Poor Things

This movie was so up my alley holy cow Disjointed review 😼:  Bella keeps winning the idgaf war, until she’s faced with the horrors of our world and the people who live in it, then she gaf.  I loved the exploration of how socialisation from birth effects how a person navigates through society.  The outdoor sets reminded me a lot of the fake Mediterranean inspired house facades on the walls of the public indoor pool my grandparents took me and my sister to when we were kids, big fan of that. Unfortunately, I think my final takeaways regarding this film don’t align with either of the positive or negative interpretations most people have. I did not think of this movie as purely a feminist critique. Following her reanimation, Bella was socialised not as a woman, but as an experiment and though she has to navigate life in the body of a woman, which brings about themes regarding gender in society, I understood her story (being someone navigating through a world with already existing rules, that everyone but her is aware of and that don’t always make sense) as something that more closely resembled an allegory to neurodivergence than anything else.  I don’t particularly disagree with the male gaze allegations, but I think there’s a lot more nuance to it Does Emma Stone have sex in this movie? Yes. A lot. However, hot take, but I didn’t see Bella whoring herself out as a conscious act of feminist sexual liberation at all. Bella sees sex in an almost animal way, it’s a neutral act that makes her body feel good. She wasn’t socialized to see sex as a private, a taboo nor a monogamous experience. I think because sex is both a natural bodily function and something deeply ingrained into our society, attached with its own set of pre-established rules, it acted as a perfect wheel to juxtapose Bella’s objective understanding of the world with that of society.  It made sense, in my opinion, that Bella would choose to partake in sex work, because at the time, she doesn’t perceive the activity in the same way as we do. She takes up the job in Paris, not because she’s a sexually liberated feminist, but because, by that point in the story, she genuinely thinks getting paid to have sex is a double win. I do however, not like the ending McCandles got, I think it’s weird how he never really got punished for lusting over Bella, when she had the mental age of a toddler, and instead ended up with her in the end (?). I think he should’ve been mauled by bears fr.