Any implication about your sophistication or lack thereof is in your head. There is nothing wrong with anyone wanting movies in their comfort zone but my point is that there are some movies I could recommend to a wide swath of people knowing little about them with a strong expectation that they would like it. This is not one of those movies. Sophistication has nothing to do with it. It is weird, a certain distinctive variant of weird. I again am surprised that my enjoyment of this weird is shared by so many. It often is not. And not because I all so sophisticated. I am not.
My experience of the movie was not that this was written for the male gaze. Some who have seen it of both genders agree with me about that; I’ve not met IRL anyone who disagrees but have read that opinion here and in a few review articles by people I don’t know. Those are subjective opinions I can agree or disagree with, but they are informed opinions.
If here you read an implication about your opinion on this you are correct. It is simply uninformed.
FWIW “Poor Things” is anything but titillating. Emma Stone is a beautiful woman and she has many sex scenes but I am hard pressed to see Stone’s character (or the movie as whole) is objectifying women. There are loads of other movies that will do that much, much better.
I’m curious. I read one of the reviews Eonwe cited, and it says the movie never addresses pregnancy or birth control. Is that accurate?
Because if true, it is DEFINITELY a story by and for men. There’s literally no story for women that involves “discovering sex” that doesn’t touch on those topics, unless it’s a really really old story by people too squeamish to bring that up, and even then, it’s implicit. Because that’s such an enormous issue in the life of almost every woman. Pregnancy is profoundly life-changing.
But maybe it’s not true, and the reviewer missed it.
The only pregnancy referenced is the one which brought Bella into the world. Bella had no pregnancy or STD concerns while in the bordello.
Nor was she indebted to the madam, which was a common occurrence among the ladies who worked for one - the madam would buy dresses, food, etc, and keep the women in perpetual debt.
Her girlfriend pointed out Bella’s C section scar and I believe discussed her own past pregnancy… but not sure I remember that correctly. Bella had believed the scar was from an accident because “God” had told her that. Knowledge was kept from her.
Bella and Max discussed her getting test for STIs when she came back and of course she had already planned on that. Up until the brothel she had had a single partner and one woman friendship briefly that likely did not touch on those issues.
Of course this is placed in an alt reality steam punk Victorian era. Birth control and protection from STIs were not quite the same then.
Still I get that the absence of concerns or dealing with periods is problematic. Bella dealt with periods from being cognitively and emotionally an infant but her dealing with that could have been a window into her growth as well, something likely a female writer would have thought to do more than a male one did?
Seriously, the objection “but it’s a piece of fiction set in an alternative world” is hardly an excuse for bad storytelling given that all pieces of fiction are set in the world of that piece of fiction. Even something as “real” as, say, “The Big Short” - a stylized look at the internal workings of some real-world players in the 2008 crash - took place in “The Big Short world”, not this one.
In short… heh-heh… saying that STI’s and pregnancy worked different because PT is set in an “alt steampunk world” is hardly a response. As you and Puzzlegal noted, it was ignored probably because the people most responsible for creating this were men.
I haven’t seen Being John Malkovich. I understand that it involves people physically stepping into the mind of John Malkovich. Is Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay flawed because it fails to address what the real-world consequences would be to John Malkovich’s cranium?
The point was less the part that was alt but the time period. Yes it would have benefited from a discussion about infections had among the workers though.
No shit (speaking as a red-blooded hetero female viewer). Seriously, there is nothing sexy or titillating about the scenes. And Ms. Stone is a gorgeous, talented woman IRL but Bella is neither a sex kitten nor a victim. Yes, sex is part of her journey but so are lots of other things. Why is everyone so obsessed with the sex part? Birth control? STDs? These were probably ignored because they are irrelevant to the story.
That’s one concern that does not apply within Bella’s story I think. Bella was in an adult woman’s body, having periods, since Bella was mentally a baby (assuming the host body resumed menstruating some time after adjusting to the fetus’ removal) so to her when she is in mental puberty, periods are not something new to come to terms with, but something utterly normal that she always had had. Bella’s experience in that respect is utterly different from that of real life women.
