Poor Things thoughts
Jan. 12th, 2024 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeI am too sleepy to attempt much of a non-spoilers section to this post. This post is growing like coral off of the notes I made on paper after a screening. But: Poor Things, like The Favourite, has Yorgos Lanthimos directing, Tony McNamara writing, and Emma Stone as a lead - really the lead, this time. And they are all doing what they do as well as ever: it is well-designed, uncomfortable, sharp, and funny.
The beginning of the movie was dense with surprises when I first saw it. The second time, all the elements it introduces were old acquaintances: ah yes, hello again perfectly normal [person/animal/place]. I liked it enough to see it a second time in theatres partly because of how expansive it felt the first time; I'm pleased I did, and not just because it helped me gather my thoughts about things that were niggling at me - I had a great time both times - but the whole thing did feel smaller when I knew where it was going.
I notice myself getting very immersed in movies these days; or maybe I mean I've seen a lot of examples of movies aimed directly at the brainstem over the last few years. This, Dune, Across The Spiderverse, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Is spectacle hitting me different? Or am I just forgetting past immersions?
So if you haven't seen the film and are reading this, a) I would advise against doing that, but b) in Victorian London a brilliant scientist has resurrected an unborn child's brain in the skull of its dead mother's body and is determined to raise her as a perfect scientific experiment, not because he's a loving dad. He's not. Stop implying that he isn't a man of scientific objectivity, he doesn't like it.
I have only been learning about Tumblr in the years since the Locked Tomb started. This is the first time I've seen something and thought, in so many words, "There's gonna be Discourse about this." Bella starts out with a child's brain in an adult's body. The movie is well aware of the discomfort it's playing with: she learns to masturbate the scene after we learn this. I think the camera early on is good and artful in how it looks at Bella. As she learns to masturbate, we see her legs lying almost still. I sensed none of the male gaze in it. They were just a person's legs. We then cut to her face, and she has an intense, distant focus, before going "Oh gosh yes I like this." A few scenes earlier, when she lies chloroformed, and Max hesitates a fraction of a second before covering her naked breast with fabric, I don't feel as though I'm inside his head, nor do I feel the erotic charge which is part of why he proposes marriage to her some scenes later.
The flyer for this movie describes Bella as 'Free from the prejudices of her times.' But she has not been raised in the absence of those prejudices: she's been raised with more kindness than most, certainly, but the first thing anyone tells her about masturbation is that it's not done in polite society. Her immunity to those socialisations is part and parcel of the way her inexperience is a strength, not a weakness. When she goes to Lisbon with the rake Duncan Weddeburne, the title card (gosh the title cards are beautiful!) shows her riding happily on the back of a massive fanged fish. Everywhere she goes in the movie presents some level of sharp-toothed threat. The sequence where she wanders off through the city streets has all the ambience of a drug trip: hyper-stimulating and labyrinthine. But she has confidence, and it is warranted: a conceit without which the premise couldn't survive. I want to read people talking about this treatment of innocence who know more about past such treatments than I do. Currently what I've read is interviews with Emma Stone talking about the sex scenes being well-handled in filming, and some stuff that implies negative views on the sex scenes which amount to "Gasp! There's a lot of them! We mustn't have that!" None of the things I've skimmed have anyone talking about the age the character's brain is when the sex happens as though it was meant to be thought of literally. And in part, maybe it isn't. The abstraction of the design is gorgeous! The film isn't set in Victorian times, but in the dream of them! That doesn't seem a complete answer. The teeth are left too sharp. The scenario is too precise.
~
I appreciated more the second time the way the arc of this movie is Bella surviving Weddeburne easily, and Weddeburne, the ruiner, pouring his own medicine into a glass and drinking it because of his total inability to understand any other way of relating to women. I loved the scene where she looks at his face in puzzlement and mild horror as he gradually starts weeping. On first viewing I thought the film would be episodic enough to leave Weddeburne entirely behind, which it never does. I still like the idea of a version of it which did, since there would be more space for other things - when we meet Harry and Martha, when we get to the brothel, whole other vistas open up, across which Weddeburne's shadow keeps falling. On the other hand, it is cohesive this way, and it sure is fun and good to see Mark Ruffalo implode.
