On Sunday night, celebrities strutted down the red carpet and streamed into the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles for the 96th Academy Awards ceremony. All in all, the Oscars delivered what they promised — a festive evening full of pretty things, pretty people, and some great movies.
The movie that caused the greatest upsets of the evening, winning the most awards other than Oppenheimer, was Poor Things, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Nominated in eleven categories, the film won four Oscars, for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Actress in a Leading Role (which went to Emma Stone).
The professionals in those categories are surely excellent at their job. And Stone is clearly a gifted actress — who had to do awful things for nightmarish scenes throughout the film. But the film, horrible in the truest sense of the word, did not deserve to be honored at all.
Under the costumes, the makeup, and the production design, Poor Things is a gruesome, exhibitionist dissection of womanhood, grotesquely misunderstood.
It begins with the dreamlike sequence of Stone’s character leaping off the Tower Bridge into the River Thames below. Her still-warm body is pulled out of the water by Willem Dafoe’s character, Godwin Baxter (who is ominously called “God” throughout the film).
God, a mad-scientist type with a depraved surgical practice in his large Victorian London home, discovers that the woman was pregnant. Through some flesh-cutting scenes and ink scrawls on parchment, the audience learns that God placed the brain of the baby in the head of the mother. In Frankenstein-fashion, the woman is reanimated, simultaneously mother and daughter. Bella Baxter is born.
The film then follows Bella Baxter’s coming-of-reason, which unnaturally coincides with her coming-of-age, as she is both an infant and an adult. While she learns how to speak and walk, she is viewed as a sexual object by the male characters around her, including God’s assistant Max McCandles, played by Ramy Youssef. (The pedophilic overtones of the film have hardly been scrutinized.)
In garish scenes, Bella travels through a European hallucination, discovering the pleasures of sex, food, dancing, and music. She meets strange characters who open her mind to poetry and philosophy. The lesson is simple: Patriarchy, bad. Self-actualization, good. She encounters horrible poverty for the first time, which churns her first real experience of disgust with the world.
Bella ends up in Paris, alone without resources, and becomes a prostitute controlled by a madam. She forms a sexualized friendship with another prostitute (who is also an avid socialist).
Eventually, Bella returns to London and faces her old self’s former husband — the one who made her suicidal in the first place. Painfully one-dimensional, the husband is the epitome of a controlling, violent misogynist. He keeps Bella in his stone house as a wife-prisoner. With the help of a pistol, Bella manages to escape.
Eventually she reunites with her dying “father,” God, and inherits both his house and his practice. The film ends with all of the enlightened characters sipping martinis in the garden of the Baxter mansion, while the husband crawls around chomping on leaves (for Bella has replaced his brain with that of a goat).
The world of the film is one devoid of any higher good, only the desire for flesh and power. Poor Things glorifies unhindered sexual activity as the tool that provides Bella with her own agency, with only scattered attempts to show Bella’s intellectual growth. In a stunning cliché, when Bella has sex for the first time (Stone and Mark Ruffalo are a strange match), the movie shifts from black-and-white to color.
That prostitution is empowering seems to be the sole push of the film. Bella gains independence by doing whatever she wants with her body — and letting others do whatever they want to it. She then ascends to power by gaining the material wealth and position that was God’s. She becomes God.
Similar themes run through contemporary feminism — that women ought to shirk all conventions of the moral and social kind, engage in libertine sex, ascend to a position of power, and dole out wrathful justice upon evil men. A woman is to have no God but herself.
Mind you, the Stone character is an infant in a woman’s body engaging in graphic sex acts with a parade of predatorial men. As all humanity and transcendence are stripped from the world of the film, we are meant to admire the sophistication and creativity.
Have all cultural institutions become so brainwashed by botched Beauvoirian thought that any narrative of womankind’s sexual liberation deserves applause, regardless of the perversion the woman is made to endure? What could the value of such a film possibly be? Certainly it is too intentionally disgusting to flirt with beauty.
As displayed through the surrealist, fishbowl lens of Lanthimos, our culture is neck-deep in a “mindless love affair with the avant-garde,” as Roger Kimball put it. A shared consensus among the gatekeepers of American “high” culture is that being “shocking” is the “very raison d’être of art.”
Kimball quotes Clement Greenberg, the great 20th-century art critic:
Today everybody innovates. Deliberately, methodically. And the innovations are deliberately and methodically made startling. Only it now turns out not to be true that all startling art is necessarily innovative or new art. . . . It has become apparent that art can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything startling—or new. The character itself of being startling, spectacular, or upsetting has become conventionalized, part of safe good taste.
Poor Things is transgression for its own sake. But Lanthimos and his team are not aesthetic purists operating outside of the gatekeepers of taste. The film was backed by Hollywood, with a sizeable production budget, marketing budget, and A-list actors. The film was made for the Academy — it bowed to the Academy’s tastes. It did not challenge them. This is the irony of the Academy honoring Poor Things with four Oscars — the members of the Academy reward “art” that viciously provokes the assumed status quo, without acknowledging that they themselves help set that status quo.
Greenberg’s observation, from 1969, is perhaps truer now than ever — the “safe good taste” of our day has become a wasteland of torn-down things.