It's the poverty of Poor Things

Barbie, the billion dollar advertisement, proves the more subversive story.

A beautiful young woman escapes the shackles of innocence, stumbling into self-discovery. On the first steps of her hero’s journey, she is seen as both ingenue and object: she gawks at the world as the world gawks back. Among polite society, she is an orphaned freak, a slate wiped clean by motherlessness, in search of her future but discovering her past. Hers is a story of autogenesis and sexual maturity. It’s a metaphor for Enlightenment — and an apologia for bourgeois feminism.

This is a description of both Barbie and Poor Things.

Something is amiss for our heroines. Is the world as it seems, all pink and plastic, in the one instance, and monochrome in the other? Like good students of Kant, they steel themselves for adventure and embrace their ability to think for themselves. We must have the courage to know the world on our own, according to Kant, free from the dogmas of the past. Only then can we shrug off our “self-imposed immaturity.” So it is for Barbie and Bella Baxter. 

It is in daring to know that the protagonists encounter the other. This recognition of something outside themselves — and their struggle to integrate, or at least reconcile, difference — precipitates the psychic break that launches the girls into womanhood. Because just as Odysseus abandoned domestic boredom in Ithaca for glory at Troy, Barbie and Bella both chafe at their gilded cages. Barbie feels her fundamental thing-ness, her vinyl dollhood, as emptiness, a foreign pull towards death: she introduces difference to the suffocating sameness of Barbieland and brings a raucous-if-monotonous blowout to a halt by contemplating the possibility of nonexistence. Bella rebels against the designs of her father-captor-creator God by smashing porcelain to bits and pleasuring herself on fruit. It’s the apple, the flower of the tree of knowledge, that introduces Bella to her sexual freedom.

In the Enlightenment tradition that Kant inaugurated, knowledge of the self leads to mastery of the world, and eventually, the domination of the other. (“And when we know the world,” as a character in Poor Things says, “the world is ours.”) You could call this the feminist critique of Enlightenment: the recognition of our contingency is the germ of our autonomy. But nature abhors a vacuum. The search for stable ground on which to erect first principles reveals that selfhood is not just freedom, but desire, fear, and control. 

Here is the self-created ego and the arrogance of man, that we can make sense of the contradiction between contingency and autonomy by imposing our rational will upon the world. An uncreated creator needs no justification, and Bella and Barbie both flirt with this male-coded image of the self. After all, Barbie returns from exile as a conquering hero, fomenting a counterinsurgency armed with the knowledge of the self gained on her quest. Bella herself assumes the throne at God’s surgery table.

The brilliance of the films, I think, lies in how the two women develop consciousness of themselves, learning who they are, as ambiguous creations, both self and other. This is literal in Bella’s case: she discovers that she is the body of the mother carrying the mind of the child. Barbie learns she is a toy, a doll with an impossible hip-to-waist ratio, and yet a human woman yearning to be.

In both cases, they are the contradictions of creation made concrete — or rather, flesh. (They are therefore also films about parenthood.)

But the poverty of Poor Things is that the billion dollar advertisement proves the more subversive story. Barbie learns that there is no going home. She leaves Barbieland to the unsophisticated playthings while she opts for the fallen kingdom of adulthood. (“Do you ever think about dying?” and “I’m here for my gynecology appointment” bookend the film’s major conflict, as Barbie seeks eternity in the ephemeral.) Despite the Enlightenment fiction that drives the plot of Poor Things — “it is the goal of all to progress, grow” — Bella ends where she begins: at the vivisection table. Barbie continues her exile in search of herself, while Bella assumes her father’s post as master of nature. Therapeutic self-actualization or godly dominion over the other are the two routes that the Enlightenment has taken us. The liberation in each is shallow, individual, and unconvincing. In a word, bourgeois. 

Labor doesn’t exist in Barbieland. (His job is beach. Just beach.) It’s a function of Barbieland’s plastic unreality, a utopia so complete there is no need for work. The lack of class conflict keeps the Barbies in their self-imposed immaturity (those poor things!). When the conflict comes, it’s a battle of the sexes, and its resolution returns Barbieland to its status quo, minus its hero. Barbie’s choosing of selfhood and the possibility of motherhood over dollhood — “I want to be a part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that is made” — is a recognition that we are created and creators. The work of existence in an imperfect world is the work of reconciling ourselves to this contradiction.  

Labor is more visible in Poor Things, but Bella walls herself off from it at the end of the film. She retreats from the material messiness of the imperfect world for the sterile conditions of her lab. It’s an acceptance of her place as the inheritor of God’s domain, wise master of the world around her. There, she can sustain the fantasies of omnipotence she enjoyed as an infant, a specimen in controlled conditions. This denouement proves a betrayal of her journey into personhood, which begins with the anguish of helplessness and a refutation of Enlightenment omnipotence.

Because while the erotic apple might have marked Bella’s discovery of her own autonomy (“Bella discover happy when she want!”), her exile from Eden culminates in the powerlessness of grief. Since she is soldered into her own mother, Bella experiences the pain of differentiation for the first time when she is helpless to aid those in need. 

When she finally sets foot on concrete ground in the city of Alexandria, Bella walks straight into the horrors of capital. The stone staircase that leads to Alexandria’s slums has been broken. Across the chasm, unreachable, lie the slave laborers who have built her world of pretty colors and fancy dresses. Incapable of helping them, Bella resorts to secular indulgence. She gathers the casino winnings from a Lothario lawyer and offers them to a pair of opportunistic sailors. Bella cleanses herself of responsibility in the material world. Having performed her ablutions, she can sustain the fantasy of her innocence.

Now penniless, Bella is kicked off the ship and lands again in the real world. She joins a brothel, an act framed in explicitly political terms: “we are our own means of production” she spits at her ex-lover. Whereas the men in her life have been using her, whether as an experiment or fuckdoll, sex work allows Bella to take ownership of her self. “How delightful,” as the madam puts it, “a woman plotting her course to freedom.”

The irony hinted here is that this is only an accommodationist freedom. As the madam has to explain to Bella, some men pay for sex in order to rob the women of their freedom to say no. The surgical rationalism Bella adopts from God gives her a critical distance from her own body. She can withstand the degradations of the clientele as a dissociative experiment. 

Bella’s past at last catches up to her when her mother’s erstwhile husband claims the body of his bride. Alfie is portrayed villainously, but his villainy is shallow. His are sins of affect, not of oppression. He is cartoonishly cruel to his trembling servants and it is that cruelty, not his class status, that makes him contemptible. I imagined the film ending in an orgy of aristocratic comeuppance, Bella transforming her status as science experiment into revolutionary consciousness for the subjugated classes.

Instead, Bella returns to Ithaca to take up her throne. God is dead. Alfie is tamed as a perverted pet. In her scientific refuge, walled in by capital, Bella may be a free woman, but the contradiction of Alexandria remains. She has made her peace with it.