Poor Things and American Frankenfeminism
Poor Things. I see you. And I am into you. But I do have a bone to pick with you.
Last week, we talked about how Frankenstein had a feminist/anti-feminist moment in 1976, in the super weird and unsuccessful film Embryo. And it turns out that in 2023, Frankenstein had another feminist/anti-feminist moment. Poor Things (2023) was, like, pretty obviously a feminist Frankenstein reboot. (Maggie Gylenhaal’s upcoming The Bride! promises to be another—stay tuned for that.)
Like Embryo, Poor Things explores the possibility of saving a fetus that’s trapped inside a dying mother and growing that fetus up into a gorgeous, autonomous young woman. In Embryo, an insane and traumatized doctor harvests a fetus from a dead woman and grows it up. In Poor Things, an insane and traumatized doctor, uh, harvests a fetus from a dead woman and grows it up. In Embryo, the fetus grows up to be a gorgeous, highly sexual, super genius. In Poor Things, the fetus grows up to be a gorgeous, highly sexual, super genius. Mmm-kay.
The first big difference, of course, is that in Poor Things, the fetus’ brain gets put into the body of its own mother, whereas in Embryo the mother’s body is collateral damage, and is not narratively important. So, where Embryo is really not interested in the mother at all, Poor Things is precisely interested in making us bear witness to a female fetus that parasitically takes over the body of its own mother, as a host for its own life. In so doing, the mother’s body lives on, but with the consciousness of the daughter. The second big difference is that, in Poor Things, the traumatized, insane doctor (Willem Dafoe) has surprisingly sound sexual boundaries; he doesn’t try to fuck his daughter/creation/ward/pupil In Embryo, the traumatized, insane doctor (Rock Hudson) does precisely that, ultimately impregnating his daughter/creation/ward/pupil with a fetus that will ultimately accelerate her demise. And of course, the third big difference is that Victoria in Embryo gets very murdery, whereas Bella in Poor Things gets very sex workery.
Taken together, these three differences say a lot about the historical and current status of what I’ll just go ahead and call Frankenfeminism in American cinema.
In Embryo’s panicked Frankenfeminism, the mother’s body doesn’t matter. It’s totally abject, garbage, medical waste. So much so that we never even see her. She’s incidental, accidental. Nothing. Because the core thought experiment of the film, as regards women’s reproductive rights, is quite conservative: what if we could make a 12-week fetus viable? What would that look like? Forget about the mother’s autonomy, or agency, or wishes. In fact, just kill her off, no big deal. Correlatively, even though Victoria grows up from her fetal state to be scintillatingly, supernaturally intelligent, what ultimately matters about her is her sexual desirability. That’s what gives her power, and that’s what ultimately takes her down. No matter how paternal Dr. Holliston’s feelings may have initially been about her, her status as a sexual object trumps every other site of value in her. Quite old-school; quite patriarchal. But the film goes too far with her sexuality, so far as to make her enjoy her sexuality—she’s shown to be voluptuous and autoerotic—which, of course, means she’s marked for unplanned pregnancy, decay, and death. The feminism of this film is not, in fact, feminism at all. It’s full-on Frankenfeminism, where the filmmakers tried to make something beautiful, but instead made a horrific chimera of misogynist tropes: woman as baby incubator; woman as sex object; woman as whore; woman as hag; woman as corpse.
Just shy of 50 years later, Poor Things goes in a radically different direction, in terms of its own Frankenfeminism. Bella’s mother’s body matters a lot; without it, baby Bella wouldn’t live. Now, there’s a problem, which is that the mother didn’t get to choose what would happen with her own body after she committed suicide. In fact, she pretty clearly chose not to have a body anymore, when she threw herself off the bridge. So, Mommy’s wishes aren’t getting respected here, either. But at least Mommy gets to have, as it were, a second crack at her own life, even if that life is, from the perspective of Bella’s mother, bodily only. Once Bella’s brain is surgically implanted into her mother’s skull, most of the rest of the film is about Bella making autonomous choices, acting on impulses and whims, thinking and learning according to her own inclinations. The entire film is an aria on choice—for Bella. What will she play with? What will she eat? And later, whom will she sleep with? How far will she allow them to push her, before she rejects them? What will she charge them, after she joins the brothel to make money? Where will she live? Whom will she marry? It’s all about Bella’s choices, all the time.
