I’m tired of watching movies about women made by male filmmakers. And I’m tired of those movies winning awards. For that matter, I’m also tired of living in a man’s world. I recently watched Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, the award season’s somewhat sleeper spoiler, taking the trophy (from Barbie) in many of the top categories at both the Oscars and Golden Globes. As the movie’s final scene faded to black, I sat for a moment, trying to wrap my brain around what I had just seen. The credits rolled and I was unsurprised to find that, in addition to Lanthimos, the screenplay was written by a man adapted from a novel also written by a man.
The story of a pregnant woman so brutalized by her marriage that she takes her life, jumping off something like the Tower Bridge in London, only for her body to be discovered by a mad scientist who “reanimates” her by replacing her brain with the brain of her unborn child, thus creating an infantilized, sex-crazed adult woman feels like a particularly male fantasy. She has the body of a woman, but the intellect of a baby.
Although I loved Lanthimos’s The Lobster (it was brutal, funny and strange in all the right ways), Poor Things did not initially appeal to me. I don’t have a high tolerance for the grotesque and it is definitely grotesque. It was only after reading a (male) New Yorker film critic’s review that it piqued my interest, giving me the impression that the movie explored female pleasure and autonomy in a radical way. After it upset so many awards that I would have given to Barbie, I was excited to see what the fuss was about.
The movie’s origin story—the filmmaker, the screenwriter, the source material, the brutal husband and mad scientist who destroy and create Bella (Emma Stone)—reveals so much about its attitude towards women. She is a captive creature beholden to the whims of men. By contrast, Barbie, the doll, was created by a woman (played by Rhea Perlman in the film as a benevolent Godlike figure) and the movie was conceived by women. Greta Gerwig gave us a story set in utopian Barbie Land where Barbie (women) run the show—Barbie is president, the entirety of the Supreme Court (no one’s overturning Roe v. Wade in Barbie Land) and every night is girl’s night. Sorry Ken!
In Poor Things, Bella is in the custody of men throughout the entire movie. She was imprisoned by her husband and then by the paternal mad scientist who wishes to marry her off to his dopey, lovelorn assistant. She’s only allowed to leave when a miscast Mark Ruffalo seduces her into an adventure. (Sorry, Ruffalo, you cute, but a convincing lothario, you are not.) Over the course of the movie, Bella experiences both the pleasures and pain of life—sex, food, drinking and dancing in Lisbon; an intellectual awakening by way of reading Emerson aboard a ship bound for Greece, where she later witnesses poverty and death—all with unblinkered, childlike wonder, while simultaneously developing a more sophisticated sensibility about the world, unblemished by “polite society’s” mores. That’s all fine and good and there are some charming moments, but it also left me wondering how that’s really any different from a normal woman’s coming of age without the perversion of a lobotomy she did not consent to.
Barbie’s utopia is intruded on by her existential thoughts about death, which turn out to be tethered to the real world where Barbies are projections of the women and girls who play with them. Her disillusionment comes in realizing that the real world is a man’s world, which Ken discovers simultaneously and gains the tools to run amok in Barbie Land.
In Poor Things, Bella finally lands in Paris broke, having cut Ruffalo loose, and devolves into “whoring.” She needs money, she likes sex, and figures, this is a good arrangement. But it’s during this too-long sequence that the sex and Stone’s nudity begin to feel obligatory, her pleasure shifting to degradation, scene after pornographic scene, even as Bella becomes wiser to the ways of men and the world. This is when the male gaze becomes too nakedly obtrusive and the movie soured for me.
In the end, Bella returns to the mad scientist’s home, weds his assistant and decides to become a doctor, herself, following in her demented creator’s footsteps with the ridiculous near-final line, “I am never happier than when I am here.” What was the point of all that adventuring if you’re just going to happily return to captivity? Then again, I never understood why Dorothy went back to her dull, black-and-white existence in Kansas with that scolding Auntie Em after her technicolor adventures in Oz. And, for that matter, I didn’t much care for Barbie’s decision to become a real woman in the real world at the end of the movie when everything in Barbie Land is so much better and more fun.
As my father put it, Poor Things is the X-rated Barbie. But it’s not the better Barbie. Or the more radical movie. What was it about Poor Things that made it more worthy in the eyes of the Academy or the Hollywood Foreign Press? Does a film about a woman need to be grotesque, degrading, sexually explicit, dominated by hapless, broken men and written and directed by men to be taken seriously?
The Golden Globes invented a category to reward Barbie’s record-breaking $1.4 billion box office success because it knew it couldn’t bring itself to reward the film for its artistic merit. At the Academy Awards, Ken managed to upstage Barbie—Margot Robbie, dressed appropriately in a funereal, minimalist black sequin gown in contrast to her Barbie bubblegum pink looks throughout award season, was surely a protest over her and Gerwig’s snubs—with his nomination and “I’m Just Ken” performance spectacle.
Even as I write this, I feel how easily I can be dismissed for standing up for a silly doll. I watched the Oscars on a second date with a man, a playwright, apparently, who said that Barbie was not well written. I smiled sweetly and simply said, “Agree to disagree.” I might have even batted my eyelashes because even I have been socialized to be deferential to men when trying to make a good impression.
I played with Barbie as a little girl and most of her exploits, not unlike Bella’s, were generally wild, naked and filled with sex with multiple Kens (and Ken-sized GI Joe’s). But it’s Gerwig’s movie that captures the essence of the unruly female experience of coming of age in the modern day, raised to believe we could do and be anything we wanted, only to be shellshocked later by the limitations society wishes to place on us. After I saw Barbie, I joked that if it doesn’t win all the awards, it will only further prove the patriarchy we continue to live in. The reason Barbie lost is the same reason The Sopranos is taken more seriously than Sex and the City and why our country elected Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
Just look at how women are portrayed in Oppenheimer, which won Best Picture at both the Oscars and Golden Globes. Florence Pugh as mistress is more set piece than character, onscreen briefly for an obligatory (if, admittedly, kinda hot) sex scene where she bears her breasts and is later driven to suicide, while Oppenheimer’s wife becomes a shaky alcoholic (a type Emily Blunt plays brilliantly—hello, Girl on a Train). Is the totality of the great scientist’s destruction really something to be celebrated as heroic and taken so deadly seriously?
When I think of the movies I loved best this year, it turns out they were all made by women. And they were all underrepresented in both awards and nominations. Past Lives by Celine Song is the kind of movie I wish I had written—beautiful, quiet, poetic—a chaste love triangle between a Korean American woman, her American husband and the childhood love she left behind in Korea. Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla captures both the tragedy and irresistible sex appeal of Elvis on a more human and haunting level than Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Any woman who’s fallen for a lesser heartthrob understands Priscilla’s story as Coppola tells it, the divine pleasure of powerlessness to the ecstasy and indignities of a man like that until the only option for survival is escape. (Tall drink of water Jacob Elordi’s casting goes a long way in making this case, too.)
Emerald Fennel’s Saltburn is arguably of like genre to Poor Things, both wild, romping tales of libertinism that bend to the grotesque. Only Saltburn has more winking humor and the sexual situations are brought to us from a female gaze—horrifying for their debasement, yet titillating for their depth of devotion. And Barry Keoghan’s exuberant naked wiener dance in the final scene is one of the best things I’ve ever seen in a movie.
I want more of that—more wild and quiet movies by female filmmakers, more complex, three-dimensional female characters and stories, more full frontal male nudity and more sex on screen designed for female pleasure from a female gaze.
