Perpetual Questing
The core of our identity is defined by what we love, and the purpose of our lives is the pursuit of this love.1 Yorgos Lanthimos’s extraordinary film, Poor Things (2023), is a cinematic demonstration of this reality played out in the lives of odd, brilliantly acted characters living in a spectacularly off-kilter world. Lanthimos is a master at creating worlds mostly resembling our own, yet possessing an oddly affected bent that reflects a dark and scathing image of our world.2 Poor Things uses its skewed world to testify to the disordered nature of our modern longings and our quest to satisfy them. The modern self has no authoritative deity to which it is beholden. Self-definition, being true to oneself, is the greatest value of the day: anything impeding that must be cast aside.
Poor Things uses its skewed world to testify to the disordered nature of our modern longings and our quest to satisfy them.
Lanthimos’s dark comedy is a Frankensteinian fable in which a scientist recreates a human from the dead. In a reversal of Mary Shelley’s original gothic novel, which portrayed a scientist constructing an ugly monster, Lanthimos’s scientist is the deformed monster who gives life to a beautiful woman. In an incredibly disturbing revelation, the audience learns how this came to be: A pregnant woman, nearly dead by suicide, is found by the scientist with her child still alive in the womb. He surgically transposes the child’s brain into the mother’s body, resulting in the creation of a new woman named Bella. The film chronicles her physical and metaphysical journey as a child in an adult body rapidly acquiring both knowledge and experience as she travels through foreign lands.
Ostensibly, the film celebrates female empowerment. Bella lives in a world governed by men who seek to possess and rule her. Her creator, Dr. Godwin Baxter (unsubtly named “God”), attempts to protect her from the world’s ubiquitous dangers by keeping her imprisoned in his castle. He recruits a surgical student to meticulously catalog her behaviors and growth. Over time, she becomes the student’s object of fascination and desire. God arranges their marriage under the condition that Bella never leaves the estate, to which the student agrees. The prospect of spending his life studying this fascinating specimen is an offer he can’t refuse.
This plan is thwarted, however, by a rakish villain who seduces Bella to journey with him to faraway lands. He does so as an unabashedly promiscuous lothario whose intent is to get his fill of her sexual offerings and eventually cast her aside. Paradoxically, he comes to find himself entrapped by her unwillingness to belong to him alone; that she has no qualms about having sex with all comers drives him mad with jealousy.
In an unexpected turn of events, the man who was the husband of the woman who provided Bella’s body steals her away to be a prisoner in his own castle, intent on controlling her. He’s determined to guarantee that she’ll no longer roam by controlling her sexual appetite through surgical manipulation. In a moment of self-reflection, Bella confesses the appeal of such a state as she would no longer be driven by her perpetual “questing.” However, she quickly disavows such a prospect and turns the table on him in dramatic fashion.
When the Body Becomes an Object
All of this is, of course, fantastical. Yet, there is something about the words, motives, and behaviors of these men that regrettably ring true in our own world. A woman should be free from such as these and Bella frees herself. She has, in essence, overpowered man. Poor Things exalts Bella as the ultimate master of her body, which becomes a tool that she controls. She employs her body to earn money through prostitution, albeit not always on her exact terms, but always with her permission.
Throughout Poor Things, bodies are objects to be dissected and consumed. They exist as feasts for sexual pleasure or intellectual knowledge.
In my work as a psychiatrist, I’ve encountered many women with a history of sexual trauma who turn to sex work, be it prostitution, erotic dancing, or pornography. Beyond the obvious motivation to generate income, some have pursued this path to gain control over their own bodies. Having been abused by men and subjugated to horrors beyond their control, they judge that voluntary contractual sex work will preserve their autonomy. In this mindset, the women’s only real asset—their bodies—are sold to men on their own terms rather than stolen from them.
This invariably leads to more trauma. Bella, however, does not appear to suffer any obvious consequences from her inexhaustible sexual encounters. The only possible consequence is an odd and out of place comment at the film’s end when she returns to her surgical student fiancé and offers that she will be tested for sexually transmitted disease prior to their marriage. Presumably, Dr. Fleming has already discovered penicillin in the world of Poor Things and all will be well.
