Poor Things and Past Lives

Couched

Dear Friends,

I’m catching up on Oscar movies and sharing a discussion of a couple of them. As usual, these are more meant to be read after you’ve already seen the film. At the partner site

Inner Life

Laura Durnell

writes on Erica Jong and

Mary Tabor "Only connect ..."

interviews Henry Jaglom.

Best,

Sam

POOR THINGS

dir. by Yorgos Lanthimos, based on a novel by Alisdair Gray, with Emma Stone as Bella

This is a great movie and I’m staggered, actually, by how great it is. Lanthimos has gotten to a place of complete confidence and almost total freedom. In The Favourite that had to do with a very specific kind of loneliness. In Poor Things, it’s about female sexuality — a whole footloose, Candidean epic of female sexuality. 

Lanthimos seems to solve a few problems all at once. He solves the problem of how to do historical fiction — a stiff, problematic genre — by making it timeless. We’re in the fin de siècle, but a fin de siècle of its own imagination, with Victorian primness crossed with flying trams and a really-cool-looking Jules Verne-ish ship. In this fantasia, that “looks like nothing that could never exist in the real world,” we approach pure play — Wes Anderson tries the same thing but is, for me, less successful. And Lanthimos solves the problem of how to talk about female sexuality, and the violence and cruelty inherent in it, by just going for it, by taking all the different stages of female sexuality as fact, by treating the tendency to allow oneself to be exploited and controlled, the fascination with prostitution, etc, all as part of the journey of self-exploration.

Bella on the journey of self-exploration

The basic premise of Poor Things is that social interaction does virtually everything in its power to inhibit honest conversation about female sexuality, but Bella, by virtue of being uninhibited, is able to talk about it simply and directly and, to a surprising extent, get to the end of its mysteries. A society woman may think herself clever by saying, “Why would I keep it in my mouth if it’s revolting. I have said that to Gerald before if you catch my drift,” to which Bella promptly one-ups her by saying with complete guilelessness, “Oh because you mean his penis. Duncan’s can be salty.” Duncan may be horrified by Bella’s whoring, but Bella finds a very simple formula for it: “I have examined my situation. I need sex and money. Hence I must seek employment in your establishment.” And if Bella seems to be getting exploited at different points of the story — by Duncan, by General Blessington — she is in those relationships entirely of her own free will, and, as it turns out, she gives at least as good as she gets. 

The kind of central organizing joke of Poor Things is that she never wants to be with Max. This is explained on a surface level as that she can’t help but hold Max in contempt for his subservience to Godwin, but, as everybody in the film knows, there’s more to it than that. She can’t bear to be with Max precisely because he loves her, treats her well, wants the best for her. The ending is, I think, meant to be genuinely happy, [SPOILER] Max and Bella as a true partnership running the surgery together. But it takes a long time to get there. She prefers Duncan, even though he is cruel and insufferable. And then she prefers General Blessington even though she must have an intuition of how sadistic he is. The point being made is that, from the standpoint of female sexuality, the road to wisdom must pass through degradation. This is very different from the usual arc of finding-oneself epic narratives, which tend to be about men and focus on the moment of heroism, of courage. That’s alluded to glancingly in the figure of General Blessington, who has apparently achieved all possible tests of manhood on the field of battle and has nonetheless emerged from them vicious and simple-minded: “my life is dedicated to the taking of territory,” he says with commendable self-awareness, “that is the long and short of it.” 

Bella’s journey is somewhat different, a bit like Candide, a bit like Fanny Hill. The really challenging moments in it are the encounter with Astley on the ship — and Astley’s buddhistic introduction to Bella of the infinitude of suffering. This is meant to be only a preliminary step on Bella’s journey — Astley, as she astutely notes, is “just a broken little boy who cannot bear the pain of the world” and is playing at philosophy mostly to hurt Bella. But Bella undertakes the next, more difficult stage — with Madame Swiney the brothel keeper as her deeply absorbing, deeply untrustworthy guide. “We must experience everything,” Swiney says. “Not just the good but degradation, horror, sadness. This makes us whole Bella, makes us people of substance.”