~
In the brothel, is Bella inventing 'make small talk with clients' as a method? This, and the fact that lack of contraception causes no problems, are other aspects of how innocence is permitted to serve her as a strength. We see her having sex and other interactions with clients, and talking with Toinette, and having deeply uncomfortable interactions with the madam; we don't see any other dynamics between the sex workers from whom she might be learning. This is partly because of language barrier: neither I nor (initially) Bella speak French, and if I did, I'd be understanding more of Toinette's lines. As it is, I find Toinette the most underserved person in the movie.
[Edited to add: the other important thing about her innocence is that it does harm and benefit others. Those sailors probably pocket the money. When she speaks up about another way of doing things in the brothel, Toinette pays a price for it. Though I feel a bit as though she's narratively blessed, it's not a free blessing.]
~
I still don't know why Bella wants to marry Max at the end. I mean, I do, they have an old connection and he's kind, competent, and accepting in a world where those things are at a premium; but the whole 'agreed to marry her because he loved her while her brain was about three years old and he was intimidated by her mad scientist father' thing seems... It's not that it seems implausible to me. It's that we don't see her stand back and choose between options. No other option is built out for us to see except the terrifying worst of Victorian patriarchy. I'm glad the end sequence with her body's old self's murderously terrible husband is in the movie, but it takes some of the weight off Max and God, because they're so good in contrast to that. (The scenes where she does talk with them about it all, while brief, are great. And on first viewing I missed the way God mistakes his cancer for grief and responds to it by turning his back on emotion and re-animating a corpse as a proxy daughter, which it is so easy to imagine Willem Dafoe saying mildly, as though it made sense).
This leaves me interested to read the book the film is based on, because spoilers I have read on Wikipedia about the way it frames the story are interesting and may be telling on this point.
~
Trailing edges of thoughts:
Emma Stone is so good in this.
For the most part I find Bella's early dialogue has a strangeness that isn't twee, which is impressive. There was one bit I thought was twee, I don't recall which.
When Weddeburne is outside the window in the snow in Paris, Bella and Toinette go back inside, and the camera stays with Weddeburne for a few beats. When the terrible old husband gets given the brain of a goat at the end, we zoom in on him as the music crashes: triumph. These are two moments where I would have felt more victory in less focus.
I still love the fisheye. leaflemming is unconvinced by the fisheye. I feel that every instance of it is justified, for different moods and movements and intensities, though I can't necessarily tell you how.
What I do not think is justified for its intensity is the overuse of 'fuck'. I recall also thinking this about The Favourite, which Tony McNamara also wrote. Now, I stand by a lot of the fucks! Especially the several times when someone delivers a formal, period-sounding barb and someone else adds something like, "Yeah, fuck off, fuckface" as though providing a translation into English. But the word's power lies in how it pops, and after a while (when it's found indented into notepaper, when it's what a servant says in the uncontrolled moment when soup is spilled on her) I found that it began to flatten.
Bella calls one person 'strange feathered lady' and two more as 'old spotted couple.' Blurting out things society wouldn't like mentioned is the modus operandi of her early-film self. So it's interesting how she never mentions that Harry is the first black man we see her meet. It's Martha she comments on. This seems quite deliberate: the script knowing what it can handle/what it's focusing on.
Toinette, the film's other black character, and her socialism which is one of the implied counters to Harry's cynicism, are footnotes. If there's not more of her in the source material, I'll eat my hat. (My confidence isn't high enough to promise not to cook it first).
