Fredric Jameson’s vision of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism is one of the most influential constructs in the history of cultural theory. And, while Jameson’s theorization would seem to depict postmodern culture as unable to amount any effective political critique of capitalism, Jameson himself (a consistently utopian thinker) has long argued that some forms of cultural production, because of their eccentric relationship with the mainstream strand of postmodern cultural production, 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 (54). One might argue that Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things (1992), published just a year after Jameson’s foundational book, was already a political form of postmodernism, while also remaining on the margins of late capitalism. What we argue here, though, is that Yorgos Lanthimos’s widely acclaimed Oscar-winning 2023 film adaptation of Gray’s novel might function even more clearly both as an eccentric exception to postmodernism and as a demonstration that a political form of postmodernism itself, complete with a utopian vision of a possible better future, is genuinely possible.
Lanthimos has long been a leading figure in the “Greek Weird Wave,” while initially residing well outside the Hollywood-dominated mainstream. His film Dogtooth (2009) was one of the key films that established the Greek Weird Wave as a genuine phenomenon in global culture[1]. Lanthimos further built his reputation for weirdness with such subsequent efforts as Alps (2011), The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). Then, his offbeat historical comedy-drama The Favourite (2018) scored ten Oscar nominations (including for Best Motion Picture and Best Direction), winning one for Best Actress in a Lead Role (Olivia Colman). The success of this film firmly placed Lanthimos among the front ranks of the world’s filmmakers. It also demonstrated his ability to keep it weird in the face of mainstream success—as well as to make a lavish (if definitely out-of-kilter) period film.All of these precedents, though, could not quite have prepared Lanthimos’s increasing band of followers for his unlikely 2023 adaptation of Gray’s Poor Things, which is both a weirder and a loftier achievement than anything Lanthimos had accomplished before. It is also a highly political film that 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 of the characteristics that identify a film it as postmodern.
Poor Things, Novel to Film
To make Gray’s Poor Things adaptable at all, Lanthimos and screenwriter Tom McNamara (who also co-wrote The Favourite) were forced to eliminate wide swaths of the particularly 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 elimination of some of these quintessentially postmodern elements would have made the novel much less interesting; their elimination from the film, however, helps to focus the story in both a narrative and thematic sense, one result of which is to move the film more clearly into the realm of (weird, steampunk) science fiction and to identify it more directly with the Frankenstein story as a source. Meanwhile, Lanthimos replaces some of the overtly literary and textual aspects of the novel with overtly cinematic gestures, making use of sound, visuals, and performances in ways clearly designed to call attention to themselves. Finally, the film adds certain science fictional elements not explicitly present in the novel to provide an additional subplot that links the liberation of women from patriarchal control directly to scientific and technological progress. These additions help the film to retain and even extend the subversive political energy of the novel, despite all of the elements from the novel that are missing in the film.
Gray’s novel is constructed as a sort of Menippean compilation of three different documents (plus a relatively brief editor’s introduction). What one might consider to be the “main” narrative is a memoir entitled Episodes from the Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer, supposedly written by Glasgow physician Dr. Archibald McCandless (replaced by “Max McCandles” in the film) and privately published by him in 1909, two years before his death. Other sections of the novel either call into question or attempt to support the veracity of this segment, but the film adapts this segment only, telling 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 but transplants the brain of her nine-month-old fetus into her cranium, giving her a fresh start in life. Naming his creation Bella, Baxter then begins to teach her as she advances from mental infancy, serving largely as a father figure for her. Baxter then employs his assistant McCandles (sitcom star Rami Youseff) to help with Bella’s education, but then McCandles falls in love with Bella and is betrothed to her himself, only to have her run away with local cad Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, who scored an Oscar nomination for the role). Wedderburn takes Bella on a sex-fueled tour of Europe and the Mediterranean. Eventually, Bella returns and rejoins McCandles (whether or not in wedlock is not entirely clear), 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.