I’m actually okay with ignoring STDs because it’s a fantasy world and that wasn’t relevant to the story. But “you can get pregnant if you have sex” is really central to what it means to be a woman. If she doesn’t know that, well, that’s the opposite of empowering. If that’s “irrelevant to the story” then it’s a story about a man who happens to look like a woman. It might be a really good story, but it’s not a woman’s story.
Honestly it fits in the story that she might not have known about that until late in the game when she decided to follow in God’s footsteps and go into medicine.
Again her not hearing about it from the other sex workers could have played well into the story though.
Anyway, I really have nothing more to add to this discussion other than I think in 20-odd years this film will be an entry in the “What the hell were they THINKING?!?” hall of fame.
I am not sure (I don’t think it is ever covered in the movie) but I think it is not a stretch to assume that when Godwin removed the fetus from dead Bella that he “broke” the baby making machinery. Or Bella’s death rendered her unable to have children. I am guessing (or may have missed it) but I think either of those notions easily plug into this story (her lesbian lover notices her c-section scar). Since pregnancy or STDs were never covered we can assume, as a viewer, it somehow was not a problem for Bella.
FWIW this all happens in some alternate reality. The movie definitely is not in “our” reality/earth. That is very obvious when watching the movie. So, having different rules for how things work isn’t a stretch.
Not picking on you or anything, but I strongly disagree. The ability (liability) of getting pregnant isn’t even on my list of what it means to be a woman. How is it not “a woman’s story” when it’s about a woman and I, as a woman myself, related to it?
Just to be clear: that person was not Bella but Bella’s mother whose body she then inhabits and grows up in.
I would be interested in hearing more of your take on the feminist v misogyny take.
But honestly I think that was only one of the themes in this movie and I’d love having someone help me parse out some of the others! (And FWIW I can accept that it was more focused on the critique of the males, their clueless cruelty and need for control, the potential for growth and the failure to do so sometimes, than about the female experience. As strange as her growth was.)
I’m struck by how even as many of these characters are cartoonish they are still very complex. There are few straight up villains. There are obvious comments being made about the division between those with power and those without. And the conscious refusal to see it. Godfrey’s story dribbles out horrifyingly. Her friends on the cruise ship were a great way to represent exposure to different philosophies. And her already growing beyond her extant playmate.
I still am not sure about the significance of the fish eye lens views or the meaning of what is in black and white vs color.
Don’t know if this makes me dense, but the feminist v misogyny take literally( yes) didn’t occur to me until John T shared his daughter’s thoughts. I could have used a couple less sex scenes, partly because I was with my sort of reserved SIL, but mostly because it became tiresome. Almost as if we’re not meant to be titillated. If I had to say it leaned one way or the other, than feminist for sure. I say it isn’t / doesn’t have to be either. At least I didn’t view it through either of those lenses( good question, though).
It’s understandable but kind of a shame that a lot of people are fixating on the sex aspect. She travels and meets people and learns things and forms her own opinions and, by the way WINS in the end!
As for the fish eye lens thing, I think it might just be the director’s style / trademark? I remember him using that a lot in The Favourite but don’t recall if it’s in all his films.
As a male my opinion is (I seriously agree) worth a bit less on this specific question than women who have seen the movie, but yeah I was also surprised by it. I had heard the feminist one previously, in a review that I think described it as a very not family friendly Barbie, but would not have gone there right off on my own either. To me it is more a horror movie homage that uses horror tropes to mock how social propriety institionalizes cruelty, by way of viewing social structures through the eyes of one naive to the rules. It is more as if she is an alien landed in the alt reality Victorian world than anything else? A stranger in a strange land without Heinlen’s actual misogyny. She eventually groks.
There was no way to avoid sexuality and desire when dealing with a human brain going through teen age years and young adulthood. Male or female there is commonly some preoccupation that gets socialized. And an alien studying human behavior and social interactions probably would find sexual interactions most fascinating. Pretty sure its not being titillating and very much not erotic was intentional. It was written I think thinking of that alien gaze? Neither standard issue male or female. But agreed that it was a bit much.