There are interesting parallels between Bella’s journey and the character Séverine in Luis Buñuel’s 1967 French film, Belle de Jour, which chronicles the life of a bored and affluent newlywed who seeks a sort of liberation and self-discovery through prostitution. Both films portray naïve and beautiful women whose bodies are repeatedly subject to degradation at the hands of men. Both films feature a roguish tough who wilts into childish madness when he can’t be the sole possessor of “his woman.” Both films feature a high-end Parisian brothel with a prominent mother figure/madame who simultaneously educates and exposes the heroine to danger. Both Bella and Séverine have a surgeon husband/fiancé patiently waiting for her to consummate the marriage in her own time. (With all of these similarities, one wonders if it is more than a coincidence that Poor Things’ protagonist is named Bella.)
Belle de Jour would have been an appropriate title for Lanthimos’s film. The beautiful body is on display like the day’s featured menu item. In the brothel, women’s bodies are lined up as delicacies from which the men may choose according to their appetite. Bella humorously, yet quite reasonably, asks why the women should not choose the patron? Would it not be more enticing for the man to know that he was desired? She is summarily, yet gently, rebuked by the madame to stick with the order of things: it’s men who do the choosing, not women. (A similar thing happens to Séverine.)
Throughout Poor Things, bodies are objects to be dissected and consumed. They exist as feasts for sexual pleasure or intellectual knowledge. God’s workshop is an anatomy lab with dead bodies arranged on tables as slabs of meat waiting to be carved like roasted pigs. Bella’s body is treated similarly to the corpses which are exposed, naked on anatomy tables—material objects without personhood that exist for the pleasure of man.
We also learn that, when he was a child, God’s father tortured his body through a series of bizarre experiments in the name of scientific progress. There is no respect for personhood, no care for body and soul. Both the rake and the original husband confess an emptiness inside their chests. They are like the many cadavers lying supine with torsos cut wide open and emptied of internal organs. C. S. Lewis’s “men without chests” comes to mind. These objects are poor things indeed.
Technology, Addiction, and the Loss of Pleasure
Lanthimos creates an alternate Garden of Eden. He deploys the literary device of chimera throughout the film. However, unlike the supernatural Chimera of Greek mythology, Lanthimos’s chimera are crafted through the technological achievement of man harnessing the laws of nature to his own purposes. We see bodily imperfections compensated with machinery, such as a woman in a wheelchair, a man with a metal hook hand, and God himself hooked to an elaborate digestive machine (necessitated by his father’s body-damaging experiments).
In the garden of God’s estate, however, we see an abundance of natural creatures chimerically fashioned together as whimsical oddities, like the dog-duck and pig-chicken. Presumably, these living wonders are stitched together through God’s genius surgical innovations. This experimentation has its crowning achievement in the creation (or rather, re-creation) of a woman. Unlike the God of the Bible who creates ex nihilo, the film’s god must use existing material and leftover parts. He artificially joins together a woman’s body and the brain of her infant which were previously joined together in a natural fashion as two persons.
From this Garden of Eden, Bella (like Eve) takes an apple as an object of pleasure and offers it to another, as Eve offered the fruit to Adam. Once consumed, she is guided by sensual desire as the means to enlightenment and freedom.3 She escapes the garden with the promise of greater pleasures in the larger world. The transition from the garden into the world is displayed as the film transitions from black and white to color. Here we see a Dorothy transposed from colorless Kansas to the spectacularly colored land of Oz, full of wondrous possibilities. Where Dorothy’s house lands on a wicked witch, Bella’s body lands on a wicked man. The adventure begins.
Human beings are body and soul; therefore, true pleasure involves both. People were not made to be ultimately satisfied by the things of this world.
Carnal pleasure may be a legitimate means to a worthy end (such as sexual pleasure leading to the creation of a child) or a worthy end in itself (such as the enjoyment of sex as a gift of the marriage bed). However, when sensual pleasure becomes disordered as the ultimate end, people become disordered. As a physician specializing in addiction treatment, I try to help people heal from these disorders. With disordered desire, pleasures dissipate and lose their luster. Bella learns this when she eats too many sugary pastries and gets sick. We also see Bella over-imbibe in alcohol which leaves her body unconscious and displayed as a sadly contorted marionette.
