by M. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023) is a politically charged work of postmodern cinema that would seem to be an exception to Fredric Jameson’s influential theorization of postmodern culture as unable to amount any effective political critique of capitalism. Then again, Jameson himself (a consistently utopian thinker) has long argued that some forms of cultural production, because of their eccentric relationship with the late capitalist mainstream, can surmount the seeming dominance of capitalist ideology over contemporary culture. In addition, Jameson insisted as long ago as his 1991 book on postmodernism that there might someday arise a “political form of postmodernism,” in which postmodern culture itself might mount an effective challenge to capitalist hegemony (Jameson 1991a, 54). We argue here that Lanthimos’s Poor Things is an example of precisely this political form of postmodernism, complete with a socialist critique of capitalism and a utopian insistence that a possible better future is genuinely possible. In particular, Poor Things allows us to see the emergent world of modern capitalism through the eyes of a protagonist who is entirely free of the interpellating effects of Victorian bourgeois ideology, able to imagine a genuinely better world simply because she has never learned that such a feat is supposedly impossible. The result is a film with a socialist-feminist consciousness, a strong historical dimension, and a clear utopian vision, even while retaining many formal characteristics that clearly identify it as postmodern.
Poor Things, Postmodernism, Pastiche
Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things, from which Lanthimos’s film is adapted,is a virtual compendium of postmodern literary techniques[1]; to make the noveladaptable at all, Lanthimos and screenwriter Tom McNamara were forced to eliminate wide swaths of the metafictional literary material that constitutes the novel. In fact, the film adapts only one of the three main segments of the novel, segments that interact with one another in a distinctively postmodern way, resolutely undermining any attempt at interpretive closure. The film version necessarily eliminates many of Gray’s textual shenanigans, substituting the overtly literary technique of the novel with a virtuoso display of overtly cinematic techniques, creating a visual spectacle that won several Academy Awards in visual categories. The narrative of the film, like that of the novel, is also highly episodic, creating a fragmented narrative of the kind often found in postmodern works.
Poor Things is built around the story of how Frankensteinian mad surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe in the film, with lots of facial prosthetics), resurrects the body of a pregnant woman who had committed suicide by drowning, transplanting the brain of her full-term fetus into her cranium, giving her a fresh start in life. His creation, whom he names Bella (played by Emma Stone in an Oscar-winning performance), thus emerges with a mature adult body and an immature infant brain, so that Baxter has to instruct her as if she were an infant, serving largely as a father figure for her (as Victor Frankenstein had so spectacularly failed to do for his creation). Baxter then employs his assistant Max McCandles (sitcom star Rami Youseff) to help with Bella’s education, but then McCandles falls in love with Bella and is betrothed to her, only to see her run away with local cad Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Wedderburn takes Bella on a sex-fueled tour of Europe and the Mediterranean, a tour that eventually leaves him physically exhausted and emotionally broken. Bella returns to London and rejoins McCandles, but only after a number of complications, including the reappearance of the former husband who originally drove her earlier self to suicide). Bella then goes on to study medicine so she can become a pioneering woman doctor.
Despite all of the fresh material regarding gender and sexuality, the narrative of Poor Things is taken so obviously from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—with a dash of Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) thrown in for good measure—that its construction can clearly be considered a form of pastiche[2]. Jameson, of course, sees such pastiche construction as the most representative technique of postmodern art. In this sense, however, Poor Things deviates from Jameson’s description of postmodernism in important ways, because the pastiche in the film works less like Jameson’s postmodern “blank parody” and more like Mikhail Bakhtin’s characterization of parody as “an intentional dialogized hybrid. Within it, languages and styles actively and mutually illuminate one another” (Bakhtin 1981, 76). Among other things, the depiction in Poor Things of an alternate Victorian world on the cusp of full-blown modernity helps to emphasize the status of Frankenstein as a signpost on the historical road to capitalist modernization, while asking us to re-examine this status. In addition, the amusingly strange hybrid animals created by Baxter in the film create an essentially comic visual effect, but they also indirectly recall the experiments that are used to much more chilling effect in The Island of Doctor Moreau. Of course, both Frankenstein and Moreau are cautionary tales of irresponsible scientific overreach, and to that extent their connection with Poor Things might seem ominous. However, Poor Things actually reverses the Frankenstein story, largely by showing us Baxter as a responsible scientist who adopts a nurturing (though controlling) attitude toward his creation, as opposed to Victor Frankenstein’s hasty abandonment of his creation or Moreau’s abusive treatment of his creatures, leading to tragic results. Indeed, Baxter’s role is complicated by the fact that (as the film’s visual representation of his damaged physiognomy and digestive system indicates) he himself had been subjected to weird experiments by his own father, so that he plays the dual role of mad scientist and mad scientist’s experimental subject. In any case, a principal difference between Poor Things and Frankenstein or Moreau is that Bella is a successful experiment. As a result, Bella’s story converts the cautionary tales of Frankenstein and Moreau into a utopian tale of the promise of science—which, in this case, not only defeats death but overcomes the shackles of Victorian ideology and gender role rigidity to produce a woman who thinks clearly and rationally (“empirically,” she might say), as well as compassionately and unselfishly, while also becoming a trailblazer and a role model for other women.