Poor Things is, in many ways, a pastiche of Frankenstein, but this pastiche 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” (76). Among other things, the depiction in Poor Things of an alternate Victorian world on the cusp of full-blown modernity helps to emphasize and reconsider the status of Frankenstein as a signpost on the historical road to capitalist modernization. And, if the film adaptation of Poor Things is not quite able to capture all of the novel’s various dialogues with nineteenth-century literature, the film at least mimics the overt postmodern literariness of the novel through an especially overt and self-conscious use of the resources of cinema. Indeed, some reviewers complained that the film goes too far in this sense, as when Manohla Dargis grudgingly declares Poor Things to be “visually sumptuous and gleefully clever,” but ultimately turns grumpy and feels that the movie is just too impressed by its own cleverness, to the point that “you start to feel as if you were being bullied into admiring a movie that’s so deeply self-satisfied there really isn’t room for the two of you.”
Reading the film along with the novel, though, shows why some of this cleverness is well motivated as an attempt to capture some of the spirit of the original. Thus, some of the verbal and textual shenanigans of the novel are replaced with sound, visuals, and performances that replicate some of the postmodern playfulness of the novel. The spectacular nature of the film’s cinematic elements was clearly designed to draw attention to them, and that effort seems to have been successful, given the attention that the film did indeed receive—leading to the film’s nomination for eleven Academy Awards, including four of the “Big Five” categories: Best Motion Picture, Best Achievement in Directing (Lanthimos), Best Adapted Screenplay (McNamara), and Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Stone[2]). Among these only Stone won, but the film scored Oscar wins in several visual categories, including Makeup and Hairstyling (Nadia Stacey, Mark Coulier, and Josh Weston), Costume Design (Holly Waddington), and Production Design (James Price, Shona Heath, and Zsuzsa Mihalek) The other nominations were also in particularly cinematic categories, including Best Supporting Actor (Ruffalo), Cinematography (Robbie Ryan), Film Editing (Yorgos Mavropsaridis), and Best Original Score (Jerksin Fendrix).
Touting Stone’s “hilarious, beyond-next-level performance” in his five-star review, Peter Bradshaw described Poor Things as a “steampunk-retrofuturist Victorian freakout and macabre black-comic horror,” while declaring Lanthimos to be an “absurdist virtuoso.” Aside from the basic plot (which jettisons verisimilitude, as did Gray’s novel), the absurdism of Lanthimos’s Poor Things resides primarily in its creation of fantastic visual spectacles—which themselves carry a certain utopian energy. Other elements of the film’s visual texture also call attention to themselves, most obviously its use of black-and-white cinematography throughout the first part of the film (after a very brief prologue of Victoria’s suicide, plus a sequence of color flashbacks to Bella’s creation). Then, a little over forty minutes in, the film suddenly switches to dazzling hyper-color, where it will remain the rest of the way.
This switch serves a variety of functions. For example, the early black-and-white scenes might evoke memories of James Whale’s early black-and-white Frankenstein films, which remain the most important cinematic retellings of the Frankenstein story nearly a century after their release. This motif will also surely remind many viewers of the shift to an explosion of color in The Wizard of Oz (1939) when Dorothy arrives in Oz from a drab sepia-toned Kansas, and the comparison is apt: in both cases a female protagonist suddenly enters a new world of possibility after leaving the constricted world in which she had previously lived. However, the shift in Poor Things is specifically linked to Bella’s discovery and exploration of her sexuality. The very first color scene features her having sex for the first time after her brain transplant.[3]
In another key visual flourish, we find that the performance of Dafoe is, for once, overshadowed by that of other actors, but that is partly because his role is informed less by his acting than by his spectacular appearance, as overdone prosthetics give him an extreme look that is presumably meant to evoke Whale’s version of Frankenstein’s monster, though more than one critic has also suggested the title character of David Lynch’s Elephant Man (1980) as a referent[4]. The novel does hint (but only hint) at the possibility that Godwin’s father might have created him by the “Frankenstein method”—a fascinating possibility that would fold Frankenstein and his monster into a single figure in Poor Things, with Bella as the intended Bride (274). However, the film simply stipulates that Godwin’s father had performed a variety of macabre experiments on him throughout his childhood, leaving it to us to guess exactly how far those experiments might have gone.