Until, her mother’s life reaches up, as though from the grave like Frankensteinian body parts, to drag her to her doom. Bella, literally at the altar to marry her chosen beloved, is discovered by her mother’s husband—which is to say, her own father—who believes her to be his disappeared wife. Bella is constrained to go and live with this man, even though she is not her mother, and even though she did not consent to marry him. This, needless to say, is a premise far, far, far more incestuous and nasty even than what we have in Embryo with Dr. Holliston and Victoria. Once there, at her mother’s own former home, Bella realizes that her father—now also her husband—is a cruel, abusive man. He threatens her with weapons. He gaslights her. He coerces her. He manipulates her. He abuses her. He is, by just about every definition in the book, a domestic abuser. And now we know why Bella’s mother killed herself (or tried to): she was pregnant by a sociopathic domestic abuser, and she wanted out. She made her choice. And now Bella, it appears, will have to live out the life her mother wanted to escape, but ultimately couldn’t, imprisoned by a sociopathic husband-father.
If you can think of a better metaphoric rendering of what it is to live under The Patriarchy, I’m here for it.
Fortunately for Bella, the evil shitbird husband-father literally shoots himself in the foot, and she is able to transform him into a goat-brained zomboid of his former self.
Bella winds up happy, wealthy, paired off with someone doting and appropriate, and studying. Feminist icon! Also, she had a crazy, crazy, crazy amount of sex during the movie, and is in no way punished for it by the narrative arc. That is, the film depicts her sexuality as not just acceptable, but laudable and glorious. Feminist icon indeed!
There’s a reason everyone loves this film. And I would count myself among their number: it’s a great film. Provocative in all the best ways.
But I have to say that the ending bummed me out. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a super happy, bouncy, hilarious, righteous ending. It’s an ending befitting the world I want to live in. But alas, it’s not an ending befitting the world we actually do live in.
1. The Patriarchy does not tend to shoot itself in the foot. Like it or not, The Patriarchy is careful with its weapons, and almost never own-goals with them.
2. Relatedly, women trapped in abusive domestic situations by The Patriarchy usually cannot escape them, either mentally or physically, without the significant exertion of effort and the intervention of friends/family/allies.
3. The only reason Bella is able to escape—a reason that is ever-present but ever-muted in the film—is that she is wealthy and was created/raised/tutored by a wealthy benefactor. Put otherwise, the fantasy about tearing down The Patriarchy one fuck and one book at a time that this film advances for us is shot through with classism.
To be clear, I don’t see any of these faults as profoundly disabling; it’s still a great film, and a fun one. I’d be the first in line to throw roses at Emma Stone if I saw her crossing Broadway. But the ultra color-saturated, high res, high production values, orchestral, choreographic ending of the film made me sad, precisely because it was so totally and completely a fairy tale ending, to a story that is not a fucking fairy tale.
Women die while pregnant all the time. Sometimes through suicide, sure, but much more often through complications due to pregnancy; as Cat Bohannan points out in her brilliant new book Eve, pregnancy is fucking dangerous, and it kills women on the regular.[1] When that happens, the babies get born grow up not knowing their mothers, and therefore not being able clearly either to identify with them, or to disidentify from them—both of which are crucial processes in infantile and childhood psychological development. In the absence of a mother, many children born in scenarios like this are exposed to a greater likelihood of falling prey to the predatory ways of Bad Actors, like the shitbird husband-father in the film. Escaping that situation requires education, allies, and money. As the film well and truly realizes. And I appreciate it for that; I appreciate its candor about the pre-requisites for Bella’s achieving escape velocity from her traumatic origin story, and from The Patriarchy that sought to keep her in shackles.
But I guess I wanted the film to end more squarely as a horror movie—in keeping with its forebear, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and with what I suspect strongly was another influence, Embryo. I wanted it to end dark. I wanted the horror hangover. But the film couldn’t give us that. Because the nature and texture of its own Frankenfeminism is precisely to take Frankenstein and make it not a horror story. Instead, it’s a goofball sex comedy, with super gorgeous production values and a sick score. Embryo doctors Frankenstein by relating the horror of feminism’s failure to thrive in 1976 Patriarchal America. Poor Things doctors Frankenstein by reenvisioning its own latent feminism not as a horror narrative, but as a survival narrative. And again, I both love that, and I lament it. Because I do not, personally, think we are ready to look beyond the horror of the Patriarchy. I don’t think we’ve earned it, somehow. I don’t think we’re ready to relax into a technicolor goofball dark comedy of Frankenfeminism.
Or at least, I’m not. I mean, like I said, I loved this film. You can ask the friend I watched it with: the scene when Mark Ruffalo falls hard while running up the staircase in Bella’s house made me laugh so, so hard, I was snorting and farting at the same time. Because, wow: I like to see a sexual predator eat shit on a staircase. Seriously, I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed harder at a single second in a film.
But the ending left me with a real deep sense of ick. Not on its own terms, of course; there’s literally nothing ick about the ending. Except the lack of ick itself.
If we’re going to do Frankenfeminism in the 2020s, let’s let it be fucking raw and gnarly; let’s let it reflect the real conditions of women—not just rich, privileged, highly educated women, but all women. Maybe I just have to wait and see what Maggie Gyllenhaal does with her film next year.
[1] Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution (2023).