Poor Things｜Being a slut, liberation or a trap?

"Poor Things" has finally premiered on streaming. As someone who had been eagerly waiting, I watched it right away.

Frankly, I am very disappointed.

Visually, it is very appealing. The harsh string music, fisheye lens, and strange animals are all strong indications that this is a film by director Lanthimos. Coupled with the vibrant and saturated imagery, combined with tilt-shift and shallow focus lenses, it always gives me the feeling of watching a miniature amusement park story. Emma Stone's performance is also very good, hitting the mark of a non-existent person, a woman who is both a baby and an adult. I really like the performance.

But I don't think this is a good film. It seems gorgeous and profound, but it is actually very naive and hollow. I’m going to analyze the film from a feminist perspective and try to clarify how it is not a feminist film but serves as very valuable material for feminist film analysis.

In the film, Bella is set up as a woman who is shameless, uncorrupted by decadent human civilization, and passionate about sex. Because she has no shame, she can make love with one man after another without any moral burden. I feel there is something wrong with it. As a woman, I know by instinct that women are not creatures that can be horny at any time.

A woman’s sexual desire is arisen under a lot of external conditions: the right time/place the right one, safety/hygiene/comfort, and even emotional connection. These conditions matter to me not because my sanity tells me so, but out of instinct. The 1976 Hite Report clearly stated, "The inability to orgasm from penetration is the real experience of most women."

However, a whole set of pornographic culture centered on male senses is repeating such a wrong view that women need penetration, and male penetration is the only and most important way to satisfy women's sexual desire. However, the reality is much more complicated. Cultural factors, emotional status and others, all intervene in the mechanism of sexual desire. To get pleasure, women does not necessarily need penetration, nor any other sex form with men.

Yet the film takes it as a must. It assumes that women do not enjoy sex because they are bound by shame. Once they break the sexual shame brought by patriarchal society, like Bella does, and think ill of chastity concept imposed on women, they can enjoy sex, and always desire the penetration of men. I think this is sheer imagination of the mechanism of female sexual desire from a male perspective.

Therefore, I strongly doubt the sexual experiences based on such sexual desire mechanisms can bring any chance of self-awakening.

The film tries to use sexual liberation to metaphorize the awakening and liberation of female subjectivity. Women must experience the world through men to gain enlightenment. All seems very avant-garde and bold that are in fact old and outdated things.

Sexual liberation is a part of the feminist wave, and it is the focus of debate in the second wave of feminism. But feminism is not equal to sexual liberation. One opposition against it is that women are still suffering from overall oppression and it’s all self-soothing and easily exploited by patriarchy that liberation is achieved through sexual freedom to deconstruct the bondage and the construction of sexual identity behind sexual shame. And when we talk about sexual liberation, we're not just talking about removing women's shame about sex, but also about women being able to take back their autonomy and possessing power to interpret sex. It matters whether a woman can freely choose to have sex or not and the way to do it. Constantly having sex with men, or even prostitution, should not be seen as a way or manifestation of sexual liberation.

However, the film largely ignores that prostitution itself is a complete objectification and erasure of self-awareness. It also completely ignores the reality of prostitution as a violent and exploitative industry, causing great harm to female individuals.

However, I would get stuck in a quicksand if I want to criticize this movie from this point, because the movie is ambiguous and slippery when it comes to reality settings.

The brothel in the movie is completely stripped of the threats of disease, violence, restraint, human trafficking, and even killing that could probably happen in real brothels. Prostitution has become a bizarre male imagination of female survival possibilities. In this imagination, prostitutes are not threatened by violence/disease/poverty. The procuress only takes a third of the money, and Bella can keep the rest. She can also come and go freely.

This is hard to imagine even in Victorian England or Europe.

It seems Bella have accumulated endless experience through prostitution. She learns French like a genius without a teacher and understands a lot of philosophical/medical books. She can also learn about life and society from the clients, expanding life experience. In the brothel, she doesn't struggle with all kinds of strange, ugly and smelly clients. She is simply surprised and then happily accepts. She seems to be sexually thirsty, tireless of sex, and doesn't feel pain or disgusted by ugly clients. When I saw this, I suddenly understood some people's deep-rooted misconceptions about prostitutes. Their imagined life of prostitutes is nothing but the men’s experience of the world and Bella is a version of man after sex swap.

In this world, the prostitute is essentially a man, and the clients are women. “Men” can make money by having sex with different women every day. And women don't have the trouble of men getting tired, they can continue as long as they open their legs. No violence, no innate disgust from being fucked, no infectious diseases, no abuse, no confinement, no brutal and thorough economic exploitation, no killing. It’s nothing but a place where life experience can replicate and spread like virus through physical contact, or specifically, sexual contact.

This is absurd.

Here I can make my point more clear. Assuming that women can have male sexual power by imitating male sexual behavior patterns is self-deceiving. Both inside and outside the movie, the path from prostitution to freedom is a false one. In fact, Bella doesn’t gain any meaningful subjectivity and freedom through this path. Her final victory is vague. It's all because she is a freak born into a wealthy upper-class family and she has the option to returned to the loving arms of her father. Also, it’s because she is set to be extraordinarily intelligent. It’s because of anything but she is sexually open.

Bella’s travel is more like a splendid spring dream of being gazed at than a journey of self-exploration. In this dream, Bella is both a daughter and a mother, a wife and a lover, an innocent child and a mad whore. She is not only a lady from a wealthy family but also a homeless girl on the streets. She is an ignorant idiot, and also a genius philosopher. She is a super desire complex, satisfying the various needs of patriarchy for women at different stages and degrees.

She is anyone but a real woman, one that I can perceive her personality, can understand and empathize. Maybe I'm too narrow-minded. But I really don't think the film is made for women audience like me. Girls who think such movies are feminist movies, I think they are really poor things.