The status of Poor Things as a sort of postmodern remake of the Frankenstein story is the most obvious way in which it participates in the genre of science fiction. There are, however, other predecessors as well. For example, the 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 H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Of course, both Frankenstein and Moreau are cautionary tales of scientific overreach, and to that extent their connection with Poor Things might seem ominous. However, there is a sense in which Poor Things directly reverses the Frankenstein story, largely by showing us Baxter as a responsible scientist who adopts a nurturing attitude toward his creation, as opposed to Victor Frankenstein’s hasty abandonment of his creation, leading to tragic results. Ultimately, partly thanks to Baxter’s upbringing (aided by McCandles, who is so much more caring and supportive than the notorious assistants Fritz and Ygor from Frankenstein films), the principal difference between Poor Things and Frankenstein or Moreau is that Bella is a successful experiment, especially in the film[5]. As a result, she 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 also 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 utopian dimension of Bella’s success also resonates with the other main science fictional aspect of Poor Things: its status as a work of steampunk alternate history. The action of Poor Things takes place in an alternate nineteenth-century Europe, centered in London, which would be the Victorian city American and English viewers would likely know best and associate most with the coming of modernity (as opposed to the Glasgow of the novel). Indeed, some familiarity with Victorian London is quite helpful to appreciate the film, because a number of aspects in the film’s computer-modified London differ from that of the historical London, most obviously in the availability of more advanced steampunk technologies in the film than were available in the real world of Victorian London. The historical setting in some cases (as when Bella views the slums of Alexandria) pushes almost into surrealism and in all cases takes on a whimsy that calls attention to its own artificiality. But technology is at the very center of the whimsical visuals, the style of which has caused Lanthimos frequently to be compared more with Wes Anderson. Meanwhile, reviewer Jim Vorel’s list of Terry Gilliam, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Michel Gondry as analogs for the visuals of Poor Things seems a good one. In the case of Lanthimos’s film, though, these visuals often have a science fictional slant that makes them genuinely utopian, rather than merely whimsical. Meanwhile, the visual representation of steampunk technologies gives the film somewhat more of a science fiction feel than one finds in the novel, perhaps even more so because of the high-tech methods used to produce the very special visual texture of the film itself.
Bella vs. the Patriarchs
In a glowing review that declared Poor Things the best movie of the year (most importantly because of Stone’s performance as Bella), Christy Lemire suggested, “It’s as if Barbie were actually about Weird Barbie, but even that idea doesn’t quite do it justice.” Indeed, the film version of Poor Things appeared at a time when the year’s biggest box office hit was often touted for its anti-patriarchal message, though this message is certainly more radical in Poor Things than in Barbie. The most obvious political narrative within Poor Things (in both the novel and the film) has to do with Bella’s attempts to assert control of 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. However, Bella is an unconventional (and perhaps particularly effective) 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 simply to be the way of the world. Indeed, the central strategy of Poor Things is simply to defamiliarize certain 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 the male characters in both the novel and film as just such property—or at least as an object to attempt to control.
Bella’s first patriarch is her “father” (and, in the novel, potential husband) Godwin Baxter[6]. In the novel, Bella would thus initially seem, in the principal narrative, to be the embodiment of a lurid fantasy of patriarchal sexual domination. A physically attractive adult woman who starts out with the brain of an infant; she is also entirely within the control of Baxter. In this narrative, however, Baxter does not take sexual advantage of Bella, though he does initially plan to marry her once her new brain matures (under his tutelage), even though his ravaged body makes it difficult for him to function sexually. In the film, however, Baxter is stipulated to be even more incapable of having sex and is treated strictly as a father figure to Bella (in a role that is complicated for him by his problematic relationship with his own father, who treated him as an experimental subject, rather than a son). Ultimately, Baxter does endorse Bella’s marriage to McCandles, a match that she herself first accepts naïvely, then more knowingly.