The dialogue with Frankenstein and Moreau already places Poor Things in the realm of science fiction, and it might be noted that the segment of the novel that is adapted in the film is the one that is the most science fictional. Scholars such as Brian McHale—who specifically mentions Gray’s Lanark in this regard (McHale 1987, 65)—have noted the considerable overlap between science fiction and postmodernism, but it is also the case that science fiction has long occupied a privileged position in the work of many Marxist scholars as having an unusual ability to critique the capitalist status quo. In particular, Jameson himself has long (following the early work of Darko Suvin, himself drawing upon the work of Bertolt Brecht) privileged science fiction as a genre whose innate utopian energies stand in stark contrast to the weak utopian vision he sees in postmodernism. The science fiction writer, says Jameson, “is obliged to invent an entire universe, an entire ontology, another world altogether—very precisely that system of radical difference with which we associate the imagination of Utopia” (Jameson 2005, 101). Science fiction, he goes on to say, creates a Brechtian estrangement effect that produces a “shocked renewal” of our appreciation of the historicity of our culture and institutions (Jameson 2005, 255).
One might argue, of course, that Poor Things does not create “another world altogether” so much as a slightly skewed version of the already familiar world of Europe in the 1890s. In addition, the film’s play with the historical reality of 1890s Europe might seem to be an example of precisely the sort of lack of historical sense that Jameson associates with postmodernism[3]. We would argue, though, that the estrangement effect produced by Poor Things is actually strengthened by its connections with late Victorian reality, which are extensive enough that the viewer is invited to compare the world of the film with the world of historical reality in an attempt to understand what aspects of this fictional world differ from history. Moreover, we would argue that the film represents the Victorian past in a way that is estranged enough from actual history that it avoids the kind of nostalgia that Jameson has seen as key to the use of pastiche in postmodern works such as neo-noir film. Indeed, Jameson himself has singled out alternate histories as a kind of fictional representation of the past that is often free of nostalgia (Jameson 2005, 58–59). The film adaptation of Poor Things is clearly forward-leaning, rather than backward leaning, among other things linking the liberation of women from patriarchal control directly to scientific and technological progress.
Poor Things centers its action in Victorian London (as opposed to the Glasgow of the novel), but this city is clearly an alternative London that differs in key ways from the real Victorian London. The most obvious of these differences are technological, as the film shows us a London populated by more advanced steampunk technologies in the film than were available in the real world of Victorian London. Visual markers of steampunk technology in London include carriages that are driven by steam engines—though still sharing the streets with horse-drawn ones and still featuring fake horse heads on the front of them, thus rhyming with the hybrid animals created by Baxter. The film also includes sky trams that zoom over Lisbon on high wires or allow Bella to take a quick excursion to the slums of Alexandria. These images are whimsical and often even surreal, but technology is at the very center of them, and these visuals often have a science fictional slant that makes them genuinely utopian, rather than merely whimsical, especially as these visuals are reinforced by other aspects of the content of the film—perhaps most obviously in the way the technologies of the film presage the coming of a new, more modern world in which women would have far more agency than in the Victorian past.
Poor Things, Postmodernism, History
Bella’s attitude is marked by a strongly utopian faith that the coming world will be a better one, directly contradicting Jameson’s frequent insistence that postmodern culture tends to lack the ability to imagine a future better than the capitalist present. In this sense, the film stands in stark contrast to Jameson’s description of postmodern culture as lacking in utopian energy and historical sense. Bella here, meanwhile, clearly reflects Gray’s often-stated mantra that one should “work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”[4] In this sense, it is crucial that Poor Things takes place on the cusp of some of the most dramatic changes to have occurred in all of history. The dynamic changes that took place across the Western world from the 1890s through the 1920s were driven first and foremost by a shift from the classical production-oriented capitalism of the nineteenth century to the consumerist capitalism that has driven global modernization ever since. These changes transformed virtually every aspect of Western life during that period; Poor Things points toward these coming changes, but also suggests the possibility that even more radical ones might have occurred (and might still occur). Bella herself serves in the film as a visual marker of of a coming modernity, going about Victorian-era Europe with long, flowing hair and short skirts that seem to have time-traveled from the future, perhaps from the 1960s.