Anyone who has suffered from addiction knows well the seductive and enslaving power of chasing the fix only to be repeatedly frustrated by the drug’s inability to provide lasting satisfaction. Dopamine levels decrease with frequent and intense stimulation. Over time, the brain accommodates and rewires such that all pleasure is diminished. Even joy in the simple pleasures of life is blunted as the reward center of the brain is disfigured.
Addiction is, at a very basic level, a compulsive pursuit of corporeal pleasure. This pursuit goes hand in hand with the reciprocal pursuit of alleviating pain (pain often produced and compounded by the pleasure-seeking). One’s body and soul are denigrated as this quest subsumes all other priorities, resulting in stimulus-bound bodies that function more like animals. Pointedly, the term “reptilian brain” has been used by addictionologists to describe the primitive circuits of the brain run amok without the moderating influence of the higher, distinctly human cognitive processes.
Human beings are body and soul; therefore, true pleasure involves both. People were not made to be ultimately satisfied by the things of this world. We were made to be satisfied by a Person from a greater world. As Saint Augustine confesses, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee.” Life is a restless longing for this One.
In contrast, Lanthimos presents human beings as driven solely by bodily desire and earthly knowledge. Throughout the film, Bella is pleasured sexually. By men, by women, by herself. The sex scenes are gratuitous. One is left asking, why so graphic and why so much? Is the audience meant to be peephole-people, voyeuristically consuming bodies in various states of copulation? Force-fed a diet of titillating images without souls and pornographic pixels devoid of personhood? Is this an indictment of our exhibitionist, fetish-foisting, image-driven culture? Noteworthy regarding the rapid evolution of mores over the past five decades, Belle de Jour was considered highly erotic at the time yet showed little nudity. There are scenes of characters looking through peepholes, but no scenes of naked sex. In Poor Things, the camera lens is the peephole and little is left to the imagination.
Jesus taught his disciples to gouge out the eye if it causes one to sin, as the eye is a vehicle by which the lust of the heart is roused (Matthew 5:29). Early in the film, Bella gleefully and repeatedly gouges the eyes of a male cadaver with a scalpel. Men sin by seeking to possess Bella’s body as they cast their gaze upon her and are driven by desire. As she takes matters into her own hands, we see another example of her empowerment. Is Lanthimos doing the same to the eyes of the audience by sardonically scolding the indulgence of our modern pornographic proclivities? Is he gouging out his own eyes as the filmmaker who has peddled these images?
A Festival of Sex and Death
Unlike the images presented in the film, people are created body and soul by Yahweh. People have supreme dignity as creatures made in his image. We are not our own. We are not permitted to use our bodies in any manner we deem fit (or others, for that matter). Rather, we are beholden to the One who created our bodies and ultimately owns them. Persons are meant to glorify and enjoy Yahweh by receiving and reflecting his love and to share this love with other persons. All creative endeavors in the real world also flow from Yahweh’s creation and demonstrate His artistic inclinations in our personhood.
The human story is that of a hodgepodge people attempting to reinvent for themselves meaning, purpose, and pleasure, as well as immortality.
Where the god of Poor Things recycles existing material, Yahweh makes the material, and therefore, rightfully holds the patent (a translation of “Yahweh” is “He Brings into Existence Whatever Exists”). His purpose as both Author and Artist is supreme. Everything else is less-than. Contrary purposes are simply silly and little. After the Fall, we are left to our own devices. Adam and Eve ridiculously weave together ready-made fig leaves to hide their existential shame from their Creator. The human story is that of a hodgepodge people attempting to reinvent for themselves meaning, purpose, and pleasure, as well as immortality. Invariably, this results in diminution, degradation, and people bent on dominating other people.
Bella comes to learn that the person of her former body, Victoria, was a vicious woman who behaved vilely towards others. In a poignant scene, Victoria’s former maidservant tells Bella that Victoria despised being pregnant and referred to the baby as the “monster” inside her, an invader. This is the view of one who sees people as mere things. In actuality, such a view is monstrous, and Victoria is revealed as the true monster.
Many monsters are on display in this film as they treat humans as things without nobility—things to be used for one’s pleasure or things to be destroyed if interfering with one’s pursuits. In Yahweh’s world, each person is of utmost value. We are obligated to respect this value by treating ourselves and others according to His image. We are not free to do whatever we please. Attempts to do so will always lessen us, even if we, like Bella, become queen of the garden.