A blank slate in the beginning, Bella would presumably be completely malleable and manipulable. However, she is also completely lacking in the kind of conditioning that was designed to encourage Victorian women to be subservient to men, which complicates this fantasy by giving her very much a mind of her own, free of any sense that the patriarchal order is the natural one. Meanwhile, Baxter’s role in the film is given a complication that is not present in the novel. Concluding that he has made a mistake with Bella by developing tender fatherly feelings for her, he creates a substitute for her in her absence, in the form of one Felicity (Margaret Qualley), whom he plans to treat with pure scientific objectivity (as his father did him). We are not given any information about the source of Felicity’s body or brain, but she is clearly something of a Bella lookalike, who is even dressed much as Bella had initially been dressed, even if she seems to lack Bella’s intellectual powers, at least within the time frame of the action of the film.
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 McCandless/McCandles. Wedderburn thinks that he is also simply seeking sexual adventure, 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 Max, 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 in the film 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 more overtly than in the novel, “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.
It should be noted, by the way, that McCandles is a somewhat more positive character than McCandless. In the novel, Victoria McCandless makes it clear in her “Letter to Posterity” that she regards her husband McCandless as something of a non-entity. Thus, she explains that she opted not to destroy the only remaining copy of his memoir because “it is almost the only evidence left that the poor fool existed” (251). In any case, Bella’s wedding is interrupted (as in the novel) 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 (as opposed to the novel, in which he shoots Bella in the foot, before disavowing her, eventually committing suicide). In the film, 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.
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. 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 (her coordination now improving) tosses a ball with Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperdine), Baxter’s former housekeeper is with them as well, now seemingly in charge of helping to educate, with the Blessington goat bleating comically in the background. Thus, except for “Blessington” and Max, 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.
The Politics of Poor Things
The possibility of a new and better reality lies at the heart of Poor Things.While its most obvious political themes might have to do with gender, Gray’s Poor Things is an intensely political novel that also conducts a biting satirical critique of capitalism, exhibiting both support for socialism as an alternative and a strong sense of history. The novel also displays most of the formal properties that Jameson (and others) have associated with postmodernism, including its highly fragmented structure and its construction via pastiche of a number of texts from the time period of the novel’s action. Published a year after Jameson’s monumental book on postmodernism, Poor Things would at first seem to cast doubt on Jameson’s insistence that postmodernism is so thoroughly aligned with the ideology of late capitalism that it cannot conduct an effective critique of the capitalist system. However, Jameson has long insisted that there are exceptions to his analysis that
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 (Signatures 23–24).
There might some question, of course, whether Gray’s Scottish perspective is as marginal as Jameson means here, though it is certainly off-center with respect to mainstream British culture. Indeed, Gray was very much a Scottish nationalist, in addition to a socialist, giving his work a vaguely postcolonial orientation[7]. Indeed, both McMillan and Rhind have argued that Poor Things should be read as a Scottish national allegory, following Jameson’s suggestion that “third-world” literature should generally be read this way, thus essentially making it function as an alternative to postmodernism (Jameson, “Third-World”). And, if it thus seems contradictory that Poor Things might be both postmodern and a national allegory, that might be because it is an example of Jameson’s “political form of postmodernism.
