Page to Screen: Poor Things – Gray’s anatomy vs Lanthimos’s biopsy
Poor Things feels less like a cinematic translation of Alisdair Gray’s 1992 novel than a cinematic translation of the protagonist Bella Baxter’s perception
What would it be like to be born anew with a blank slate? What would it feel like to rediscover your body and mind? What if a woman could live free of the past, free of regret, free of trauma, free of pretence, free of shame, free of inner censors, free of all the straitjackets of polite society? What if instead of piling up a lifetime of inhibitions, she were to survive on pure instinct? Could she more than survive? Could she thrive?
Reinvention lies at the very heart and form of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things, now a Yorgos Lanthimos-directed baroque sex romp. Rogue scientist Godwin Baxter, an alumnus from the medical school of Dr Moreau and Dr Frankenstein, fishes out the corpse of a pregnant woman from a river. He takes the brain of the unborn foetus and fits it into the head of the drowned mother. With blessings from HG Wells and Mary Shelley and a bolt of electricity, he creates a whole new individual to be his dream companion. Bella Baxter, he christens her. The longer she is cooped up in a gilded cage, the more curious she gets about the world outside. The more she learns, the more freedom she yearns. Considering she has got the strength of a full-grown woman and the hunger of a toddler, there is no stopping her. The wisdom gained from engagements and elopements, pleasure tours and political debates, helps guide her journey towards autonomy.
Think of Bella as a Victorian-era Galatea who frees herself from Pygmalion, embarks on a Candide-like eye-opening odyssey and reshapes her own destiny. To chronicle the destiny of this extraordinary being — this Eliza Doo-more if you will — the novel becomes one. Freakish, wild and full of life. The bulk of the story takes the form of a vanity autobiography by Bella’s husband Archibald McCandless. Subtitled Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer, the book is decorated with accompanying maps, etchings, and anatomical illustrations by Gray. The Scotsman even writes himself into the novel as a fictional editor providing critical notes.
Inside the Episodes nest excerpted letters from a globetrotting Bella and Duncan Wedderburn, the sleazy lawyer she runs away with. In the final letter, she refutes her husband’s sensational account of her reanimation as science fiction. Bella, who has gone on to become a doctor and a trailblazing abortionist, reasons Archibald made the whole thing up out of envy in a sorry attempt to discredit her professional success and suffragette work. According to her version of events, he was so ashamed of his floundering medical career, he turned to a literary pursuit despite not having a talent for it either. She claims he made “a sufficiently strange story stranger still” by borrowing “episodes and phrases” from The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, “ghouleries” from the works of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, and “traces” of The Coming Race, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, Trilby, She: A History of Adventure, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes and Alice Through the Looking-Glass. “What morbid Victorian fantasy has he NOT filched from?” she wonders. It goes without saying that her version of events puts everything that came before in a new light.
Either Archibald is telling the truth or Bella is re-establishing it. The possibility exists both could be unreliable narrators. Notes from Gray’s fictionalised editor cast doubts on Bella’s version, making the question of truth an even more puzzling one. The result is a novel so rich, so lively, so adventurous, reading it can feel like rolling through the contours of a manic daydream. For that reason but not that alone, the challenge for a screen adaptation should have been more a matter of reformatting than revision. Lanthimos and his screenwriter Tony McNamara seem to think differently. Their film gets rid of the structural complexity of the book, its internal wrangling, its deliberate blend of fact and fiction, its self-reflexivity and all its playfulness. What’s left is a raunchy coming-of-age journey. Bella (Emma Stone) gets quite the sex education as she enters a society of hypocrites who fetishize the innocence of girlhood but fear the intelligence of womanhood. About half the text is taken into an aesthetic lab that has multiple experiments cooking to circumstantiate the same idea: self-discovery through sex.
When we first meet Stone’s Bella, she is an infant piloting the body of a grown-up. By day, she shuffles awkwardly around the Baxter home like a wind-up doll, banging away on a piano, spitting out food and breaking plates. By the time the day winds down, she is spent and usually without an item of clothing. To document the progress of his experiment, Godwin (Willem Dafoe) brings on an assistant, Max (Ramy Youssef), the man known in the novel as Archibald. At once, Max becomes smitten with this woman-child with no filter. Learning how she came to be or observing her violent tantrums startles him, but not enough to take off. Not even when in the wish to pretend play as a surgeon like Godwin, she flips a dead man’s penis like a toy and repeatedly stabs the cadaver in its eyes with a scalpel, teeheeing “SQUISH SQUISH SQUISH” in delight. Every child needs some outlet for their pent-up emotions, Godwin and Max seem to convince themselves.
