'Poor Things', an empowered Frankenstein

There are filmmakers who work by having a brilliant idea, stretching it for two hours with all the Hollywoodian visual pomp, while reformulating an ancestral myth of masculinity through an empowered female protagonist. Poor Things is perhaps the most successful –though tedious– version of this trend, with the added bonus that Yorgos Lanthimos is a creator intelligent enough to turn Alasdair Gray's eponymous novel into a visual product that is just uncomfortable enough, but serves to liven up the philosophical discussions of Manhattan's middle class while they have brunch. The premise of all this is quite attractive; namely, to rewrite the myth of Frankenstein embodied in a woman prisoner of a childlike brain who is forced to travel the painful path from the Rousseauian noble savage to the goal of possibilistic becoming on a masculinized planet.

The grace of this film, as also happens with Greta Gerwig's Barbie, is that Bella Baxter's false Bildungsroman (rewritten by screenwriter Tony McNamara) is described in solidly masculine terms. This involves the protagonist's relationship with a prototypical triad of men who embody the creator-protector father, the compulsive womanizer, and the unfortunate henpecked husband. On the other hand, the existential awakening of its heroine is based on two paths (philosophically, kindergarten-level) which are, on the one hand, the one that goes from the most naive goodness to the tortuous acceptance of the evil of a world divided between mega-rich and cadaverous poor and, on the other, the supposed emancipation that derives from learning the structures of language with enough depth to end up equating living happily with being able to spend a morning calmly reading Kierkegaard while you knock back a Dry Martini.

Lanthimos is skilled enough to see that this had little substance and, aware that film publicity is woven on the networks, embeds an affordable contradiction within the world of his protagonist. Indeed, for a sufficiently spacious stretch of the film and in a sweetened version of Wedekind's two Lulus, Baxter emancipates herself economically and frees herself from her Don Juan while prostituting herself. Director and screenwriter anticipate the Twitter users who might label them misogynistic (with some reason, because it is very clear that where they have a blast is sculpturally taking advantage of Emma Stone while she fucks half of Paris) by tying this process of consciousness of one's own body (and the resulting pleasure) with the socialist revolution and lesbian relationships. Ultimately, therein lies the only interest of this film: at the limit, many contemporary creators devise a product anticipating its popular criticism.

Finally, the director survives the challenge because Emma Stone assumes the process of feminist emancipation in such a beautiful way that the viewer of the film ends up forgetting that the creators use a much greater footage to portray her compulsively fucking than rationalizing her own being in contact with two highly circumstantial philosophers in the general plot. It's funny that Yankee feminism has embraced the film when what is hidden in this coming of age is that (contrary to the male heroes of the nineties, who emancipated themselves by strengthening; more clearly, Rocky Balboa had to break his face in order to get rich and Forrest Gump reinvent his mental defect to adapt it to the society of the spectacle), in Poor Things one ends up thinking that the redefinition of the emancipated woman sooner or later involves having to reluctantly offer her pussy.

 The thing has irony, because the creators of Poor Things can always say (in a typically Yankee gesture, it must be remembered) that their movie has no documentary vocation or political prescribing. They can repeat it as many times as they want, but at the risk of filtering a spoiler, I would say that at the end of their version of Frankenstein we are shown a woman who ends up giving orders to a creature as mentally crippled as she herself was. If this is not masculinizing the narrative of empowerment, then tell me where it hides. But well, in the end Hollywood always wins and has forced us to write an article about the controversy (and Emma Stone will end up taking the Oscar, especially because most academics are males lacking affection). To recover from this bore, however, I recommend that you watch Young Frankenstein by Mel Brooks again: it's shorter, funnier and, of course, provokes much more thought.