For Jameson, this form “could serve as an effective counter to the ideology of late capitalism, especially through “the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale” (Jameson 54). By sending Bella on tours of the world and by including discursive material on colonialism and the capitalist world system, Gray’s Poor Things clearly takes strides toward achieving this sort of global cognitive mapping. At the same time, it is also the case that the process of selection and elimination that was necessarily involved in adapting the novelto film also resulted in the removal of some of the novel’s most powerful political material. Still, the contrast in the film among London, Paris, Alexandria, and Lisbon (the latter location not included in the novel) does at least establish something of a global sense that there is a world beyond London. Some of the novel’s political material involves issues related to Scotland that are essentially eliminated by the film’s shift of Baxter’s home to London—though Baxter still speaks with a Scottish accent in the film. Another important omission has to do with the removal of the character of Dr. Hooker, an American doctor of both medicine and divinity, though some aspects of his character are rolled into the character of Harry Astley, who is English in the novel but African American in the film (played by Jerrod Carmichael). Astley’s Englishness plays a key role in opposition to Bella as Scottish in the novel, which is lost in the film, though one could argue that this strengthens the opposition between Bella as (Scottish) colonial subject and Blessington as colonial master in the film. The film also preserves the Englishness of Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter), with some obvious implications. Meanwhile, in the novel, Bella meets both Hooker and Astley on shipboard, where Hooker discourses extensively on the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon” race (perhaps adding a subtle irony to the fact that Astley is black in the film, though these racialist speeches are absent from the film). In particular, Hooker attributes all modern advancements, both social and technological, to the leadership of the Anglo-Saxon race, which was, he further claims, anointed by God to lead the world:
God arranged it by giving us bigger brains than anyone else, so we find it easier to control our evil animal instincts. This means that compared with the Chinese, Hindoos, Negroes and Amerindians—yes, even compared with the Latins and Semites—we are like teachers in a playground of children who do not want to know that the school exists. (139)
Hooker also argues that the United States has a special mission to lead the world into a more enlightened future as the standard-bearer of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, predicting that, before the end of the twentieth century, the United States would come to dominate the world (and rightfully so, in his view) (140).
The film does include (in somewhat modified form) a scene from the novel in which Bella’s travels across the Mediterranean in a baroque steampunk ocean liner take her to the slums of Alexandria (which she is urged to view by Hooker in the novel and by Astley in the film). Bella is horrified to learn of the depths of poverty and misery in which some people live, 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. 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 (which might just be a commentary on the cynicism of contemporary audiences).
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. All in all, though, the novel contains much more discussion of things such as socialism and the plight of the working class—much of it coming from the mouth of Astley, who dismisses most progressive political programs, but in a way so cynical that it undermines his own perspective and makes those who would dismiss socialism out of hand seem like haters of humanity. Astley is equally cynical in the film, though his discourse on politics is radically compressed. As Bella bids farewell to him before she and Wedderburn disembark in Marseilles, Astley explains that he showed her the poor of Alexandria intentionally to hurt her, because he couldn’t stand to see anything 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 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.” Bella’s optimism concerning the possibility of change remains undeterred, however. Or, as she says in the novel, “history is full of nastiness, but history is all past” (135).
If the overt critique of capitalism is less extensive in the film than in the novel, the treatment of gender issues may be even stronger in the film than in the novel, partly because of the impact of Stone’s performance on the road to exerting her sexual independence. Meanwhile, the film probably does more than the novel to link its critique of capitalism to its critique of patriarchy. 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 brothel 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. Thus, in a motif that is developed much better in the film than in the novel, the film suggests that the Madame (called “Madame Cronquebil” in the novel) 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, 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.”
Bella as Marker of the New
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. 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.”[8] 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. Both the novel and the film version of Poor Things are filled with anticipations of these coming changes, but many of the differences between the novel and the film have the effect of making the film seem a bit more optimistic and forward-looking as a harbinger of the modern world to come. In some cases, this change in emphasis involves slight tweaks to specific aspects of the novel. For example, the shift from Glasgow to London as the anchor point of the action has the effect of centering the events of the film in a location that was more at the center of the rise of modernity[9]. Similarly, the subtle shift in historical setting from the 1880s of the novel to what appear to be the 1890s of the film shifts the action slightly more into the midst of the emergence of a new modern world. In addition, Bella herself serves in the film as a visual marker of modernity, going about Victorian-era Europe with long, flowing hair and short skirts that seem to have time-traveled from the future. And then, of course, there are those visual markers of steampunk technology, including the flying trams that zoom over Lisbon on high wires and London 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).
