Bella Baxter’s Suffering and the Moral Case for Amoral Films

The power of uncomfortable stories is that they do unmoor us

Discussed: Poor Things, discomfort, Yorgos Lanthimos, feminism, Barbie, Bella Baxter

When we first meet Bella Baxter, she is banging on a piano, fascinated and delighted by her ability to create cacophonous sounds. Her childhood, if you can call it that, is filled with moments of playful destruction. Bella throws plates, punches a visitor in the face, urinates on the floor, stabs a dead body, and masturbates at the breakfast table. She doesn’t understand why everyone else doesn’t spit out the food they don’t like.

Much of the critical focus surrounding Poor Things is whether Bella’s journey towards pleasure and autonomy is feminist enough. But, for me, the heart of the film is not about Bella’s empowerment. It’s about how Bella reckons with pain. Over the course of the film, Bella takes delight in her body, but is also shocked to discover poverty and cruelty, selfishness, and deception. 

Her first instinct is to try and fix it. She tries to give money to the poor and tries to helpfully suggest that the brothel she works at would be more pleasant if women selected the men they have sex with. In reality, Bella learns that her money can’t fix poverty and that one of the reasons the madame who employs her keeps this business model is because some of her clients prefer when the sex workers they hire don’t enjoy the experience. When Bella is dismayed to learn this, the madame tries to change Bella’s perspective:

We must experience everything, not just the good but degradation, horror, sadness. This makes us whole, Bella. Makes us people of substance. Not flighty, untouched children Then we can know the world. And when we can know the world, the world is ours.

Though the madame is clearly trying to manipulate Bella into continuing her work, her speech is appealing to Bella. Unlike Stereotypical Barbie who resists the call to leave Barbieland, Bella wants to know the world. She is her father’s daughter, a man who survived brutal medical experiments that his own father performed on him, and who is torn between recreating his own fractured childhood and offering Bella a better world. This throughline of generational trauma is also seen through Bella’s mother, a woman who was so despairing that she literally jumped off a bridge. Bella Baxter is built from her mother’s fractured body, literally carrying the scars of her mother’s suffering as well as her resurrection.  

Like all of Yorgos Lanthomos’s films, Poor Things is unafraid to present the human experience as somewhat nightmarish. In Dogtooth, a mother and father are so terrified of “negative” outside influences, that they imprison their children at home; in The Killing of a Sacred Deer a heart surgeon is stalked and tortured by the son of a patient who died on his operating table; in The Lobster, romance is reimagined at a fascist hotel where guests are forced to choose a partner, perhaps a terrible one, within a fixed time frame, or else be transformed into an animal. And in Poor Things, a mad scientist takes a baby’s brain and transplants it into the body of a full grown woman who is so full of despair that, despite her social status and wealth and beauty, she tries to kill herself.

In short, viewers in search of explicitly hopeful narratives would be better served watching an episode of Ted Lasso or Bluey. 

Don’t get me wrong: there are many shows I love that are meant to inspire or that explicitly advocate for important social change. But I’ve become increasingly irritated by the discourse that suggests that stories that unsettle us are somehow morally suspect or, worse, that a story with a clear moral is actually superior to one that brings up distressing or uncomfortable feelings. In reality, the power of the uncomfortable story is that it does unmoor us. Like Bella, we are not only invited to experience the world, but to make our own judgments about it. 

It’s one of the reasons there are so many readings of Poor Things that focus on Bella’s arc from child to woman as a straightforward empowerment narrative rings hollow and why I don’t believe that Poor Things is particularly interested in providing viewers with a “happy ending.” Bella’s wit, intelligence, and insistence on taking up space certainly help her survive the world that she is foisted into, but, unlike Barbie, the other film about a pretty ingénue who learns about the world, Poor Things isn’t interested in platitudes about what it means to be a woman in the world. Instead, it asks enormous moral questions that don’t have tidy answers.

The fact that viewers must interpret the film for themselves is posed by some critics as a feminist problem. Take the recent article, “I Loved ‘Barbie’ and ‘Poor Things’ but Neither Film is a Feminist Masterpiece” where critic Jun Chou laments that the film’s “unwillingness to take a stance” makes it a lukewarm feminist manifesto:

Poor Things is supercilious yet silly, cramming in a bunch of sociopolitical topics without dedicated dissection. The frivolity makes the 2.5 hour run-time feel like a slap in the face. As Bella becomes progressively progressive, she donates to the poor, attends socialist meetings, and blithely comments on the fragility of hysterical men. All this evolution gets undermined when the film ends with her sipping a cocktail with her queer lover while commanding a zombie Bella 2.0 to fetch more drinks in her cloistered, opulent mansion.

I understand how a viewer might leave the film disappointed by Bella’s overall arc, but it’s clear to me that the final scene in Poor Things is meant to be grappled with rather than celebrated. Bella’s character survives but she also chooses to adopt a similar lifestyle to her father, a character that calls himself “God” and can be viewed as equal parts maniac and savior. By unsettling his audience, Lanthimos isn’t avoiding taking a stance; he’s asking us to examine our own emotional response to Bella’s story.

Certainly, fretting about the morality of stories is not a new concept. But the never-ending quest for the “perfect” feminist film distorts what should be a meaningful discourse by presenting feminism as a series of checkboxes. The truth is that the best films don’t preach their values at us; they urge audiences to think for themselves. In an interview for Variety, Lanthimos argues that he wants his films to have more than one interpretation:

I feel confident about the script. So that means it conveys a lot of things, I think, to intelligent people. So there's no need to discuss it further…I actually think it's dangerous to go too much into those conversations because things start becoming a little too one-dimensional. Like there's only this aspect of this film, and this is what we're thinking this is, what we're trying to do. I try to make films more open than that.

Of course, Poor Things received huge critical acclaim, with many Lanthimos fans eager to delve into its dark humor and overall weirdness. I worry less about the overall reception to the film than the fact that so many people are resistant to exploring stories that don’t have easy answers, or that try to fix a disturbing storyline by desperately trying to shoehorn a moral into it. By the end of Poor Things, Bella doesn’t heal the world, but she does create a life from the ashes of her mother and father’s traumas so that she can become her own person. The world she creates is strange and imperfect. It’s also entirely hers.