Though set in the 1890s and thus essentially at the beginning of the development of the film industry, Poor Things anticipates coming developments in film itself by employing so many intrusive techniques that serve as a sort of demonstration of the capabilities of film technology. Even the film’s shift from black-and-white to color just as Bella begins her sexual adventures with Wedderburn—much like the shift that occurs when Dorothy arrives in Oz in The Wizard of Oz (1939)—can be taken as an indication of a movement toward more modern technologies of representation. Moreover, the look of the film, after the shift to color, takes on an aspect that seems very much like a consumerist spectacle, the richly populated screen suggesting a world marked by an abundance of things, at least among the privileged—which makes the contrast to the slums of Alexandria, whose inhabitants have no things at all, all the more striking. Indeed, the abundance of fascinating objects and dazzling colors in the bulk of the film is so striking that it threatens to overwhelm the socialist-feminist message of the film’s content with the sheer spectacle of its visuals, which seem to place it, aesthetically, more in the society of the spectacle described by Guy Debord (1994) than in any sort of socialist utopia.
Spectacle, after all, was a central strategy of the new consumerist culture that arose in both Great Britain and America at the end of the nineteenth century and that Poor Things presages. Describing the rise of consumer capitalism in the U.S. at this time (but in a way that is also applicable to Britain), William Leach notes the sudden appearance of various forms of pageants, parades, and other spectacles nationwide, indicating the “new American fascination with show and display—with colors, lights, and spectacle” (Leach 1993, 197). This new emphasis on spectacle, Leach notes, led to the development of a new “commercial aesthetic” that could be most directly seen in things such as display windows in the new department stores that suddenly became leading indicators of modernity, but this aesthetic extended to the society at large, as well.
Given the importance of color in Poor Things, the emphasis that Leach places on color in describing this new aesthetic seems particularly relevant:
At the heart of the evolution of this commercial aesthetic were the visual materials of desire—color, glass, and light. … By 1910, American merchants, in their efforts to create the new commercial aesthetic, took command over color, glass, and light, fashioning a link so strong between them and consumption that, today, the link seems natural. By the 1920s so many commercial institutions and people had exploited “color” that, according to The New York Times, the word itself had been “worn to a frazzle.” (Leach 1993, 23)
Leach even identifies The Wizard of Oz as a key cultural reflection of this new commercial aesthetic. Moreover, even though he is referring more to L. Frank Baum’s original 1900 novel than to the 1939 film adaptation of the novel (which is outside the time frame he is covering), it is fairly easy to transplant his analysis of the novel to the film and to see the famous shift to color in the film, which is such an obvious predecessor to the shift to color in Poor Things, as a clear reflection of the consumerist emphasis on color that Leach notes.
There is much, then, in the aesthetic of Poor Things that seems very much in line with the consumer capitalism that was just emerging at the end of the nineteenth century (and that led directly to late capitalism and postmodernism). However, one can also read the shift to color in the film as a reminder of the fundamental changes that have occurred in the historical past, much as Georg Lukács consistently saw the thoroughly bourgeois novels of the European realists as a sign of the possibility of an end to capitalism simply because they themselves mark the rise of capitalism and the end of the feudal mode of production that came before it. If one reads these visuals as a signal of the film’s forward-looking stance, then even the spectacular look of the film bears a potentially progressive message, if also a cautionary one, reminding us that fundamental change is indeed possible—but also reminding us that capitalism has the ability to absorb many kinds of changes without a threat to its basic class structure.
That Poor Things takes place in an alternate past is obvious; what might not be so obvious is that this past is presented as the prologue to an alternate future that might be very different (more technologically advanced, more socially and economically just) from our own present. It is here that Bella’s faith in progress is key. The mainstream Victorian faith in historical progress was not willing to imagine that this progress might proceed to the end of the world order that saw the British bourgeoisie as the dominant force on the planet. Bella’s view, however, is much more radical in that she is able to envision a world in which women are fully in command of their own bodies and fully prepared to share power equally with men. In addition, Bella’s unique background means that she has been shielded from the interpellating effects of bourgeois ideology, growing up in an environment in which science, so often seen in the classic Marxist tradition as the alternative to bourgeois ideology, is unchallenged as the dominant value. Little wonder, then, that she quickly opts for socialism once she gets out into the political world, because it is the view of that world that makes sense to her.