The film knows Bella's discovery of poverty is deathly serious and also not very important; what she is discovering, in her first moment beholding the poor, is that the stairway down is broken and the problem is one she, as an individual rich woman, cannot solve. Her wanting to take that stair is a wish to die in the face of the problem at the same time as it's a wish to cross the distance.
The beginning of the movie was dense with surprises when I first saw it. The second time, all the elements it introduces were old acquaintances: ah yes, hello again perfectly normal [person/animal/place]. I liked it enough to see it a second time in theatres partly because of how expansive it felt the first time; I'm pleased I did, and not just because it helped me gather my thoughts about things that were niggling at me - I had a great time both times - but the whole thing did feel smaller when I knew where it was going.
I notice myself getting very immersed in movies these days; or maybe I mean I've seen a lot of examples of movies aimed directly at the brainstem over the last few years. This, Dune, Across The Spiderverse, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Is spectacle hitting me different? Or am I just forgetting past immersions?
So if you haven't seen the film and are reading this, a) I would advise against doing that, but b) in Victorian London a brilliant scientist has resurrected an unborn child's brain in the skull of its dead mother's body and is determined to raise her as a perfect scientific experiment, not because he's a loving dad. He's not. Stop implying that he isn't a man of scientific objectivity, he doesn't like it.
I have only been learning about Tumblr in the years since the Locked Tomb started. This is the first time I've seen something and thought, in so many words, "There's gonna be Discourse about this." Bella starts out with a child's brain in an adult's body. The movie is well aware of the discomfort it's playing with: she learns to masturbate the scene after we learn this. I think the camera early on is good and artful in how it looks at Bella. As she learns to masturbate, we see her legs lying almost still. I sensed none of the male gaze in it. They were just a person's legs. We then cut to her face, and she has an intense, distant focus, before going "Oh gosh yes I like this." A few scenes earlier, when she lies chloroformed, and Max hesitates a fraction of a second before covering her naked breast with fabric, I don't feel as though I'm inside his head, nor do I feel the erotic charge which is part of why he proposes marriage to her some scenes later.
The flyer for this movie describes Bella as 'Free from the prejudices of her times.' But she has not been raised in the absence of those prejudices: she's been raised with more kindness than most, certainly, but the first thing anyone tells her about masturbation is that it's not done in polite society. Her immunity to those socialisations is part and parcel of the way her inexperience is a strength, not a weakness. When she goes to Lisbon with the rake Duncan Weddeburne, the title card (gosh the title cards are beautiful!) shows her riding happily on the back of a massive fanged fish. Everywhere she goes in the movie presents some level of sharp-toothed threat. The sequence where she wanders off through the city streets has all the ambience of a drug trip: hyper-stimulating and labyrinthine. But she has confidence, and it is warranted: a conceit without which the premise couldn't survive. I want to read people talking about this treatment of innocence who know more about past such treatments than I do. Currently what I've read is interviews with Emma Stone talking about the sex scenes being well-handled in filming, and some stuff that implies negative views on the sex scenes which amount to "Gasp! There's a lot of them! We mustn't have that!" None of the things I've skimmed have anyone talking about the age the character's brain is when the sex happens as though it was meant to be thought of literally. And in part, maybe it isn't. The abstraction of the design is gorgeous! The film isn't set in Victorian times, but in the dream of them! That doesn't seem a complete answer. The teeth are left too sharp. The scenario is too precise.
~
I appreciated more the second time the way the arc of this movie is Bella surviving Weddeburne easily, and Weddeburne, the ruiner, pouring his own medicine into a glass and drinking it because of his total inability to understand any other way of relating to women. I loved the scene where she looks at his face in puzzlement and mild horror as he gradually starts weeping. On first viewing I thought the film would be episodic enough to leave Weddeburne entirely behind, which it never does. I still like the idea of a version of it which did, since there would be more space for other things - when we meet Harry and Martha, when we get to the brothel, whole other vistas open up, across which Weddeburne's shadow keeps falling. On the other hand, it is cohesive this way, and it sure is fun and good to see Mark Ruffalo implode.
