The Impoverished Sexuality of 'Poor Things'
Debased sex isn't "sex positive"
Female versions of Frankenstein’s monster may not be new to cinema, but director Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is a contender for the most controversial. With its steampunk backdrop, the film follows a suicide victim reanimated with the consciousness of an unborn child, whose cognizance rapidly develops to match the confines of her adult body. This woman, named Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), goes on a journey of self-discovery, defying all the ways the men in her life attempt to control and confine her.
Self-discovery is a legitimate plot device, especially for protagonists in their formative years or working through significant life changes. Problems arise, however, when the narrative adopts the paradigm of expressive individualism, which “ties human dignity and personhood to one’s ability to live unencumbered from any tradition or moral restraint.”
In this vein, Poor Things screenwriter Tony McNamara explains how audiences will envy Bella’s unencumbered freedom:
She is what none of us get to be. . . . I think there’s part of you that kind of goes, I wish we were that! I wish we could adventure through life and discover it on our own terms, and shape life the way we wish, and be slightly more impervious to outside forces, like she is.
The article goes on to say that McNamara’s view of freedom is “particularly evident in Poor Things’ approach to sex.” Indeed, Bella’s numerous sexual pursuits are integral to the development of the plot. The American Spectator describes the film as “grafting the Sexual Revolution onto Victorian England.” People says Bella’s “discovery of womanhood includes plenty of uninhibited sex.” And according to Vulture, Bella is “one of cinema’s most shamelessly sexual characters.”
When a narrative like Poor Things garners such a large amount of critical acclaim—including 11 Oscar nominations—it would behoove Christians to evaluate the misguided values undergirding it. We can arrange our evaluation in light of three biblical characteristics of God-glorifying, soul-satisfying sex.
The following is not designed to be a movie review or an evaluation of all the film’s various components. We will limit ourselves to what is widely acknowledged about the film—i.e., its sexually explicit nature, as evidenced by dozens of reviews and secondary sources, including the “final cut” draft of the screenplay.
Characteristic #1: Joyful Giving
Scripture portrays sexual intercourse as a self-giving act: a man and woman relinquish their autonomy and seek the good of each other (1 Cor. 7:1-5). Sex is a blessing of mutual giving and mutual delight. In contrast to this self-giving view of sex, modern society promotes the concept of self-fulfillment: “how can I extract what I want from others?”
In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis points out the pitifully narrow view of sex this posture reveals:
We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he “wants a woman.” Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. (94)
This description certainly applies to Bella’s first lover, the controlling cad Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). But it also applies to Bella herself. In the words of film critic James Berardinelli, Bella views Duncan as “little more than a means to provide her with carnal pleasure,” and that she “gradually loses interest in him as she explores her sexuality in increasingly extreme fashions.”1
Bella is surprised to see Duncan offended when he finds out she has had sex with someone else. “Are you now crying?” she asks him. “What a confusing person you are.” Both she and Duncan are treating each other like animals, and yet neither notices anything amiss with their own actions.
Speaking of animals: arguments have been made that Lanthimos dehumanizes the characters in his movies, reducing them to their animal instincts (see, for example, here and here). This holds true in Poor Things as well. Critic David Thomson says the film “is interested in nothing so much as animal energy and its release. It says: ‘Can’t you see, we the people may have to become no more or less than animated sensation machines? Isn’t that where we have been headed all along?’”
Characteristic #2: Covenantal Love
In the Christian view, sex is pursued in the context of covenantal love. Instead of being a performance or a consumerist product, sex within marriage offers a man and a woman the repeated joy of what Tim Keller has called a “covenant renewal ceremony.” Sex outside this protective covenant lacks the acceptance, belonging, safety, and security involved between a committed husband and wife.
When Bella finally decides to leave Duncan for good, she wrestles with a dilemma: “I need sex and money. I could take a lover, another Wedderburn who would keep me, but may require an awful lot of attention.” The second option she considers is joining a Paris brothel: “Or it’s twenty minutes at a time and the rest of my day is free to study on the world and the improving of it.” She opts for the latter: access to sex, sans a relationship.2
This sex-as-commerce arrangement goes as well as one might expect. Bella’s first encounter is with a pungent-smelling client who roughly treats her as a mere vehicle for his own pleasure. And yet, Bella later describes the experience as “brutal, in a strangely not unpleasant way.” Somehow, she gets pleasure out of being treated like an object.
Shortly after, Bella receives a compliment from Madam Swiney, the woman in charge of the brothel: “Gosh you look pretty. How it agrees with you to be ravaged.” Bella’s response is, “I suppose.”3
These are small bits of dialogue, and yet they communicate a large and disgusting concept: that sexual exploitation can be not only enjoyable but also beneficial to the human psyche/body. The fantasy world of Poor Things creates a twisted fantasy reality in which the abuse of sex somehow leads to the enjoyment of sex.
When she’s later reunited with Max, the man to whom she had been earlier betrothed (before Duncan whisked her away), Bella candidly states that Duncan became upset “when he discovered my whoring.” She asks Max, “Are you okay with that?”
Max’s response echoes the perspective of expressive individualism: “It is your body, Bella Baxter. Yours to give freely.”4
Bella thus acquiesces to their original marital arrangement, stating, “I am enjoying this practical love we have.” Not, evidently, a “fanciful” love—nothing influenced by covenantal commitment—but rather a love defined according to Bella’s own terms.
Characteristic #3: Private Intimacy
An intimate activity is, by its very nature, private. Public intimacy is an oxymoron. As such, Scripture compares sex devoid of privacy to a broken well, its waters contaminated by the dirt of the streets (Prov. 5:15-19). The sex act is perverted if it becomes a spectator sport.