One day, waking up from an anaesthetic haze after yet another tantrum, Bella discovers her libido when her hand slides between her thighs without provocation, like she was just scratching an itch. Experiencing an orgasm becomes a eureka moment. She can’t help but repeat the activity with any object within her grasp. At the breakfast table, she experiments with an apple and a cucumber, hoping for the same happy conclusion. In excitement, she shares her discovery with the maid and Max, only to be scolded. “In polite society, that is not done,” Max tells her. Bella presents a vision of female sexuality that is not chained by the manacles of patriarchal morality and all its expectations, implied or imposed. Where “polite society” sees deviancy, Lanthimos sees humanity at its most nakedly vulnerable. As far as Bella is concerned, pleasure equals happiness equals freedom.
For Bella, the experience of pleasure unlocks the gateway to a world beyond her home. The search for more broadens her horizons. It isn’t until she elopes with the dastardly Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) and the two have sex for the first time in Lisbon that her once black-and-white world erupts in eye-popping technicolor. It’s as if her increasing sex drive brings the film to vivid life. Unable to keep up with her, Duncan looks to control her, smuggling her away on a Mediterranean cruise. On board, rap sessions with co-passengers Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) and Martha von Kurtzroc (Hanna Schygulla) open her mind to new ideas. So does a love for reading. A brief stop in Alexandria exposes her to a cesspit of suffering at the foot of their luxurious hotel. The rich and the poor are kept apart by a sweeping stairway. With world below framed from above, the distance gives the impression of observing an ant farm.
The same sojourn in the book takes on a monumental significance. In place of the kindly Martha is Dr Hooker, an American evangelical and colonial apologist who believes the Anglo-Saxon race must take control of the world. Sitting with Hooker and Harry in the hotel veranda, Bella witnesses a shocking scene: starving women and children scramble for coins tossed by wealthy tourists from above. Hooker taps into her shock to make a eugenics case for Anglo-Saxon superiority over the rest. Instead, the incident awakens Bella’s socialist consciousness. In the film, it doesn’t happen until she breaks things off with Duncan, finds herself stranded in Paris, becomes a sex worker and takes on comrade Toinette (Suzy Bemba) as lover and socialism instructor. For Book-Bella, working at a bordello was a three-day gig to earn cash to make the trip back home. For Movie-Bella, it stretches into a much longer residency. Sex work teaches her: how men relate to her, why she must define the rules of engagement, and what being financially independent (“her own means of production”) means. By ridding the moral obstacles between herself and the pleasure she yearns for, Bella reclaims her body.
Poor Things feels less like a cinematic translation of Gray’s text than a cinematic translation of Bella’s perception. Fish-eye lenses and pinhole cameras reflect her distorted reality, a life that feels suffocating under the possessive grip of men from all corners. Once she escapes and her perception grows, the world expands as well. Tradition and progress, gothic and rococo exist in both tension and harmony in this alt-Victorian world. Each tableau is like a diorama for us to watch Bella evolve inside. Each city is a glass dome of sorts to map said evolution. From free-floating trams to bruised purple skies to odd animal hybrids, each element of the film’s exquisite scenography works overtime with Stone’s malleable face as a barometer of Bella’s transplanted interiority. The frantic atonal music of Jerskin Fendrix creates an additional psychological layer with a combination of strings, woodwinds and organs.
In the wrong hands, a character like Bella could easily have become a one-note joke. But Stone plays her with love, respect and sensitivity, sure of every choice she makes and what it means, maybe even more so than Lanthimos. In two hours and change, she charts the fish-eye-lensed evolution of Bella, from a newborn barely able to speak in complete sentences to a horny teenager chasing freedom to a liberated woman redefining herself on her own terms. Each developmental pole vault doesn’t feel so absurd, given the sheer conviction with which she harnesses her physicality.