The Politics of Poor Things
The most obvious political narrative within Poor Things has to do with Bella’s attempts to assert control over her own life and body in the face of the attempts by a series of patriarchal men to dominate, control, and essentially assert their ownership of her. But this narrative is also an historical one, as Bella’s quest to become a new woman is aligned with a movement toward a new historical era. However, Bella is an unconventional feminist heroine in that she battles the gender prejudices of her day, not because she objects to them out of insight and analysis, but because she has simply never been taught to accept attitudes and practices that others consider to be the natural order of things. Indeed, the central strategy of Poor Things is to created and estranged view of certain familiar aspects of gender relations by showing them through the eyes of someone to whom they are decidedly not familiar. It makes no sense to Bella, for example, that a man with whom she is engaged in a relationship should regard her as his exclusive sexual property. Yet she continually functions, to most of the male characters as just such property—or at least as an object to attempt to control. In a special sort of dramatic irony, we know much more than she about the patriarchal structure of the society she is only just beginning to explore; in a special sort of cognitive estrangement, we beginning to realize that this structure is an entirely unnatural one that need not be the case.
Bella’s first patriarch is her “father,” Godwin Baxter[5], whose parental role is complicated by the fact that Bella is also an experimental subject and that Baxter had been an experimental subject to his own father. But Baxter is a caring guardian who at times seems to feel that he has failed as an objective scientist because he has developed genuinely paternal feelings for Bella. A blank slate in the beginning, Bella is also completely lacking in the kind of conditioning that was designed to encourage Victorian women to be subservient to men, which complicates her role by giving her very much a mind of her own, free of any sense that the patriarchal order is the natural one.
When Bella runs away with Wedderburn, she is not rebelling against Baxter’s patriarchal control so much as seeking adventure and experience before settling down with McCandles. Aware that she knows almost nothing about the world, she is determined to experience as much as possible before settling into the confines of marriage—with she already seems to sense might greatly limit her ability to explore. Wedderburn thinks that he is also simply seeking sexual adventure on this trip, though he ultimately falls in love with Bella, attempts to assert his possession of her, and then is driven insane by his inability to control her and his inability to cope with her subversion of the power dynamics that he has come to associate with sexual relationships. Bella, after a stint as a prostitute in Paris, then returns to London, where McCandles, trying in the film to explain why he did not tell Bella the truth about her origins, notes that “Baxter kind of makes one a prisoner to him.” Indeed, the narrative in the film is aided by the fact that McCandles (as played by the eminently likeable Youseff) serves as a sort of counter to controlling men such as Baxter and (especially) Wedderburn. When Bella explains to McCandles about her time in the Paris bordello, she asks him, “Does the whoring thing challenge the desire for ownership that men have? Wedderburn became much weepy and sweary when he discovered my whoring.” Max then graciously responds, disavowing ownership of Bella quite overtly, “I find myself merely jealous of the men’s time with you, rather than any moral aspersion against you. It is your body, Bella Baxter, yours to give freely.” In a moment that might have become a bit too heavy-handed, Bella then responds in her typically literal fashion, saving the day with humor: “I generally charge 30 francs.” McCandles amusingly responds that this seems low, and their wedding is on.
Unfortunately, the wedding is interrupted by the appearance of one General Alfred Blessington (Christopher Abbott), the former husband who (tipped off by Wedderburn) shows up to claim Bella as his previous wife, Victoria. The comically awful Blessington (his background as a famous colonial officer notorious for his harsh treatment of insubordinate colonial subjects is fleshed out more thoroughly in the novel) turns out to be the most possessive of all the film’s patriarchal figures. Blessington demands that Victoria be handed over to him essentially as his property and, beginning a rapid sequence that greatly streamlines the same events in the novel, drags her back home with him, keeping her there under lock and key. He even attempts to prevent Bella/Victoria from getting out of his sexual control by having her subjected to a clitoridectomy. “My life is dedicated to the taking of territory,” he tells her in good colonialist fashion. “You are mine and that is the long and short of it.” “I am not territory,” she insists. When Bella rejects his ownership, he first threatens and then actually attempts to shoot her but ends up shooting himself in the foot. Blessington collapses, and Bella and Max take him into surgery—repairing his foot and using Baxter’s notes to “improve” him by replacing his brain with that of a goat, echoing the comical hybrid animals made by Baxter that we’ve seen throughout the film. Science triumphs over patriarchy.
