Poor Things Reveals the Monster in the Closet

I saw the film Poor Things at my local theater one evening this winter. I was delighted, mystified, disturbed. I went home afterward, slept and dreamt about it, woke up, and immediately started crafting this article … (but beware—this article includes spoilers!)

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Poor Things is smart without being pretentious. It speaks volumes without being pedantic. It is absolutely delicious and supremely creepy. It’s unabashedly feminist. It involves monsters.

But who are the monsters? Is Bella Baxter, an ungodly amalgam of a dead woman’s body and an infant’s brain, a monster? Or what about Godwin Baxter, aka “God,” a professor who dissects cadavers and, as a side project, imbues Bella with the spark of life? Perhaps, because Godwin appallingly replaces Bella’s brain with that of her unborn baby. She thereby becomes a child in a grown woman’s body, evincing the monstrous Victorian-era supposition that grown women possess the minds of children. Max, Godwin’s assistant, falls in love (aka lust) with this child-woman, so maybe he’s the monster? And her estranged husband? Classifying his cringeworthy cruelty as monstrous is an understatement. 

Frankenstein’s monster certainly looms over the story. The patchwork of scars that segment Godwin’s face resembles visual representations of Frankenstein’s monster. But Godwin, as Bella’s creator, is likewise analogous to Dr. Frankenstein himself. And to get more meta, Mary Shelley, author of the 1818 novel Frankenstein, was the daughter of William Godwin, social philosopher who believed in the primacy of individualism and reason, and Mary Wollstonecraft, radical feminist who died of complications from childbirth. Thus, fathered by a Godwin and carried by a mother who didn’t survive her birth, Shelly and Bella have similar origins. Both go on to defy contemporary expectations for women. And the plot of the film is an inverted Frankenstein story: whereas Frankenstein’s monster starts out with an open heart and grows murderous through his negative interactions with humans, Bella starts out as a slightly evil toddler-monster (i.e., crushing a frog and poking out the eyes of a cadaver), but, as she matures and gains experience in the world, develops wisdom and compassion.

Compassion and other feelings, as exemplified by Godwin’s proclamations that Max’s “emotionality is unseemly” and “our feelings must be put aside” were anathema to rational, scientific Enlightenment thinking—an ideology that bred monstrous behavior. Viewing scenes through the microscope-like fish-eye lens, along with other distorting camera angles, suggests distorted perceptions of other human beings. Godwin’s own father, a “scientist” dedicated to empirical observation, performed cruel experiments on his son. This, as well as Godwin experimenting on Bella, call to mind developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who, while not physically harming his children, nevertheless observed and recorded their behavior—a research method that is ethically questionable, and behavioral psychologist John Watson, who used child subject “Little Albert” to test his theories.

Psychologist Sigmund Freud, also, is invoked in the film. Godwin expresses his love of cocaine at one point, alluding to Freud’s predilection for the drug. And in Freudian fashion, Bella’s husband condescendingly tries to quell her “sexual hysteria,” assuming he can shape her according to his designs. Freud writes in a 1925 article, “Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own.” But Bella proves Freud wrong on all counts. In fact, she defies the expectations of all the men in her life. Godwin realizes he’s created a monster (i.e., a woman who has agency) when she rebels, shattering a jar of formaldehyded penises on the floor of his laboratory. And she definitely doesn’t harbor Freud’s penis envy—she describes the male inability to achieve multiple orgasms as a weakness and is secure in her own sexuality.

Freud was not the only man who intellectually constructed false notions of women. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf recounts that the “women” in literature written by men are weirdly contradictory reflections of men’s insecurities that say nothing about who women actually are. A few decades later, Simone de Beauvoir pronounced in The Second Sex “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Both Woolf and de Beauvoir see the idea of “women” as culturally constructed by patriarchal norms and observe that real women who desired to live on their own terms had difficulty escaping cultural conditioning (in part because of their disadvantaged material and legal circumstances). Bella, however, comes into instant womanhood, free of cultural constraints, and her fresh view of the world reveals the ridiculousness of gendered expectations. 

Women as dolls are a manifestation of such gendered expectations, an idea also recently explored in Barbie. Both Bella and Barbie are fashioned (by men) as dolls—exaggerated, era-specific specimens of womanhood. Imagining Barbie as a real person with her distorted proportions and perma-high-heel feet … monstrous. As for Bella, she dresses like one of the creepy dolls strewn around her “childhood” home, and later she and the other women in the brothel don ridiculous outfits and garish makeup. But both characters eventually get real, and like Mary Wollstonecraft had hoped for women, gain control of their bodies and their sexuality. Barbie coyly alludes to her new genitalia with a saccharine visit to the gynecologist, unlike Bella, who, just because it feels good, has sex and sex and more sex and more and more sex. 

In the end, who is the monster? Certainly not Bella. As she matures, she exhibits honesty, fortitude, curiosity, intelligence, spirit, compassion, and generosity. Not Godwin or Max, who sort of come around in the end. Definitely not the screenwriter or director, the men who architected this ultra-feminist film. Not even men in general. Rather, the monster in the closet is the repressive patriarchal notion that women are not full human beings—that they are not whole, embodied, thinking, feeling, desiring, acting people in the world. And the monster’s minions who miss out on such rich and varied aspects of humanity? Those who unquestioningly conform. Poor things.