Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (released in December 2023) has been lauded as a feminist masterpiece (MacArthur), with infrequent critique of film’s born sexy yesterday trope and its convoluted presentation of male sexual fantasies as feminist (Ahmed). While Emma Stone’s acting, alongside Lanthimos’s stunning worldbuilding, deserve all the praise they have received and more, this article focuses on what has not received much critical attention. In their feminist appraisals of the film, critics have either disregarded or overlooked the fact that the film is a masterpiece of insular White Feminism. The film’s epistemologically manipulative White Feminism builds itself up on the pedestal of imperialist patriarchy.
Poor Things is a feminist bildungsroman that traces the evolution of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a child in a woman’s body, from a naïve protected girl confined to Godwin’s (Willem Defoe) ritzy London townhouse to Max’s (Ramy Youssef) fiancé, to a world-traveling beloved of a much older lover Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), to a sex-worker in a Parisian brothel and eventually to the “ultimate self-made woman” (Ide) who inherits a lab where she turns her abusive (ex)-husband into a goat. She is a newly born woman, completely free of social pressures, free of the constraints of “polite society” as the films puts it. Who doesn’t love a bewitching, bold, and vivacious woman with benign aspirations, and who can also make one laugh?
Everyone loves Bella, including the audience. Bella claims her sexual and intellectual agency (Grady refuses to be controlled by men (Rooney), remains empathetic, and eventually transforms into an enormously likeable, sexually liberated woman. So liberated that critics aptly comment that some details may repel sensitive audiences, but the film, overall, is a triumph for the broadminded (Christy). But is the film’s limited vision of feminism, or the film’s White Feminism also a triumph? Let’s see.
Bella does what White girls do in Europe i.e. learn philosophy (Grady), and simultaneously – according to the film – have improbable amounts of sex while miraculously remaining safe, both physically and emotionally. How does Bella – an incredibly attractive, young, charming woman – travel through Victorian Europe unscathed? Because she is a stunning White woman written by feminist men in a world imagined by feminist men. When Bella makes mistakes, others pay the price. She performs her feminism and others watch in awe. Almost all men in her life (Godwin, Duncan, Max, and even her husband in her previous life) support and sponsor her feminism: her husband encourages and finances her prohibitively expensive and inventive methods of torturing their servants; she knows she can choose to return to the safety of her house and stability of a partnership with her fiancé, Max, anytime she likes; Duncan grooms and sponsors her much-celebrated initial sexual liberation during their Europe tour until she gives away all his money.
Duncan, unable to control Bella and her sexuality in Lisbon, takes her on a cruise ship under the pretense of a change of scenery. On the cruise, she meets Martha (Hanna Schygulla) and Harry (Jerrod Carmichael), who introduce her to books and philosophy. Harry, one of the two Black characters in the film, introduces Bella to structural socioeconomic inequities. During their stop in Alexandria, he, from the safety of their ship, shows Bella the abject poverty of the locals living in slums and in extreme heat. Quickly panning over the poor from a distance, camera is more invested in the rich Bella’s shock at witnessing poverty than in visually or dialogically investigating the poverty itself. Lisbon is balmy, charming, civilized, and safe; Alexandria, on the contrary, is scorching, primitive, uncivilized, and dangerous – the orient as it exists in the imperial imagination.
Bella is distraught. To fix the poverty in Alexandria, she entrusts all of Duncan’s gambling winnings to two guards who promise to hand the money to the poor – an act that reads like White savior complex. An enraged Duncan humiliates the ship’s crew for Bella’s decision to fix the poverty in Alexandria with his money, while Bella watches. Meanwhile, she saves her own money that Godwin had sewn in the seams of her dress to use in tough times. Eileen Jones attributes Bella’s shallow investment in fixing poverty to her youth or her childlikeness. However, she is naïve enough to use all of Duncan’s money to help the poor, but smart enough to not use her own money – i.e. make a personal sacrifice – for philanthropy. Does she try to learn why the slum poor are penniless while Duncan burns seemingly endless money on expensive hotels, bars, restaurants, and cruises to woo her? No. She almost literally throws Duncan’s money at the problem of poverty for self-gratification without any self-reflection. One wonders if her charity is her desire to help the poor or a subconscious attempt at taking revenge from Duncan.