The film then ends with the death of Baxter, followed by a scene of feminine utopia, as Max and Bella (possibly, though not necessarily, wed at last) relax in Baxter’s former garden, where Bella heads a new generation that is now in charge. Toinette (Suzy Bemba), Bella’s fellow former whore, is at her side (in a way that suggests that the two might be lovers), while Bella leisurely studies for medical school. Felicity (Margaret Qualley), Baxter’s second experimental creation, tosses a ball with Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperdine), Baxter’s former housekeeper, with the Blessington goat bleating comically in the background. Thus, except for Max and the goat-brained Blessington, it is an all-female household, and it is clear that Max has no desire and Blessington no ability to exert dominion. Bella, with Max’s help, has thus established (at least within the confines of their own household) a new reality.
This new reality, though, is informed, not just by gender equality, but also by the fundamentally socialist values that Bella has by now acquired. In one crucial moment of her education, Bella’s travels with Wedderburn across the Mediterranean in a baroque steampunk ocean liner take her to the slums of Alexandria. Bella is horrified to learn of the depths of poverty and misery in which some people live there, which is highlighted by the fact that the slum is overlooked by a fancy restaurant in which the rich are dining on gourmet meals, while the poor die of starvation beneath them[6]. Shocked that there are people in the world who must live in this way and overcome by the sight of babies dying in the blistering sun, Bella staggers back to her cabin on the ship, where she discovers an unconscious Wedderburn lying in a pile of cash that he has won at gambling. She then takes the money to give to the poor people of Alexandria but is intercepted on the way by two ship’s officers who promise to deliver the money for her. The trusting Bella gives them the money. We don’t see what they do with it, though it seems natural to assume that they will steal it, given that they (unlike Bella) have been formed by the capitalist ideals of the society around them.
When a shocked Wedderburn learns that his money is gone, Bella tearfully explains, in a speech that comes as close as anything in the film to capturing the socialist sensibilities of the novel, “Money is its own form of sickness. And all the scarcity of it. And who am I, lying in a feather bed, while dead babies lie in a ditch?” Cad that he is, Wedderburn is unimpressed and refuses to grant her a requested hug of solace. Meanwhile, we learn soon afterward that the cynical American Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) engineered Bella’s viewing of the poor of Alexandria intentionally to hurt and disillusion her, because he couldn’t stand for anything to be as pure as her rosy view of the world. When she says she is glad to have learned of the suffering in the world so that she can improve it, he tells her that improvement is not possible: “Don’t accept the lie of religion, socialism, capitalism. We are a fucked species. Know it. Hope is smashable. Realism is not. Protect yourself with the truth.” The film, though, clearly rejects Astley’s view, as does Bella. Thus, her optimism concerning the possibility of change toward a better future remains undeterred. Or, as she says in the novel, “history is full of nastiness, but history is all past” (135).
Poor Things links its critique of capitalism to its critique of patriarchy in a number of ways. For example, while the plight of workers is mentioned multiple times in the novel, the only workers whose point of view we see extensively in the film are the whores (their term of self-description) in Paris at the bordello run by Madame Swiney. Madame Swiney is in many ways quite supportive of Bella, as when she responds to Bella’s decision to go to work in the bordello by exclaiming, “A woman plotting her course to freedom! How delightful!” On the other hand, she is less responsive to Bella’s plans to reform the way the is run, as when she rejects out of hand Bella’s suggestion that the girls should be able to choose their clients, rather than the other way around. Madame Swiney can also be physically aggressive, as when she is apparently overcome with lust for Bella and bites her ear so hard that she draws blood. The film clearly suggests that the Madame attempts to control the sexuality of the women, dispensing their services to customers like any other capitalist commodity.
Bella’s new friend Toinette enthusiastically endorses Bella’s plans for reform of the bordello, again recalling the socialist inclinations of the novel: “As a socialist, I agree entirely!” Madame Swiney, however, responds by ordering Toinette to service a rather repellant customer free of charge. Toinette, though, is treated very positively in the film, which thereby would seem to endorse her socialism, as does Bella. When Toinette explains that a socialist is someone who wants to “change the world. Make it better. A better world,” Bella approvingly responds, “Then I am that, too.” Bella even begins to describe her project in Marxist terms, as when she characterizes the whores in Madame Swiney’s establishment as being their own “means of production,” suggesting that the brothel is not an entirely retrograde institution, but is instead one that gives women special opportunities if managed properly.