Carl Trueman adds desecration to C. S. Lewis’s list of disenchantment and liquidity as prime characteristics ailing our modern society.4 Poor Things is a portrait of this tragic trifecta. There is no mystery or magic in the world of Poor Things. To be sure, there are wonders to behold, but they’re all human-wrought. The cinematography is a brilliant but unnatural array of colors artificially fashioned by the filmmaker. This gives the film an otherworldly presence, but not one most would want to inhabit as the beauty pales in comparison to our own. Contrast this cinematography with glorious displays of earthly grandeur seen in the works of classic filmmakers such as John Ford and David Lean, or more contemporary directors like Terrence Malik and Jane Campion. Here we see the spectacular stages of our natural world in such a way that our hearts are filled with transcendent longing and gratitude.
In Poor Things, human reason reigns and serves to accomplish whatever it will. There is no solidity either in creature or in place. Technology has produced a state of fluid boundaries in Bella’s body as well as her rapid travels. The divine spark within the human body is extinguished and the body is left profaned. Trueman astutely identifies modernity’s base attitudes toward sex and death as the key cultural drivers of our age. What once was imbued with a sense of reverence and respect is now joyfully trashed. Poor Things is a veritable fecal festival of sex and death.
The Liturgy of Love
Trueman has clearly diagnosed the distinctly modern disease of desecration. He also offers the remedy: a restoration of the proper value and purpose of human beings through acts of consecration. Entering liturgical space with other persons to worship Yahweh is the only viable antidote to counteract the powerfully degrading cultural forces upon us. In Yahweh’s liturgy, we are shaped according to his divine design. We practice how to give and receive, not to take and demand. We gain what every person yearns for and what the world cannot give: the love of our Creator. This love is not the superficial emotion of worldly desire, rather it is the prime animating force bursting forth as a fountain between the persons of the Trinity from all eternity. The Trinity is a liturgy of love. Not only are we invited into this intimate union, but Yahweh desires our participation. Instead of neutering desire and obliterating pleasure, he beckons us to be intoxicated by this love.
Our modern longings are shaped by a libidinous liturgy of carnal consumption… Yahweh offers us the alternative liturgy of a divine marriage feast.
Where Poor Things is a portrait of the insipid offerings of modernity, the Old Testament’s Song of Songs is a stunningly beautiful picture of the mutual possession between Yahweh and his people. Here a garden is the Holy of Holies where rapturous intimacy is enjoyed between a bridegroom and a bride. Beautiful animals abound in this garden as erotic descriptors. The choicest fruit is consumed, lips drip with nectar, tongues play with honey, hands drip with liquid myrrh, breasts are caressed, hearts are thrilled, cedared perfume is inhaled. The holy call of this song is an ecstatic refrain: “Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love!” These lovers are friends, and they give themselves freely to one another in joyful intoxication. Any other pleasure is a poor substitute for, or weak echo of, this bliss.
Our modern longings are shaped by a libidinous liturgy of carnal consumption. This liturgy promises freedom and fulfillment through autonomous pleasure devoid of all boundaries. Yahweh offers us the alternative liturgy of a divine marriage feast. We are invited to feast upon Immanuel, “God With Us.” Immanuel took on our flesh, with every temptation known to our human frame. Yet, his passions were rightly ordered and, for the joy set before him, he endured the cross. His body was desecrated and traumatized for the desecrated and traumatized. His debasement ennobles our flesh and soul and enables us to enter the Trinitarian love song of eternal delight. As we gather together in our eucharistic worship, we do so as his bride in mutual possession and pleasure. He dwells with us, and we become fountains of his overflowing love. This is an exceedingly rich liturgy for an exceedingly rich people.
- For an excellent apologia for this claim, see James K.A. Smith’s You are What You Love. (Smith, James. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Brazos Press: 2016.) ↩︎
- Consider Lanthimos’s 2015 film The Lobster as a prime example. ↩︎
- In the third chapter of Genesis, the fruit is a temptation, both as an object of desire and to knowledge. ↩︎
- Trueman, Carl. “The Desecration of Man.” First Things (January 2024). ↩︎
