Finally, the highly anticipated “Poor Things” has also arrived in our theaters, which tells the story of Bella (Emma Stone), a young woman who died by suicide, brought back to life by Dr. Godwin, who transplants the brain of the fetus she was carrying in her womb. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the Golden Globe as “best musical or comedy film” and received several nominations for the 2024 Oscars. And, from the prevailing sentiment, I think many people liked it a lot. Good. I didn’t. Provided I can still say that I didn’t like Poor Things, right? I ask the director: can I say it, yes?
My question is legitimate, because if you dare to naively write somewhere “I didn’t like Poor Things” you are often considered an imbecile without taste and critical capacity and surrounded by crowds of “then, you didn’t understand it”, “you trivialized it” or “you didn’t read it in context”, etc.
Here, since we’re at it, I would like to tell these new Spielbergs to kindly start contemplating the hypothesis that there are human beings who may not like a film, however award-winning, despite having understood it, grasped its metaphors and decoded it. And I’ll tell you more: a film can legitimately not be liked even by those who are not media literate and by those who have no cinematographic culture. A film is like music, it’s like a painting: it communicates something to you regardless, because art speaks to the soul and we all have one.
But let’s get back to us: no, I didn’t like Poor Things. I found it decidedly horrendous, to be precise. I was not struck by anything so brilliant, indeed, to tell the truth, I was amazed by the recurring banality and pettiness of the dialogues. Certainly, I noticed how everything was cunningly put together: I saw colors and costumes alternating parallel to the protagonist’s changes. I observed the gothic and steampunk atmospheres and caught the cultural references. I perceived the dissonant and disturbing soundtrack, as well as the deliberately exasperated shots. But all this is only the artistic frame of a repugnant painting.
And the main reasons are three.
1. “There is no right way to do the wrong thing”
And what was seen in “Poor Things” is terribly wrong. Even if your name is Yorgos Lanthimos and your style is – let’s say – bizarre, it is wrong to show on the big screen such explicit scenes portraying a person only apparently adult, but who, for a good part of the film, has a childlike awareness (in perfect “Born Sexy Yesterday” style, coincidentally…). In case you didn’t notice, on that screen you saw a child having intimate relations with adult men, who took advantage of her naivety. You saw her humiliated and subjugated. And this aspect went almost unnoticed because, as far too many have written, those experiences are “functional to the character”. Instead, in that insidious bombardment of images there is absolutely nothing functional to the character: there is no discovery of an identity, experimentation, expression of one’s personality.
There is not even the intent to reveal the most vulgar corners of the human soul in order to create awareness in the viewer. None of this: in those images (as in Hollywood) there is only perversion. And an apple (!), that of deception. Because moreover, to tell the truth, the trailer that for a long time has snaked charmingly on all social media did not let it be understood how relevant sexuality was in Bella’s journey and if by chance you had never heard of Lanthimos, you went to the cinema unaware, just like her, and a form of violence – whether you are aware of it or not – you also suffered.
2. The intellect is an extra
The true protagonist of the film is Bella’s body, which she uses as the main instrument of her emancipation. As much as I consider the woman’s right to dispose of her own body sacred, I found it extremely reductive and mortifying to represent the protagonist claiming her freedom primarily through a bulimic approach to sexuality and almost relegating her intellect to a marginal role. So to those who say that the film is the manifesto of feminism, I would like to point out that it is exactly the opposite. Certainly the body of us women over the centuries has been mortified, demonized, controlled and we have been made guilty of our desire and of what we arouse in men, of the pleasure we feel and of what we do not feel, in some latitudes even guilty of having a body that must therefore be mutilated.
Yet it is in the recognition of the capacities of one’s intellect that women have found the strength to conquer their rights, to study, to vote, to manage their own sexuality, without physical and mental belts and hypocritical prejudices. I therefore find it disturbing that the idea of a liberation acquired almost mainly with sexual anarchy and promiscuity is affirmed. Is this then the freedom to which women aspire? The freedom of degradation?
3. The moral of the story is not moral
Where is Bella’s choice? When does she choose good by rejecting evil? At what point in the film are lust, gluttony, anger unequivocally labeled as wrong? Never. Because in fact there is no catharsis. And so what is so heroic about her journey? Why does the criticism mostly speak of Bella as if she were a woman who has something to teach us? Bella grows, but does not evolve internally. And the film in every way tries to inculcate in us the idea that one must experiment with everything, not only good but also “degradation, horror”. After all, Emma Stone herself, in her acceptance speech for the Golden Globe as “best actress”, stated that her character “accepts good and evil in equal measure”.
And this is her unforgivable mistake: fighting the evil that lurks insidiously within us is the only path to inner evolution, otherwise one is not facing an awakening – as many have written – but simply an age and cultural maturation that is naturally acquired through encounters, reading or travel.
Accepting evil and good in equal measure because both are part of the life-experience means not making a choice, being practically like Dante’s ignavi, sanza ‘nfamia e sanza lodo: that is, spiritually passive people. The moment of discovery and struggle with what is rotten that exists within us – the alchemical nigredo – is the moment when one can speak of awakening, when one begins to understand that the purpose of existence is the search for Good, the only true morality.
Bella, instead, undergoes an ethical involution because from victim she becomes, in turn, executioner and in the dramatic epilogue of the vindictive replacement of the human brain with the animal one there is the true abomination that debases divine creation to the subhuman level. In the Sistine Chapel, God’s finger, emerging from what has been rightly interpreted as an image of the brain, reaches out to touch man’s finger to infuse the pneuma that makes the creature alive. In the film we witness the reverse process: the apology of pedophilia and perversion leads to a nihilistic outcome, which abhors life and virtue, with the replacement of the human brain, true mirror of God, with an animal one.
What can I say? For me “Poor Things” was just yet another confirmation of how Hollywood continues to be the main spokesperson of the slimy design to violate our minds subliminally through films and music to distance us from what is pure and normalize the murky, to legitimize Evil and distance us from Truth.
Now you will be wondering “Quid est veritas?”. Well, know that Pontius Pilate also asked himself this question, but he “washed his hands” and evaded the choice.
We are called not to make his same mistake.
Rona
♥
“When the human race learns to read the language of symbolism, a great veil will fall from the eyes of men.”
Manly P. Hall