Poor Things, Jameson, Ideology
Poor Things employs an active mode of pastiche that engages in a productive dialogue with predecessors such as Frankenstein. In so doing, it intersects significantly with the genre of science fiction, long held by Jameson and other Marxist critics to have unusual utopian potential. Poor Things is also informed by a strong historical sense that portrays its alternative 1890s as the prologue to a possible better future, supporting this vision with an endorsement of socialism as an alternative to capitalism. As such, it would seem strongly to contradict Jameson’s vision of the political limitations of postmodern culture. That vision, of course, is a form of ideological critique, in which Jameson sees postmodernism as so thoroughly aligned with the ideology of late capitalism that it loses most of its critical force and becomes the “cultural logic” of late capitalism, almost totally lacking in utopian energies that might help it to see beyond capitalism. With the historical process of capitalist modernization essentially complete, the ideology of late capitalism now has unprecedented power, so that “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally” (Jameson 1991a, 4). There is thus no gap between the once “relatively autonomous” aesthetic sphere and the economic sphere, which now has almost total sway over every aspect of life.
Of course, this sweeping vision represents the kind of totalization that Jameson has consistently championed and that has typically been decried by defenders of postmodernism as a form of authoritarianism. Indeed, Jameson’s totalizing vision of postmodern culture would appear to set him in direct opposition to the early champions of postmodernism, who tended to read it in exactly the opposite way and to tout its emancipatory political potential. And Jameson himself has been highly critical of Jean-François Lyotard and other proponents of the anti-authoritarian glories of postmodern fragmentation. Following Jameson, Perry Anderson has insisted (rightfully, we think) that the postmodern critique of totalization (as in Lyotard’s view of postmodernism as a liberating assault on “totalizing metanarratives”) should probably be read first and foremost as a rejection of the Marxist model of history itself (Anderson 1998, 45–46). In this view, the “subversive” energies of postmodernism are aimed primarily, not at a thoroughly dominant capitalism, but at socialism, the principal surviving (if on life support) alternative to capitalism.
However, it is important to note that the kind of totalization championed by Jameson is thoroughly dialectical, thus leaving room for counter examples and conflicting viewpoints. In particular, Jameson has consistently made clear his view that the “negative hermeneutic” of Marxist ideological critique takes its full value only when supplemented by a “positive hermeneutic” that seeks out utopian energies. Thus, in The Political Unconscious, he declares that “a Marxist negative hermeneutic, a Marxist practice of ideological analysis proper, must in the practical work of reading and interpretation be exercised simultaneously with a Marxist positive hermeneutic, or a decipherment of the Utopian impulses of these same still ideological cultural texts” (Jameson 1981, 296). And, for Jameson (who has consistently rejected the kind of “total systems” thinking that he associates with thinkers such as Michel Foucault), those utopian impulses will always be there, even in the most seemingly debased cultural phenomena. Thus, the ideological colonization of postmodern culture by late capitalism can never be complete, leaving room for some utopian energy in all postmodern texts—but also potentially leaving more room in some kinds of texts than others.
That Poor Things might be an exception to the totalizing power of late capitalist ideology does not, therefore, necessarily contradict Jameson’s theorization of postmodernism. Jameson himself has long insisted that there are exceptions within contemporary culture that escape the control of the dominant ideology of late capitalism. These exceptions, he notes,
draw on the collective experience of marginal pockets of the social life of the world system: black literature and blues, British working-class rock, women’s literature, gay literature, the roman québécois, the literature of the Third World; and this production is possible only to the degree to which these forms of collective life or collective solidarity have not yet been fully penetrated by the market and by the commodity system. (Jameson 1992, 23–24)
Whether Poor Things occupies the kind of marginal position indicated here by Jameson is debatable. After all, the film removes the Scottish nationalist material of the novel, which is centered in Glasgow though Baxter still speaks with a Scottish accent in the film[7]. At the same time, the film explicitly thematizes an escape from capitalist ideology in its presentation of Bella as a tabula rasa who has not been exposed to the interpellating power of the dominant ideology of the world around her.
Jameson insists that the power of the ideology of late capitalism to control the minds of its subjects is unprecedented, and it is primarily to our own contemporary condition that he refers when he declares that “our imaginations are hostages to our own mode of production (and perhaps remnants of past ones it has preserved” (Jameson 2005, xiii). But this declaration is merely an extension of Marxist ideas about the power of inherited ideologies that go back to Marx himself. Marx expresses this idea in several places, the clearest of which is probably his discussion, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), of the ultimate failure of the 1848 revolution failed to bring about radical change, instead leading the “grotesque mediocrity” Louis Napoleon Bonaparte to seize total power in France in a coup in 1851. This failure, Marx explains, came about because the imaginations of those involved in the revolution had been inherently limited by the ideological baggage they inherited from the past:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.” (Marx and Engels 1978, 555)
Bella, with her brand-new brain, has been freed of the weight of those dead generations and can thus imagine a totally new path to the future, unburdened by time-worn prejudices, allow her clearly to see a way to a better future. At one point, for example, Bella declares, “It is the goal of all to improve, advance, progress, grow.” Meanwhile, when Madame Swiney rejects Bella’s proposal for reforming the operation of the bordello to be more fair to its workers, she explains to Bella that her suggestion is simply not the way things are done. Bella then responds with a key declaration that points toward the film’s sense of hope for the future, while also linking (via context) that hope to better conditions for women and workers: “As God my father says, it is only the way it is until we discover the new way it is, and then that is the way it is, until we discover the new way it is, and so it goes until the world is no longer flat, electricity lights the night, and shoes are no longer tied with ribbons.”
