First published in Counterpunch on March 08, 2024.
Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves
by John Kendall Hawkins
Three of the leading Oscar nominees for best picture for 2024 -- Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Poor Things -- include women in controlling situations that make one wonder if post-postmodern feminism isn't upon us, and, if so, how did men get so chickenchoked. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm not trying to say anything politically incorrect -- I mean, if I got canceled today, at my age, that would be the end of my sorry ass. But something's not right. It's time to sort through the signs and haruspicate.
For instance, in Oppenheimer two strong women -- wife Kitty and mistress Jean Tatlock -- fight over access to Oppie's schlong. Tatlock, a former student of Oppie's, and a psychiatrist and communist activist, in one notable scene pulls herself off Oppie's meat rocket to go over to the bookshelf and pull out the Bhagavad Gita, containing the now-famous Hindu script: Now, I have become as God. She hops back on and essentially forces the hero to read the script in translation while she rides him until he has a massive mushroom explosion, constellating her firmament with swimmy stars, and making one wonder if we couldn't all get together and re-tell our Origin story that way. Please? Tatlock ends up killing herself and, of course, the SALT II Treaty isn't working. And when I remember Carl Sagan saying we are all 'star stuff' I now get queasy.
Barbie, from what I could see and understand, had no conventional sex in it -- by the heroine at least -- making the film a kind of version (virgin?) of the anatomically incorrect doll girl she so sensually embodies. There's like a formula at work here. In her previous film, Barbie star Margot Robbie played a totally anatomically over-the-top slut in the aptly named Babylon. Now, in this film, she's like in rehab, on the sexual wagon, got herself into a nunnery, maybe part of a 12-step program that involves heavy doses of sunshine smiles and lampooned male-gazing reversed or something. What range. I don't know, am I wrong, or was Barbie cynically targeting the LGBTQ+ complexity and the whole bolshy I'll Remake Me Who I Am scene? What a time to be a man!
I dunno. I'm willing to entertain the notion being kicked around, like a can, in near-academia that Barbie is an ur-feminist movie. That it's actually angry. Like some Miles Davis tribute album: I'm a sex doll; they'll never let me forget it. I'm a sex doll alright; I'll never let them forget it. So much of feminist academia seemed to me back then angry and an interrogation of privileged white male gazing and its fixities of purpose. In this film, Ken (Ryan Gosling) seems suitable for a future cuckolding, and the arrival of GI Joe, which you expect at any moment, to rock the arc, never arrives. We begin with a lame send-up of 2001: A Space Odyssey (is that a kazoo playing the Strauss theme?), a little girl touches a monolithic (and svelte) Barbie leg and becomes a wrecking ball, smashing one doll's head in with another doll in a revolution of tool-making -- the tool here, presumably, withholding love (and what says withholding better than anatomical incorrectness?).
Then the party with all the flavors of Barbie (from frolicsome fat to NASA lift-off) showing up and dancing queenlike to gay choreography, only to see the party come to a sudden halt when someone mentions the word DEATH. Silence. For anatomically incorrect also means DEATH. The Barbie scene, with the vast array of doll roles and accessories, ain't the ideal fem world after all. There's some bite here. Now you get why they embedded the grim-sounding Billie Ellish number, "What Was I Made For?", which has frankly nihilistic tendencies -- though not as nada, nada, nada as that song that has the lyric "I wanna end me" from Night Country. Jesus, you're thinking, Barbie just might be subversive, along the lines of an Angela Carter re-fabling, out to castrate the grinning wolf in grandma's bed. Gaze on that, motherfukka! says the little visiting hood.
Then there's the film I'm here to concentrate on, Poor Things. What a hoot! I hope it wins the whole shebang. The production design is elite. The writing's over-the-top clever. The acting by the principals is top-notch. But is it a feminist feel good movie, as some people I don't necessarily trust are saying, just because she CHOSE to be a whore? In this day of rescinding rights for women (see Roe v. Wade) maybe being a whore in a (classy) Paris brothel is a way of saying with Miles, again, I'm a play doll alright -- I'll never let you forget it. There's more to it, though. Shall we unpack and stay a while?
Poor Things (2023) is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, 2015), and stars Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, Willem Dafoe as Godwin Baxter, Vicki Pepperdine as Mrs. Prim, Ramy Youseff as Max McCandles, and Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn. This main ensemble is terrific. Secondary players, such as Hanna Schygulla (remember her -- ooh, was that a pun); Jerrod Carmichael, as Harry Astley, the handsome Black intellectual is excellent as the confidante who urges Bella to 'see the world' while, at the same time, declares that 'the world sucks' and she shouldn't expect much. (He is like an anti-Pangloss advising a female Candide as she embarks on her 'education of the senses.' It's the worst of all possible worlds.) And speaking of candida, it's a miracle Bella doesn't catch something of that ilk at the Paris brothel run by pimpette, Swiney (played by Kathryn Hunter of Harry Potter fame).
Without spoiling anything, I wondered if Emma was faking it, and if they went ahead and used those cucumbers and carrots in the salad afterward. We wonder, what's with Godwin's fucked up face, and how does he remain so handsome and approachable, when so many others would have succumbed to Victorian melancholy? And I had a jack-in-the-box when the quim-questing Bella snatches at the housekeeper Mrs. Prim, and she shouts: "She grabbed me hairy business!" Ramy Youseff is a Muslim and we wonder how he could play in this movie, even as a foil or as a nice but uninteresting man; he shows signs of a boring lover's devotion. And Mark Ruffalo who, last seen in a film, was leading Leo toward a lobotomy on a Boston Harbor island asylum in Shutter Island is, here, arch as, and a real comical girdle-wearing douchebag, who falls for Bella hard in a reversal of fortunes wolves howl at the moon over. He himself ends up in a rubber room, bouncing off the walls. Goddamn love.
Well, okay, who is this dona Bella (as opposed to belladonna)? Alive and kicking. Finger-licking. Blissful oodles of gliss. Tanatalizing feminism that fucks with your mind. We all want to be Duncan Wedderburn, even at the risk of a rubber room with a view, in the end. But Bella, Bella does not suffer fools for very long. If it all comes down to 'being with' you or else achieving an orgasm, then Bella's choosing the O, and preferably a climax by self-immolation. Duncan, you can go f*ck yourself.
Poor Things is based upon the 1992 novel by Alisdair Gray, a Scottish writer and artist, with lovely and raunchy wit and quirks that hearken back to the titillating secret chamber days of Victorian England. It's essentially a naughty Victorian novel, the kind that saw spanks administered back in the day, for no good reason. A Portnoy's Complaint for the lacy boudoir set. Victoria's Secret catalog. In fact, Suzy Bemba, who plays Toinette, a socialist prostitute and confidante, and who gives Bella orgasmic head in one scene, could have sprung straight out of today's VS catalog.
Gray sets out to write a Victorian tale based on a mystery of a book-find, such as Conan Doyle might have devised for Sherlock Holmes. Alisdair Gray, pretending to be a character in the novel, explains in the Introduction that the tale comes as the result of a local historian in Glasgow, Michael Donnelly, discovering a book in a trash heap, and thinking it a lost gem decides to publish it. Gray tells us:
Michael saw the name of the first woman doctor to graduate from Glasgow University, a name only known to historians of the suffragette movement nowadays, though she had once written a Fabian pamphlet on public health.
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