Poor Things · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with a face seen through a fishbowl. The frame bulges at its edges, the banister curves away as if the house were breathing, and Bella Baxter lurches down the staircase like a marionette still learning its own strings. You don't yet know the premise — that a scientist named Godwin Baxter drowned a pregnant suicide, revived the body, and seated her unborn infant's brain inside the adult skull. You don't need to. Before a single fact arrives, the lens has told you HOW she sees: rawly, hugely, with the world pouring in at the corners. The film begins not with a story but with an optics.

Deleuze had a name for an image that puts the act of seeing in front of the thing seen — the perception-image. Most cinema hides perception: the camera shows us a room and we forget there's an eye. Lanthimos and his cinematographer Robbie Ryan do the opposite. The wide-angle and fisheye optics, sometimes pinched inside a circular iris, don't record Bella's world so much as register the freshness of a consciousness meeting it for the first time. The distortion IS the infancy. And watch what the film does as she matures: the fisheye relaxes, the framings normalize toward eye level. Perception is the plot. You are literally watching a brain calibrate its lens.

Running underneath that eye is something older and hungrier. Early Bella is pure appetite — she eats with both fists, smashes plates for the pleasure of the noise, discovers what she gleefully calls 'furious jumping' and pursues it with no shame attached, because shame is a thing you have to be taught. Deleuze, borrowing from Zola, called this the impulse-image: a world of naked drives erupting beneath the social crust, bodies governed by compulsion rather than choice. Baxter's gaslit townhouse, with its surgically remade duck-dogs and its grotesque master, is what Deleuze would call a derived milieu that turns out to be an originary world — a respectable Victorian surface peeled back to show the raw biological furnace humming inside it. The genius of the conceit is that Bella's drives aren't degraded. The film keeps the impulse-image's energy and strips off its usual descent into ruin.

It saves that descent for the man. Mark Ruffalo's Duncan Wedderburn fetishizes Bella's inexperience, and when the inexperience evaporates he comes apart by degrees — seducer to suitor to sobbing wreck to asylum. That is the impulse-image's classic line of slope, the irreversible downhill toward exhaustion, handed to the libertine instead of the monster. The naturalist drive that should have dragged the created woman down dooms her possessor instead. Lanthimos turns the form's fatalism into a joke with teeth.

The deepest Deleuzian wager here, though, is in Emma Stone's body. Deleuze, late in his cinema books, became fascinated by a cinema of the body — film that lets posture and gait carry time and meaning directly, no psychology required. He called the charged version of this the gest: an attitude that exposes a social relation rather than explaining it. Stone builds Bella out of micro-adjustments — the loosening of an infant's stagger into a walk, the hardening of a curious tilt into appraisal. When she stands at a Paris brothel and treats sex work as one more thing the body can simply DO, her plain unembarrassed stance does the satire. Her posture exposes the propriety around her as a costume everyone else forgot they were wearing. She can see the ideological furniture because she was never trained to call it natural.

The color confirms it. The film opens in austere monochrome inside Baxter's house, then blooms — Lisbon in oversaturated pastels, Alexandria and Paris in thickening warmth. This is Deleuze's affective colour-image, a color that absorbs a scene's whole feeling, and Lanthimos runs it as a graph of a widening mind. The palette is the cognition.

None of this is invented from nothing; film is a conversation. The chapter-by-city architecture comes straight from Godard's Vivre sa vie, where a woman's life is sliced into encounters that accumulate without tidy psychology. The picaresque that promises a heroine integration and keeps delivering exploitation, while her vitality refuses defeat, is Fellini's Nights of Cabiria. The created being's wondering education in sensation is Whale's Bride of Frankenstein. From Buñuel's Discreet Charm comes the bourgeois ceremony staged so it fails to complete itself, and from Gilliam's Brazil the trick of building anachronism into a coherent world-system so the satire reads as a whole reality, not a gag. Even Bella's half-constructed physicality, sharing animacy with the furniture, recalls Švankmajer's Alice.

What does it add to the discourse? It weaponizes the perception-image for feminism. The Bildungsroman normally ends in accommodation; here the optics that start distorted clear into a vision the world can't bend back. By making us SEE through an unsocialized brain, the film makes ideology visible as ideology — and hands that clarity to a woman. Rewatch the opening fall down the stairs knowing this. The bulging frame isn't a stylist showing off. It's the first second of a person learning to look, and refusing, ever, to be taught to look away.