This declaration of faith in progress might seem perfectly in line with the Victorian worldview, which (until a late-century crisis in confidence) relied on the assumption of continual historical and technological progress (with Britain in the lead). However, Bella (due to her lack of prior conditioning) is willing to endorse fundamental changes that go well beyond the Victorian norm. Meanwhile, her suggestion that these changes might come about as a natural result of the historical process adds to the film a utopian optimism that rivals Jameson’s own.
For What It’s Worth: Poor Things as a Political Form of Postmodernism
Poor Things seems (in its fragmented form, its pastiche construction, and its central alliance on spectacle) to be an exemplary postmodern film in most ways, except for the fact that it differs dramatically from Jameson’s characterization of the political impotence of postmodern culture. Part of this quandary might have to do with the film’s source material: the novels of Gray are already filled with both anticapitalist political material and postmodern formal techniques. Churchman, for example, grants that Lanark seems a classic case of postmodern style but argues that it is (mostly) not postmodern because of its commitment to the “socialist humanist tradition” (76). In the same way, the clear political charge of Poor Things might tempt one to conclude (wrongly) that Lanthimos’s Poor Things simply isn’t itself postmodern but is actually something else.
Indeed, many observers of twenty-first century culture have felt that it was beginning to move in new directions that take it beyond postmodernism. For example, the journal Twentieth-Century Literature published a special issue in 2007 that was entirely devoted to the notion that postmodernism might have run its course. In his introduction to that issue (subtitled “After Postmodernism,” which is also the collective title of the issue itself), Andrew Hoberek explains that the volume’s essays “propose new models for understanding contemporary fiction in the wake of postmodernism’s waning influence” (233). Then, five years later, Jeffrey Nealon would enthusiastically adopt the term “post-postmodernism,” positioning his account as a sort of sequel to Jameson’s theorization of postmodernism, arguing that post-postmodernism is now the cultural logic of neoliberalism in the same way that postmodernism was the cultural logic of late capitalism.
Nealon’s interest is largely in fiction—and is not specifically focused on fiction with strong anticapitalist messages. Indeed, he describes his “post-postmodernism” as an “intensification and mutation within postmodernism,” rather than as a turn to a completely new direction—just as neoliberalism might be seen as an intensification of late capitalism (Nealon 2012, ix). However, it is also the case that many of the most interesting novels published since his 2012 book have displayed postmodern formal characteristics but have also contained strong anticapitalist critical energies (which is in some ways the opposite of the trend detected by Nealon). Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019), for example, draws upon the Frankenstein story to construct a narrative that suggests artificial intelligence as a way beyond both capitalism and conventional gender identities. Postmodern novels such as Lavie Tidhar’s A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), or Percival Everett’s The Trees (2021) and James (2024) gain political power by drawing upon historical events such as the Holocaust, slavery, and lynching, while both A Man Lies Dreaming (detective, alternate history) and The Trees (detective, horror) engage in subversive dialogues with popular genres. Much the same can be said for film, as many ostensibly postmodern films with strong political energies have been produced in recent years, including Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018), Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021), David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022), and Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool (2023).
In this sense, it is worth noting that Poor Things was released in the same year as Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a film that gained even more attention for its feminist message and that was—especially in its disavowal of realism in favor of an emphasis on spectacular consumerist images—also clearly postmodern. Indeed, a movie that is literally about a popular consumer brand would seem to exemplify Jameson’s vision of the conscription of postmodern culture by the commodity production system of late capitalism. And there is no doubt that Barbie was conceived (and successfully served) as a marketing tool for Mattel. At the same time, the feminist message of the film, however moderate, clearly demonstrated that such films can still deliver progressive political messages. The message of Poor Things is clearly more radical (and more anticapitalist) than that of Barbie, but the film is no less postmodern in a formal sense, thus extending more into the realm of a political form of postmodernism.