The copious amount of onscreen sexual activity in Poor Things turns sex into a spectator sport, and sources like Observer, National Review, and actor Mark Ruffalo have compared the film to pornography. Even IndieWire, while denying the pornographic nature of the film, ponders how “this brazenly sex-crazed movie” escaped an NC-17 rating.
The explicit sex prompted some audience members to walk out of a Venice Film Festival screening. One scene in particular caused a ratings stir within the British Board of Film Classification: where a father brings his two teenage sons to watch him with Bella as a form of sex education.
It’s one thing to include sexually promiscuous characters in a film. That can be accomplished without pornographic or prurient visuals. It’s quite another to take Lanthimos’ approach, as explained by the director himself:
It was very important for me to not make a film that was going to be prude, because it would be completely betraying the main character. So we had to be confident. . . . The character [had to] have no shame, and Emma had to have no shame about her body, nudity and engaging in those scenes.
Were Lanthimos to film a story about a serial killer, I doubt he would want the film’s star to actually kill people in order to be true to the character. And yet Poor Things required Emma Stone to go beyond portraying a character who has no shame exposing her body in a sexual context; she had to actually become a person who has no shame exposing her body in a sexual context.
That Stone willingly participated doesn’t change the pornographic or dehumanizing nature of those scenes. Especially in our pornified western culture, one can willingly participate in sexual exploitation without recognizing or acknowledging it.5
Film critics are aware of this.6 For example, Medium contributor Robert K Starr, who confesses wanting movies to be sexier, nevertheless says, “None of the men [in Poor Things] are shot with the kind of sexuality that Stone is. . . . Lanthimos may very well be trying to make a movie about female empowerment, but his horniness is getting in the way of his message.” Angelica Jade Bastién, who herself embraces the label “deliciously vulgar,” still writes that Poor Things displays a strong interest in “the ways in which a young woman’s body can be positioned and used,” and that “scenes like the Paris brothel sequence play like a male fantasy.” And in reflecting on Stone’s embrace of a buffet of opportunities for sexualized nudity, Rex Reed, one of America’s most renowned film critics, asks, “This is acting?”7
A Poor Substitute
Publications like MovieWeb, The Hollywood Reporter, and CinemaBlend have called the sexual activity in Poor Things “sex positive.” But such a term is a misnomer—like eating out of a garbage pail being called “free-spirited.”
Christians shouldn’t just shrug, or fall for the “sex positive” spin, when these impoverished, upside-down views of sex are advanced in popular culture. Nor should we merely condemn it. We should call it out for the poor substitute that it is: a self-absorbed, loveless, debauched, dehumanizing, exploitative view of sex.
The characters in films like Poor Things (among many other examples) are fooling about with a blurred copy of sex when much greater pleasures are available in the pure form—just like (to quote Lewis again) “an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”
Poor things, indeed.
Special thanks to Brett McCracken for providing editorial insight on this piece
As an agnostic, Berardinelli does not find this movie repugnant, but rather “deliciously raunchy” and “one of the year’s best.”
In an online conversation, a friend of mine pointed out that Bella’s disinterest in a relationship projects a form of male sexuality/lust upon a woman. She said, “When men lust, they are tempted to forfeit the relationship for mere pleasure. When women lust, the combination of relationship and pleasure must be present.” That being the case, Bella’s “total disregard for relational intimacy is not feminine in the least. One more example of ‘women are stronger when they act like men.’” And since our culture portrays the female sex drive as basically a carbon copy of the male sex drive, “women go along with it since they’re convinced that’s what empowerment looks like.”
The film attempts to sidestep this atrocity by giving Bella a modern perspective on prostitution: she asks Swiney at one point, “You really expect me to go upstairs with a man even if I find him distasteful?” And in the very next scene, she says, “I still believe everyone would be happier if we [the prostitutes] could choose [our clients].”
Such a “progressive” take reveals an attempt to eat one’s cake and have it too—to paint prostitution as a legitimate form of work/pleasure-seeking, while at the same time delegitimizing the very commercial structure of prostitution (i.e., the customer chooses the vendor, not the other way around).
He even goes so far as to say, “I find myself merely jealous of the men’s time with you, rather than a moral aspersion against you.”
To quote women’s activist Caitlin Roper, “[T]he objectification of women…has been repackaged as female empowerment or women owning their sexuality (which incidentally tends to be indistinguishable from the porn-inspired fantasies of heterosexual men…go figure). Empowerment, it appears, means women being reduced to object status on their own terms.”
I am citing secular critics in this piece, but there are a few faith-based critics who have commented on the film as well:
Jeff Huston (whom I have quoted before as a stellar example of how to critique a film both artistically and morally) writes, “Poor Things is exquisite cinema but it perverts innocence & wisdom with wanton sexual vice, positing sex as a pure expression of the former & a gateway to the latter. Its theme ‘we must experience everything to be whole’ is itself a carnal standard for defining a meaningful life.”
Sister Hosea Rupprecht says, “Contrary to what human dignity dictates, the story centers on the selfishness and self-discovery that comes only through sexual exploits that are abusive rather than loving.”
And Paul Asay claims this movie “may have the most skin in any film I’ve ever reviewed,” and that “Poor Things echoes every pop star who takes off her clothes for the camera and says it’s an act of empowerment.”
James Berardinelli, who thinks Stone’s performance does qualify as acting, nevertheless acknowledges that her nudity in the film goes “well beyond what we normally see from mainstream actresses, not to mention those ensconced on Hollywood’s A-list.”