Echoes of the Road in Poor Things
Perhaps roads were on my mind the second I entered the theater.
I had, after all, journeyed almost three hours to see Poor Things at Dartmouth’s iteration of the Telluride film festival. With a splitting headache and an unfortunate sense of nausea, I was well aware of every mile traveled. I felt the road in all its weight, the miles of cement and tar that stretched before me, taking me across several state lines, past the coast and into the mountains, only to dump me in the most liminal, transportative place of all – the movie theater.
That’s why, when Bella Baxter, the protagonist of Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film Poor Things, is whisked off from her London home to a European adventure, I was thinking about the cinematic road and its echoes.
In cinema and literature, the road is a place where rules do not exist, where daring young dreamers can go to find liberation from regular social norms and customs. In many of its iterations, the road is a decidedly American place, (or anti-place, to be more specific). It is also distinctly male, symbolic of a sort of masculine invincibility (once Sylvia Plath, expressing her desire for a Kerouacian road adventure of her own, lamented that “all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery.”) Poor Things’ female-led, Victorian setting might not place it next to road classics like Easy Rider or My Own Private Idaho, but as any Yorgos Lanthimos fan knows, the director has never really been one to play by the rules.
The film presents us with a protagonist who feels trapped by her circumstances. Bella Baxter, a recently deceased woman reanimated by the brain of a fetus, is ruled by the morals of stuffy Victorian England – which, because of her childlike brain, she fails to understand. She is under the gaze of God – or sorry, Godwin, her creator/father figure – and his constant demands. “Do not say those words, Bella.” “Do not pee on the floor, Bella.” “Do not masturbate with fruit on the dining table, Bella.”
Bella’s life changes when she meets a charming, albeit scummy, lawyer named Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), who promises to take her across Europe on a sort of perverted grand tour. Together, Duncan and Bella go on the road, so to speak. Perhaps we see steamships and cobblestone streets instead of sun-bleach asphalt, but so what?
Like the protagonists of American road films, Bella embarks on a journey that takes her outside of conventional life. The most important characteristics of the road are present in Lanthimos’ film: its liminality, its expansiveness, its promise of something beyond civilized society. To be a traveler means that when Bella stops in cities, she is a mere passer-through, unbeholden to its customs. Her “road” (so-to-speak) enables her to skirt the conventions of patriarchal, European norms. In the process of traveling, Bella embraces her sexuality, her independence, and her aspirations as a female doctor. Bella’s development from her original baby-brained state to effortless maturity happens almost entirely outside of traditional citizenship – and thus, she is never indoctrinated into the patriarchy, or simply polite society.
Much of the criticism surrounding Poor Things expresses a sense of shock (sometimes mixed with admiration) toward the film’s frank depiction of female sexuality. Such a sense of shock is understandable for an audience who has been taught to recoil from sex. But Lanthimos wants us to imagine a world in which that voice is no longer present. What does it look like for a woman to exist free from the social norms that confine her? Lanthimos asks us a question that, although explored widely in film, is perhaps at its most daring iteration in Poor Things.
Such a question kept me occupied throughout the film’s runtime, and even long after. When I returned to the road after leaving the theater, I no longer dreaded the long trip home. Thinking of Bella Baxter, I felt lighter, freer, and more sure of myself, ready to embrace any and every journey that lay ahead of me.