It might be too early for what’s happening here to be exactly clear, but (at least in the case of seemingly postmodern works with significant political clout), Jameson already has much of this situation covered in his 1991 postmodernism book with his suggestion of the possibility of a future “political form of postmodernism” that overcomes inability of postmodern culture to critique late capitalism effectively by surmounting postmodernism’s usual lack of historical sense or ability to imagine a cognitive map of the late capitalist system. In particular, Jameson argues that this political form of postmodernism (like all postmodernism) would be fundamentally about the “world space of multinational capital,” but would achieve “a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion” (Jameson 1991a, 54).
The narrative of Poor Things essentially consists of Bella’s attempt, free of the limits that might be placed on her imagination by a conventional upbringing within Victorian society, to go forth and explore the world, attempting to construct a cognitive map of the world and her place in it. In so doing, the film creates for its viewers an estranged vision of the Victorian era that gives them a refreshed view of that era as the precursor to our own—but one that might well have been the precursor to something different if only the radical historical changes that followed it had turned out just a bit differently. In addition, the film doesn’t simply gesture toward the possibility of a better future; it provides us with a specific suggestion that this future should be built upon the principles of socialism and gender equity. It is probably too early to take Poor Things as a marker of the beginnings of a bold new era in postmodern culture as a whole; it does, however, suggest (in concert with a number of other recent works) that a political form of postmodernism is not only possible but is beginning to appear.
Works Cited
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Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Churchman, Georgia Walker. 2019. “(Scottish) Critic Fodder: On Why Alasdair Gray’s Lanark Isn’t a Nationalist or a Postmodernist Text, Mostly.” Forum for Modern Language Studies. 55, no. 1: 75–89.
Debord, Guy. 1995. The Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books.
Gray, Alasdair. 1992. Independence: Why the Scots Should Rule Scotland. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Gray, Alasdair. 2023. Poor Things. 1992. New York: Mariner Books.
Hoberek, Andrew. 2007. “Introduction: After Postmodernism.” Twentieth-Century Literature 53, no. 3: 233–47.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991a. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991b. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Pretexts 3, nos. 1–2: 82–104. Originally published in Social Text 1986, 15: 65–88.
Jameson, Fredric. 1992. Signatures of the Visible. London: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso.
Leach, William.1993. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. London: Vintage-Random House.
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McGrath, Harry. 2013. “Early Days of a Better Nation.” Scottish Review of Books, 28 March 2013, https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2013/03/early-days-of-a-better-nation/. Accessed 4 March 2024.
McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. London, Methuen.
McMillan, Dorothy. 1995. “Constructed Out of Bewilderment: Stories of Scotland.” In Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Ian A. Bell. Cardiff, 80–99. University of Wales Press.
Nealon, Jeffrey. 2012. Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
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NOTES
[1] Subsequent references to Poor Things are to the film unless indicated otherwise.
[2] In addition, there is an obvious (though not necessarily trivial) way in which any film adaptation of a novel is a form of pastiche, especially if it is a fairly loose adaptation that appears more than thirty years after the publication of the novel.
[3] Other theorists of the postmodern have seen such play with history quite differently. Linda Hutcheon, for example, characterizes such as play as “historiographic metafiction” that challenges the authority of official versions of history (Hutcheon 1988).
[4] This phrase (with attribution to Gray) is inscribed on the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament building. It was adapted as a personal slogan by Gray (who, late in his life, would substitute “world” for “nation”) from Canadian poet Dennis Lee’s 1968 poem “Civil Elegies,” which suggests that the best life would be to try to find a place “in the early days of a better civilization.” See McGrath (2013).
[5] It is, of course, not insignificant that Baxter’s first name is the last name of Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin. Meanwhile, in the novel, Baxter’s middle name is “Bysshe,” aligning him with Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Husbands and fathers are both markers of patriarchy.
[6] The novel calls attention to the fact that Alexandria is in this condition due to the then-recent British shelling of Alexandria in July 1882, designed to thwart the rise of nationalist opposition to the British-friendly khedive Tawfik Pasha. Its treatment of Alexandria thus carries an anti-colonial component that is missing in the film, which is, in any case, set somewhat later.
[7] Gray was very much a Scottish nationalist, as he makes clear in his pamphlet Independence: Why the Scots Should Rule Scotland, published the same year as Poor Things. His nationalism also clearly comes through in Poor Things. Indeed, both McMillan and Rhind have argued that this novelshould be read as a Scottish national allegory (McMillan 1995, and Rhind 2011). They thus follow Jameson’s suggestion that “third-world” literature should generally be read this way, thus essentially making it function as an alternative to postmodernism (Jameson 1991b).