This grand yet shallow gesture becomes more vexatious when Bella takes up sex-work. A destitute Duncan, unable to pay for the cruise, is dropped at the Parisian shore with Bella who has never had to worry about money up till this point. Exposed to the cold and rain, Bella now decides to use her own money to find shelter and food. She also earns money in return for sex. She ends up mobilizing the poverty-in-Alexandria scene in the service of her own self-gratification and subsequent self-actualization as a socialist sex-worker. She’s able to perform her sex positive and sex-work positive feminism because she can always return to financial safety, despite the façade of her economic vulnerability. Unsurprisingly, Godwin and Max later rescue her to their mansion in London as soon as they learn that that Duncan has run out of money. Given the film’s fixation on Bella’s liberatory sexuality and then her decision to start sex-work after her exposure to poor people and poverty in the world, one is compelled to read her ephemeral engagement with economic disparity as mere ‘poverty porn.’
She becomes a sex-worker because she needs money and accommodation, and she enjoys sex – win-win for everyone. But other sex workers pay for Bella’s feminism with their bodies and brains. In her first gig at the brothel, she is evidently amused by the ugliness and stink of poverty emanating from her first client’s body. So naturally, next time she asks questions about her clients. She asks why men get to choose who to have sex with, but sex-workers can’t choose their clients. It’s a reasonable but impractical question, she’s informed by Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter), who is impressed both with Bella’s beauty and brilliance. But who is forced to have sex with the ugly client due to Bella’s brilliance – a Black sex-worker, Toinette (Suzy Bemba). It doesn’t occur to the feminist Bella to ask why the same right of choice that she enjoys isn’t extended to other sex-workers like Toinette. The film’s “White Feminism” (Zakaria) doesn’t explore the consequences of Bella’s feminist choices for other women – for women of color and Black women.
Ironically, Toinette then teaches Bella about socialism, expanding upon the ideas introduced to her by Harry on the cruise. They attend the socialist teaching circle together. In one scene, Bella and Toinette are lying in bed together, presumably a hint that they’re romantically and sexually involved. Bella is feminist enough to sleep with the Black socialist sex-worker, Toinette, briefly but pragmatic enough to only date or marry non-socialist rich men like Duncan, Max, and her (ex?) husband.
Even in the exceptionally imaginative world of Poor Things, where Bella is unmarked by the prejudices and biases of polite society, she still somehow can’t imagine her self-actualization without rich men at its center; she (as imagined by the film’s director and writer) still seems to believe that the only sustained, radical thing a feminist can do is sleep with men.
Unsurprisingly then, the film not only dispenses with the Black characters but also discards those parts of Bella’s radical political education that she doesn’t find useful in her personal pursuit of self-actualization. Just like Harry, Toinette also disappears from the film while a presumably sexually liberated Bella returns to the safety of heterosexuality and opulence. Toinette only makes a return in the film’s last scene to stand on a side as a spare tool in Bella’s feminist toolbox, as a token Black friend in Bella’s feminist world. But what does Bella do with the socialism and radical intersectional feminism that Toinette and Harry, the only two Black characters, teach her? Nothing, I’m afraid.
Here, I am tempted to argue that Bella, in this performance of White Feminism, commits epistemic exploitation (Berenstain): she asks the only two Black characters, one of whom is queer, to teach her about the structural socioeconomic inequalities and feminism to eventually just discard them and the work they did in educating her to return to her rich ex-husband and then her fiancé, Max. So, ultimately, she deploys all her socialist-feminist knowledge to make more room for herself in the imperialist patriarchal structures of Victorian London. This is akin to contemporary lean-in, girl-boss feminism.