Language, not surprisingly, serves as a key marker of Bella’s development. At first, she speaks in fragmented sentences that confuse verbs for nouns. As befits a surgical creation, she stitches together words into straightforward but evocative turns of phrase. Self-pleasure is “working on myself to get happiness.” Cunnilingus is “tongue play.” Sex with Duncan is “furious jumping,” a neologism angled more towards the cold empiricism of “fucking” than the corny eroticism of “making love.” Lanthimos shoots the sex scenes in the same matter-of-fact way, neither sensualizing nor sensationalizing. Gray gave Bella’s voice a more poetic rhythm. Take for instance her reaction when Duncan finds out she is not a virgin: “It seems that women who have not been wed by wedders like my Wedder all possess a slip of skin across the loving groove where Wedderburns poke their peninsula. This slip of skin he never found on me.” The more articulate Bella becomes, the more intimidated Duncan feels. “You’re losing some of your adorable way of speaking,” he protests in the film, before tossing away her books into the ocean.
While writing a gallery of insecure men all bent on customising Bella according to their own needs, Gray doesn’t distance himself from it with a sense of righteousness. He is not one to shy away from his own complicity in an unequal power structure. Each man Bella meets is keen to possess her. Each tries to contain her impulses towards freedom, as if her growing into an actual person may threaten their very masculinity. If Duncan wishes Bella to be nothing more than a biddable sex doll, Godwin wishes to keep her home to shield her from the brutal realities of the world. Before Godwin experimented on Bella, he was himself experimented upon. It was his own father who used him like a test subject, the results of which are branded on his patchwork face. According to Archibald’s account, a lonely Godwin created Bella “to possess what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout the ages: the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman.” By contrast, Dafoe’s Baxter is cast as a father figure.
Despite being a womanizer himself, Duncan boohoos over Bella sleeping with another man. If he can’t have her as his plaything, no one can. On the day of Bella and Max’s wedding, he goes so far as to gatecrash the ceremony to expose the truth of her former life: she was once Victoria Blessington, an unhappy wife who died by suicide to escape the grasp of her sadistic husband Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), known as General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington in the book. When Alfie shows up unexpectedly, she decides to return to her old life. Not long after, she realises why she tried to escape from him in the first place. When he arranges a clitoridectomy to keep her sexual desires in check, she splashes a chloroform-laced drink in his face. As she takes his gun away, he shoots himself in the foot. Bringing his body to Godwin’s lab, she swaps his brain with that of a goat — poetic justice for a man who wished to tame his wife through a surgical procedure. Godwin dies but his legacy lives on. The ending is a happy one: Bella is studying for her upcoming anatomy exam while sipping cocktails in the backyard with Toinette and Max. She seems comfortable enough with her sexuality. But seeing as she has walled herself off in a luxurious mansion, her political awakening is yet to come.
Integral to Gray’s work was the Scottish identity and its relationship to Britain. By transplanting Bella’s origin story from Glasgow to London, the film ends up throwing the text’s political allegory overboard. A portrait, captioned “Bella Caledonia”, in the book points to the protagonist as a personification of Scotland: without a past and marginalised but alive with great promise. The choice of relocating to the heart of the British Empire strips the film of Gray’s discerning eye on how national history is constructed by way of literature. In an interview, Lanthimos reasoned, “being a Greek person” and “making a film about Scotland” would have been “totally disingenuous.” By the same reasoning, couldn’t being a male director and making a film about female empowerment be considered “totally disingenuous”? The same could be said about any storyteller telling a story that is not their own experience. Imagine how poor our culture would be if artists only wrote and filmed what they knew and didn’t put in the work to learn.
Not to suggest Lanthimos isn’t entitled to make an adaptation his own. Which he very much does. Bella’s sheltered existence recalls his breakthrough feature Dogtooth, in which two sisters and a brothers, all adults, have grown up in complete isolation from the outside world. Confined to a compound by their despotic parents, the three have lived all their lives thinking that airplanes passing overhead are plastic toys, cats are man-eating predators and no one can leave their home until one of their “dogtooth” falls out on its own. Home becomes a place for the most unwholesome distortion of reality. Rebellion takes root when an outside visitor drops by and the siblings give in to the natural instincts of growing up. The eldest daughter dares to escape. In many ways, Poor Things continues her story through Bella.
As to the poor things of the title, the easy answer would be Bella who is remade, locked up in a mansion, made to feel monstrous for desiring pleasure and freedom. Bearing in mind the plural form, it is all the women who are infantilised, exploited and forced into motherhood. In truth, it is the men, the unfairer sex — an idea both Gray and Lanthimos seem to agree upon. It is the scientist, the father, the lawyer, the lover, the husband, the ex-husband. The poverty is of imagination: of men who struggle to believe a woman doesn’t want to be subservient and conform to their desires. The poverty is of morality: of men who denounce polite society while benefiting from it. The poverty is of what these men have come to believe is masculinity.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.