sexual activity. They have a creator/creation relationship where Bella’s complexity and depth of personhood surprise the creator and cause an unintended relationship of genuine love.
Poor Things can be described as a feminist movie as it is deeply concerned about personal liberation. True freedom, of mind, body, and spirit from patriarchal norms. In this way, it is a far more feminist movie than, say, Barbie. That movie is fantastic at forming an emotional and empathetic connection with its audience, but the narrative points of that movie get blurry. It treats cellulite like a horror and never corrects that realization and much of America Ferrer’s famed speech describes things men also suffer in capitalist patriarchy. The pathway for Barbie to freedom is to choose Birkenstocks instead of heels and attend a gynecological appointment.
Male development in this movie is also troubled. The pretend toy man, Ken, only grows through Barbie’s emotional labor, and the real men (Will Ferrell and the Mattel execs) do not grow or face any consequences at all. It is a movie made by Mattel and Warner Bros and serves their interests far more than it does the liberation of women, despite the skills of Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie.
While Poor Things is written and directed by men, it has a much better understanding of liberation and, crucially, the pitfalls of the writer and director being male. Yorgos Lanthimos is very aware of ‘the male gaze’. One of the first things Bella does in the movie is repeatedly stabbing the eyes of a male corpse. Much of the film is shot with either fish-eye lenses or to create a fish-bowl effect. The eye of the director (and therefore the audience) is distorted, and warped, the only person who can see who Bella truly is, is Bella herself.
Bella Baxter is a creation of her own persona but that is only possible after her resurrection. Her fully realized resurrected life heeds nothing to what the outside world demands. The movie concludes with several Christ-referencing images. The separation of the goat & the peaceful existence in the new garden of Eden, a great physician in the making.
Bella Baxter was instantly a hero when I experienced Poor Things. Her ability to have agency over her life throughout is inspiring. I suppose the fact that she had the ‘mind of a child’ was crucial for her to be fully present and without the influence of culture to determine her choices. This movie has challenged and changed me for weeks and months beyond my watching. Deeply important for all human consumption alike. Thank you for your incredible insight, I have loved hearing others experiences. Yours is noted, very good.
What a wonderful review! I haven’t seen Poor Things but am now thoroughly intrigued. Thanks for sharing here.🌟🙏🏼