Madame Swiney — next step of the journey

And that is the real heart of Poor Things. Madame Swiney is of course not to be relied upon for a second — she is saying what she is saying largely to keep Bella continuing to work in her house, to bring her to ever deeper layers of the abyss. But Bella takes her seriously, and the end of the movie appears to redeem Bella’s faith in Madame Swiney’s equivocal wisdom. Female sexuality is something to be undergone, seen through to the end, not — as in General Blessington’s simple-minded problem-solving — excised. The path to self-knowledge and strength for a woman is not so straightforward as for a man (this is one of the reasons why there are so few epics about women), but there is the feeling that Bella actually does get to a spiritual clarity — certainly, she ends up further along in the game than her predecessor Victoria, with her prudishness, her fear of sexuality. It’s a harrowing journey — much more complicated, for instance, than the journey Max is taking over the same period of time. It passes through degradation, humiliation, but — just as Madame Swiney advised — it also is the way out of flightiness, the way to ground, to really know yourself. 

PAST LIVES

dir. and written by Celine Song, with Greta Lee as Nora

Very flat. I’m really astonished that this got the accolades it did, got nominated for an Oscar, etc. The dialogue is often very wooden — “We were babies then” / “We were still babies when we met twelve years ago”; or “Is this how you thought your life would turn out? Laying in a bed in a tiny apartment in the East Village with some Jewish guy who writes books.” The characters are lacking in chemistry —which is kind a must in a story about how they are ineluctably drawn to one another. Nora, as the center of the triangle, is supposed to be somehow uniquely alluring, but all we get from her is that we are told — not shown — that she is a grade-grubber and an ambitious writer, that she is “a fun person to talk to,” that she has a mean streak to her. The cinematography is uninspired. The long redolent pauses often just feel uncomfortable instead of evocative — you can almost see the thought bubbles over the actors’ heads wondering when there will be a cut. And, more and more as I was watching, I found myself drawn to the ‘melancholic music’ chyron in my closed captioning, which seemed so often to stand in for what was supposed to be happening on screen. 

Past Lives’ (fairly basic) dramatic geometry

So!, having said all that, let’s try to focus in on what genuinely does work about the film. And, in its way, it is doing something very ambitious and contemporary — and trying to be the voice for the sort of urbanite laptop social class, which is also my class. The point is that people’s real lives, in our atomized, over-polite society, are often buried very deep down — maybe completely inaccessible beneath the patter, the takeout food, the well whiskies, the bonhomie of easy living. Nora — unusually for a film heroine — has taken all of the less-challenging choices. She has ignored the narrative of the lifelong love affair with Hae Sung, decided that what matters more to her is assimilating to New York, is her writing program and her artist residencies. Arthur, her husband, has a moment of well-earned panic about this — realizing that their lives are very insubstantial, that they have taken very few actual risks, that there is no great story that has led to their making out with and then marrying somebody in the exact same social class, going through the exact same life trajectory. 

As befits the vanishingly minimalist style of Past Lives, it never gets more heated than that. The three of them go out for a drink, have a nice time. [SPOILER] Hae Sung appears to start to say something meaningful and then lets it dissipate into millennial shrugginess: “What if this is a past life too and we are already something to each other in our next life? Who do you think we are then?” / “I don’t know.” / “Me neither.” And then Nora, after saying goodbye to him and returning to Arthur, dissolves into long bitter tears. And those tears do, to a great extent, redeem the rest of the movie and make it fit together. The tears come from somewhere beyond Nora’s own life and the fairly conventional choices she’s taken. They do seem to swell up from the accumulation of all of her past lives — of her undeniable In-Yun with Hae Sung. There is something vast about any person, any collection of people who happen to be drawn together. Their actual lives are just a surface ripple of that.