~
In the brothel, is Bella inventing 'make small talk with clients' as a method? This, and the fact that lack of contraception causes no problems, are other aspects of how innocence is permitted to serve her as a strength. We see her having sex and other interactions with clients, and talking with Toinette, and having deeply uncomfortable interactions with the madam; we don't see any other dynamics between the sex workers from whom she might be learning. This is partly because of language barrier: neither I nor (initially) Bella speak French, and if I did, I'd be understanding more of Toinette's lines. As it is, I find Toinette the most underserved person in the movie.
[Edited to add: the other important thing about her innocence is that it does harm and benefit others. Those sailors probably pocket the money. When she speaks up about another way of doing things in the brothel, Toinette pays a price for it. Though I feel a bit as though she's narratively blessed, it's not a free blessing.]
~
I still don't know why Bella wants to marry Max at the end. I mean, I do, they have an old connection and he's kind, competent, and accepting in a world where those things are at a premium; but the whole 'agreed to marry her because he loved her while her brain was about three years old and he was intimidated by her mad scientist father' thing seems... It's not that it seems implausible to me. It's that we don't see her stand back and choose between options. No other option is built out for us to see except the terrifying worst of Victorian patriarchy. I'm glad the end sequence with her body's old self's murderously terrible husband is in the movie, but it takes some of the weight off Max and God, because they're so good in contrast to that. (The scenes where she does talk with them about it all, while brief, are great. And on first viewing I missed the way God mistakes his cancer for grief and responds to it by turning his back on emotion and re-animating a corpse as a proxy daughter, which it is so easy to imagine Willem Dafoe saying mildly, as though it made sense).
This leaves me interested to read the book the film is based on, because spoilers I have read on Wikipedia about the way it frames the story are interesting and may be telling on this point.
~
Trailing edges of thoughts:
Emma Stone is so good in this.
For the most part I find Bella's early dialogue has a strangeness that isn't twee, which is impressive. There was one bit I thought was twee, I don't recall which.
When Weddeburne is outside the window in the snow in Paris, Bella and Toinette go back inside, and the camera stays with Weddeburne for a few beats. When the terrible old husband gets given the brain of a goat at the end, we zoom in on him as the music crashes: triumph. These are two moments where I would have felt more victory in less focus.
I still love the fisheye. leaflemming is unconvinced by the fisheye. I feel that every instance of it is justified, for different moods and movements and intensities, though I can't necessarily tell you how.
What I do not think is justified for its intensity is the overuse of 'fuck'. I recall also thinking this about The Favourite, which Tony McNamara also wrote. Now, I stand by a lot of the fucks! Especially the several times when someone delivers a formal, period-sounding barb and someone else adds something like, "Yeah, fuck off, fuckface" as though providing a translation into English. But the word's power lies in how it pops, and after a while (when it's found indented into notepaper, when it's what a servant says in the uncontrolled moment when soup is spilled on her) I found that it began to flatten.
Bella calls one person 'strange feathered lady' and two more as 'old spotted couple.' Blurting out things society wouldn't like mentioned is the modus operandi of her early-film self. So it's interesting how she never mentions that Harry is the first black man we see her meet. It's Martha she comments on. This seems quite deliberate: the script knowing what it can handle/what it's focusing on.
Toinette, the film's other black character, and her socialism which is one of the implied counters to Harry's cynicism, are footnotes. If there's not more of her in the source material, I'll eat my hat. (My confidence isn't high enough to promise not to cook it first).
The film knows Bella's discovery of poverty is deathly serious and also not very important; what she is discovering, in her first moment beholding the poor, is that the stairway down is broken and the problem is one she, as an individual rich woman, cannot solve. Her wanting to take that stair is a wish to die in the face of the problem at the same time as it's a wish to cross the distance.
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Date: 2024-01-12 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-12 10:40 pm (UTC)