But more importantly, why does the audience remain invested in the protection of Bella’s naivety, her innocence? Despite Bella’s travels and her sexual and intellectual maturity, the film remains invested in preserving Bella’s naivety about the world – almost as if she navigates the world privileged by a force field of detachment. Her inability to engage with the world in an uncritical manner without any self-reflection remains her most enduring and endearing trait.
Audience loves seeing Bella – a stunning, playful White woman –take charge, break rules, assume sexual control, ditch Duncan, turn her husband into a goat. How would the audience react if, let’s say, Toinette was doing all this – would it still be cute, cathartic, playful, fun? Or are Toinette and Harry the most palatable when they are serious, intelligent, intellectual, supportive and when they teach Bella about injustices in the world?
Some have argued that feminism is projected on the film while there was none intended. However, comments by multiple members of the film crew prove otherwise. Tony McNamara, the screenwriter of Poor Things, describes it as a movie about a woman and everyone who attempts to control her (Keegan). Yorgos Lanthimos, the director, shares that he wanted to highlight men’s role in constructing the monstrous society we all inhabit (Keegan). Costume designer, Holly Waddington, comments that they all agreed that Bella would never wear a corset and making her wear one would feel conceptually wrong for a film that’s got a feminist message (Keegan). Despite attempts to own her body, nobody in the film shames Bella for her sexuality, so the fixation on Bella’s feminist refusal to be ashamed is ideologically rooted outside the film, in a world where White Feminism is the Western liberal trend.
One could, presumably, say that the film is set in the Victorian period and that is why its feminism is not inclusive or intersectional. In that case, what prompted the writer and director to revise the original narrator to center the woman’s voice (as opposed to the male narrator of Alasdair Gray’s novel on which the film is based)? How do they give Bella, a young woman, absolute sexual freedom without any moorings of shame (whether the film’s sexual portrayal is really feminist is another debate)? If the film includes two politically radical Black characters to educate Bella, then how does it fail to make Bella’s feminism more intersectional and inclusive after her political education?
Eventually, though the audience doesn’t get to see the extent of Bella’s experimental surgeries, it could be assumed that she turns into the men who, according to Lanthimos, contribute to making the world a monstrous place. Far from being a feminist masterpiece, the film only offers visions of epistemically exploitative White Feminism, which is wrapped in a dizzyingly ethereal, stunning reimagining of anachronistic Victorian Europe.
Works Cited
“Poor Things.” Film Authority, 2023.
Ahmed, Samira. “She’s bound and gagged for laughs’: is Poor Things a feminist masterpiece – or an offensive male sex fantasy?” The Guardian, 24 January 2024.
Berenstain, Nora. “Epistemic Exploitation.” Ergo, vol. 3, no. 22, 2016.
Rooney, David. “‘Poor Things’ Review: Emma Stone Is Stupendous as a Reanimated Woman Reinventing Herself in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Fantastical Odyssey.” The Hollywood Reporter, 1 September 2023.
Grady, Constance. “Poor Things stars Emma Stone as a horny Frankenstein’s monster coming of age.” Vox, 22 December 2023.
Greg, MacArthur. “8 Reasons Why Poor Things Is A Feminist Masterpiece.” Screen Rant, 22 December 2023
Ide, Wendy. “Emma Stone transfixes in Yorgos Lanthimos’s thrilling carnival of oddness.” The Guardian, 14 January 2024.
Jones, Eileen. “Poor Things Is a Light and Gorgeous Lanthimos Fantasy That Could Use More Weight.” Jacobin, 2023.
Keegan, Rebecca. “Every Day I Was Like, ‘What Am I Doing?’”: The Making of ‘Poor Things.’” The Hollywood Reporter, 20 December 2023.
Lemire, Christy. “Poor Things.” RogerEbert, 8 December 2023.
Zakaria, Rafia. Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption. Norton, 2022.
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