In addition, there are more fundamental ways in which the shift from the novel (which rose to prominence in the eighteenth century essentially in conjunction with the solidification of capitalism as the dominant mode of production in Britain) to the more modern medium of film (which rose to prominence in conjunction with the turn to a consumerist form of capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century) inherently gives the film a texture that feels more modern than that of the novel. Even the film’s shift from black-and-white to color 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.
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. 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” (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. (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 consumerist capitalism that was just emerging at the end of the nineteenth century. However, one can also read the shift to color 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.
That the film 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 prevailing 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 able 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 only view of that world that makes sense to her.
Bella approaches the world with a fresh and entirely objective perspective, freed of the prejudices of the past that had trapped the prevailing Victorian view of progress within tightly-defined restraints. Here, one thinks of one of the most famous passages in all of the monumental work of Karl Marx, in which he discusses the ultimate failure of the revolution that brought Louis Napoleon Bonaparte to power in France in 1848 to bring about radical change, explaining that
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.” (555)
Bella’s new brain, freed of the weight of those dead generations, can imagine a totally new path to the future, unburdened by time-worn prejudices. At one point, for example, Bella declares, “It is the goal of all to improve, advance, progress, grow.” Meanwhile, 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 (missing in the novel) 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 progress (with Britain in the lead). However, Bella (due to her lack of prior conditioning) is willing to endorse fundamental changes in gender roles 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 an optimism that is clearer than in the novel (which leaves so much to interpretation). In addition, there are science fictional elements in the film that reinforce this view. After all, Jameson has long (following the early work of Darko Suvin) privileged science fiction as a genre whose innate utopian energies stand in stark contrast to the weak utopian vision he sees in postmodernism[10]. In particular, various steampunk technologies that we see in the film suggest an alternate Victorian world that is poised on the cusp of an explosive move into the future. That move would, in fact, happen in our world as well, though the utopian energies of the film suggest that the future of its world might be brighter and that our own future could potentially follow suit.
Conclusion
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is an effective film adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s original novel of the same title, partly because it focuses the narrative more and omits some of the interpretive complications that occur in the novel. In addition, the adaptation replaces some of the more literary gestures of the novel with cinematic gestures such as spectacular performances and visuals that have some of the same postmodern energy. The film adaptation also emphasizes the science fictional aspects of the narrative (largely through the visual representation of advanced steampunk technologies) more than the novel. These aspects reinforce the forward-looking political content of both the novel and the film. This content includes both a resounding rejection of patriarchy and a more subtle endorsement of socialism to suggest that Bella Baxter’s faith in the possibility of a better world is a result, not of naïve ignorance, but of freedom from the brain-numbing interpellating weight of the ideologies of the past. In both novel and film, then, Poor Things suggests that there are, indeed, exceptions to Jameson’s widely cited skepticism about the ability of postmodern culture to make effective political statements that point to a future beyond late capitalism. Perhaps, both versions of Poor Things suggest, there can indeed be a political form of postmodernism.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, 1981.
Bradshaw, Peter. “Poor Things Review—Emma Stone Has a Sexual Adventure in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Virtuoso Comic Epic.” The Guardian. 1 September 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/sep/01/poor-things-review-yorgos-lanthimos-emma-stone. Accessed 22 February 2024.
Dargis, Manohla. “Poor Things Review: Monster Mash.” New York Times, 7 December 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/movies/poor-things-review.html. Accessed 22 February 2024.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Translated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014.
Gray, Alasdair. Independence: Why the Scots Should Rule Scotland. Canongate, 1992.
Gray, Alasdair. Poor Things. 1992. Mariner Books, 2023.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2005.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.
Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Pretexts, vol.3, nos. 1–2, 1991, pp. 82–104. Originally published in Social Text, vol. 15, Fall 1986, pp. 65–88.
Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. Vintage-Random House, 1993.
Lemire, Christy. “Poor Things.” RogerEbert.com, 8 December 2023, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/poor-things-movie-review-2023. Accessed 22 February 2024.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848. Ed. David McClellan. Oxford University Press, 1992.
McGrath, Harry. “Early Days of a Better Nation.” Scottish Review of Booksˆ, 28 March 2013, https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2013/03/early-days-of-a-better-nation/. Accessed 4 March 2024.
McMillan, Dorothy. “Constructed Out of Bewilderment: Stories of Scotland.” Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction. Edited by Ian A. Bell. University of Wales Press, 1995, pp. 80-99.
Papanikolaou, Dimitris. Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
Rhind, Neil. “A Portrait of Bella Caledonia: Reading National Allegory in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things.” International Journal of Scottish Literature, Issue 8, Autumn-Winter 2011, pp. 1–15.
Vorel, Jim. “Emma Stone Rises from the Dead in Fantastical First Teaser for Poor Things. Paste, 11 May 2023, https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/yorgos-lanthimos/poor-things-teaser-trailer-emma-stone-yorgos-lanthimos-frankenstein. Accessed 28 February 2024.
Notes
[1] Other key films that are considered foundational to the Greek Weird Wave include Panos H. Koutras’s Strella (2009) and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010). For a study of the Greek New Wave that highlights the role of Lanthimos and emphasizes the political energies of the movement (within the context of postmodernism), see Papanikolaou.
[2] Among other things, Stone’s performance took the weird, awkward, deadpan, almost Brechtian acting of Lanthimos’s earlier films (perhaps most strikingly The Killing of a Sacred Deer)to a new level.
[3] In this sense, the most apt comparison might be with Gary Ross’s Pleasantville (1999), which begins in a black-and-white world that seems lifted from a 1950s sitcom, cleansed of all sexuality. Then, as sex begins to enter this world, the film tracks the change by gradually shifting to color.
[4] In another science fictional touch, Baxter is a sort of cyborg. For example, as a result of his father’s macabre experiments on him, he requires the use of an external mechanical apparatus in order to digest his food.
[5] Frankenstein has no assistant in Shelley’s novel. Fritz first appeared as the assistant in an 1823 stage play but is probably most famous for Dwight Frye’s depiction of him as the monster’s sadistic tormentor in Whale’s original 1931 film. Frye then depicted the less famous assistant Karl in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), after Fritz waskilled by the monster in the 1931 film. By the time of Son of Frankenstein (1939), Frankenstein’s assistant was named “Ygor,” probably the name with which the now iconic figure of the (demented, hunchbacked) mad scientist’s assistant has been most commonly associated ever since. In that film (and in its 1942 successor, The Ghost of Frankenstein) Ygor was played by none other than Bela Lugosi.
[6] 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.
[7] See Gray’s pamphlet Independence: Why the Scots Should Rule Scotland, published the same year as Poor Things.
[8] This phrase (attributed 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.
[9] The novel does, though, call attention to the crucial role played by Glasgow in the process of capitalist modernization, noting that it was in Glasgow that James Watt conceived the steam engines that were so crucial to the rise of Great Britain as an industrial and colonial power and William Thomson (aka Lord Kelvin) devised the transatlantic telegraph cables that provided such a boost to modern communication. Finally, we are reminded that it was in Glasgow that Adam Smith did much of the work that led to the first modern theorization of the workings of capitalist markets, though the claim that Smith “invented modern capitalism” in Glasgow might be a bit accurate (96).
[10] Jameson’s summary statement on science fiction can be found in his book Archaeologies of the Future (2007), which contains a significant discussion of the utopian possibilities of science fiction as a genre, as well as a compilation of many of Jameson’s articles on specific works of science fiction over the years.