Poor Creatures!: Sociology between Cinema and Art

Poor Creatures!, the seventh film by Yorgos Lanthimos , winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and nominated for eleven Oscars, presents itself as an extraordinary monstrous creature. With a color palette ranging from black and white to saturated colors, the film explores narrative techniques that oscillate between excess and sobriety, evoking chimerical reflections, just like the creatures that will appear to disturb and entertain us on screen. An artistic product , therefore, as well as a simple film, that fosters suggestions of the sociology of cinema and art.

Summary of Poor Creatures!

"Poor Creatures!", based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray , transports us to a gothic, steampunk London, awash with steam and metal. The story unfolds through a compelling flow of free associations devoid of morals, exploiting the language of the pure unconscious. A cinematic experience that distances itself from elaborate symbolism and, while at times mad and grotesque, manages to be extraordinarily linear.

The narrative, reminiscent of Mel Brooks's "Young Frankenstein" and Tim Burton's "Corpse Bride," focuses on the story of Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, a woman brought back to life whose brain has been replaced with that of an infant. The female embodiment of a controlled delirium between sadism and creativity, Bella, with her quest for the new and the surprising discoveries of the world, gradually becomes an example of the struggle for women's moral and sexual liberation throughout the centuries.

Bella Baxter as fatal monster

Bella's distorted vision, the product of her ignorant childhood, offers a critical look at the adults around her , distorted in their perception of tenderness and seductiveness. Bella breaks the mold through her childhood in a woman's body: she challenges norms and conventions, allowing for a reflection on their origin, function, and usefulness. In some ways, Bella, as a creature, becomes a fatal monster in the most sociological sense of the term (Ieranò, 2017, p. 12) because she embodies both the creative potential of her anthropological womanhood and her technical prodigy.

In "Povere Creature!", discovery manifests itself through experimentation—repeatedly filmed and experienced on the flesh—through the systematic transformation of bodies and the pursuit of pleasure. In some ways, hedonism feeds on scientific curiosity.

As anticipated, the film offers a glimpse into humanity as the creator of the monstrous and the marvelous . Dr. Godwin Baxter, played by Willem Dafoe, embodies and reflects a sort of revolutionary Dr. Frankenstein, while Bella Baxter, his creation, represents a woman struggling against social conventions and rebelling against the gilded cage imposed on her.

3 themes covered in Poor Creatures!

There are many themes that can come to mind during and after watching the film. To summarize, here are some sociological suggestions regarding the film:

• Identity constructionThrough some of the figures she interacts with throughout the story, Bella is socialized into the world, learning about love, promiscuity, commitment, and compassion. This evolution may suggest that innocence is an illusion destined to emerge only at the end of a subtle journey through temptation and mystery, or that, more simply, it is something destined to disappear with the awareness of the time it inhabits.
• Creation and praise of technique. A tribute to knowledge and the Enlightenment through a scientific experiment. Empiricism, skepticism, and the experimental method uncover the Victorian hypocrisy in which the story is set, reflecting on crucial dichotomies such as free will, courage, love... and pleasure, which was still taboo at the time.
• The monstrous as a sociological crowbarThe film uses the category of the monstrous to talk about something else. Beyond the references of "Poor Creatures!" to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, we are faced with the monster as a situation and enigma (ibid., p. 18): an almost steampunk world on one side and the gothic and decadent world of the creature on the other. The monster reveals, whether it is a place or the people who inhabit it. The conventions and ideas that characterize the world are analyzed in depth, even with a critical (sociological) eye.

Parallels between Poor Creatures! and Barbie

There are several similarities between the two films, even though they differ profoundly in structure and narrative style. Bella and Barbie are two women/girls driven by a desire to discover what lies beyond the four walls where they grew up.

Both gradually free themselves from lives confined and controlled by dominant male figures , but they have different reasons for doing so: in her "real-life" adventure outside Barbieland, Barbie experiences an inner unease (thoughts of death) and will seek out her own autonomy and emotional freedom. Bella, on the other hand, is driven by curiosity about pleasure. She will travel and experience it through "thoughts of life," thus finding independence through sexual freedom. In a certain sense, she creates a sensorial continuity between herself and the world, which fuels both her desire for knowledge (with a scientific eye on the world) and her desire for the flesh (Chair, according to Le Breton, 2021, p. 191).

Both protagonists are, in fact, accompanied by blatantly patriarchal male figures: Mattel's men on one side and God, Bella's creator, on the other. In both cases, they are men who fear an independent woman who knows no fear.

While on the one hand we have a pop narrative about a doll, on the other Lanthimos offers exclusively pure auteur cinema. Despite their differences, however, both films explore common themes such as emancipation, independence, and the mockery of male fragility resulting from the loss of control over the female body . Both directors use satire to ridicule men who try to control women due to their own insecurities. But beware, "Poor Creatures!" goes beyond genre conventions: it tells a story of human and universal freedom.

References

• Ieranò G., Demons, Monsters, and Prodigies: The Irrational and the Fantastic in the Ancient World, Marsilio, Venice, 2017;
• Le Breton D., Anthropology of the Body, Meltemi, Milan, 2021;