Poor Things Accomplished Everything Barbie Thought It Did

In the rising action of 2023, the hype was all about Barbenheimer, the crossover event of the decade thus far between Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. No one was doubting the excitement and overall sentiment that this was the return to cinema, that Hollywood truly wasn’t dead. As the summer release date came around, reality confirmed these ambitious expectations. Time progressed, and the two films found themselves in a dead heat running for Best Picture, the other nominees merely side-pieces to the extravagance of Barbenheimer. Film bros found themselves at odds with a mainstream domination of girl power through Barbie; not even Ben Shapiro was safe.

            But there was another film that came out in 2023 that fell between the cracks due to this competition. This was Poor Things, directed and written by Yorgos Lanthimos, and a tremendous feat of its own in what it accomplished. Chances are, you heard of the film or even saw one of the many ads for it on television, but it never got close to the box office success of Barbie.

            Before I go any further, I want to give credit where credit is due. Greta Gerwig’s efforts in making, promoting, and celebrating Barbie were fantastic and should be equally celebrated as such. The positive messaging of empowering women, encouraging the progression of equal rights, and overall, really cleverly written family comedy are all great things, and I don’t know many people (well, Ben Shapiro, maybe) that would argue these points. It’s a good movie. Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie don’t phone in their leading roles. Margot as the titular Barbie is not only exciting for the wide range of audiences the film was aimed at, but is also well aware of the weight of the role and showcases this with the emotion of the overarching character arc. Gosling arguably gives his best comic performance since The Nice Guys (2016), leading into the “dumb jock” facade just enough to make even I chuckle at a number of the self-depreciating jokes littered throughout. The mere fact that this film ravaged theater populations nationwide is one of the best compliments it can receive. The impact on cinematic history cannot be ignored, and for that, I give it its accolades without hesitation. As though my words carry much weight, but I say what I say: Barbie was pretty, pretty, pretty good.

            But what about the silent contender? Here’s where the shit slinging may come in, but I’ll do my best to keep it under wraps. Oppenheimer won Best Picture at the Oscars that 2024 season, and I agree with that decision. Most years, the best picture ends up being the most controversial, a key example being the mix-up around Moonlight and La La Land in 2017. This time around, I think they did get it right. Both Barbie and Poor Things were also up for the award. However, I believe the average viewer was far more interested in Barbie, seeing Poor Things as, like I said earlier, a “side-piece”. This wouldn’t be without blame, as from mere statistics one can assemble the following: Barbie pulled in over a billion dollars worldwide in box office sales, Poor Things did just over a hundred million and change. For our mathematicians, they pulled in less than a tenth of Barbie’s box office run.

            Why is this and how is this helping my argument? To the second point, it’s not, but to the first, it is primarily due to the content, genre, and rating of Poor Things. Yorgos, who I’ll get to in a moment, is known for pushing the envelope of dramatic storytelling through provocative and often abrasive content. Poor Things specifically is laced with profanity-laden black comedy and countless scenes, including graphic nudity and sexual content. Simply put, it’s hard to compete in the box office against a PG-13 family-friendly rating with the R counterpart, especially when you go as hard in the paint as Mr. Lanthimos.

            So, who is Yorgos Lanthimos? Yorgos is a Greek filmmaker who sprung onto the scene in 2009 with his intensely profound and disturbing Dogtooth, a film revolving around incest and psychological torture. Over the following years, he would gain critical and award acclaim for his various efforts, and with each one, his craft refined and became more specific to the psychology of relationships and the lengths of such. He was nominated for Best Original Screenplay for the film The Lobster (2015), a story about a man who is threatened by society to find a lover lest he be turned into an animal for the rest of his existence. His 2017 film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, follows the relationship themes again with the dichotomy between a heart surgeon and the son of a patient who passed. Emma Stone entered his life as a leading lady for The Favourite (2018) a year later, once again coming up in the Oscars for then a Best Picture nod. Stone leads royal cousins vying for the attention and favor of their Queen Anne, once again a more complex and developed analysis of relationships, this time through a period piece. Mr. Lanthimos then went into hiding, only to re-emerge five years later with Poor Things…

            Where Yorgos’ previous films had relied on the thematic breakdown of relationships as the centerpiece of his stories, Poor Things uses the relationships of the film to recontextualize its protagonist. In its opening moments, the audience is quickly introduced, not to Emma Stone, but rather to Willem Dafoe’s Godwin Baxter. A mad scientist the likes of Frankenstein, not just in appearance, as he revitalizes and saves the life of a woman he loved when it seemed she wouldn’t continue. The form this woman returns to life as is not of herself, but rather a new human being, born at age zero within the body of a fully grown adult woman: Bella Baxter. The story unfolds from here; Bella begins her life as though an infant baby, experiencing every part of life for the very first time. Godwin (affectionately and cleverly referred to by Bella as ‘God’) guides her, acting as both a father figure and a scientist, studying her every move and recording her progress. Godwin hires a young servant to assist him, the assistant in essence serves as Bella’s inciting incident as he falls in love with her child-like creativity and open perspective of the limited world around her; as for her safety, as decreed by God, she is not to go into the outside world for her safety and well-being.

Whereas in previous Lanthimos films, the story is the relationship(s) at hand, in Poor Things, they are mere catalysts for the following sequences. God serves as the father, the assistant, the childish first love, and then a bachelor obsessed with her external beauty whisks her away into the real world. It’s here that the story’s primary themes of feminine exploration and the clashing of worldviews between the sexes come into full view. Bella is whisked away into the ‘real world’, where she’s exposed to the unfortunate reality of humanity: selfishness, greed, and lust consume the majority of interactions she has throughout the film. The first example that arises is when the assistant to Godwin, now infatuated with Bella, asks for God’s permission to marry her. Seeing this as an opportunity to keep her within her walls, he agrees. This blatant disregard for Bella’s autonomy seems to catalyze her path of self-discovery, as once her brain conceptualizes the trap, she wastes no time running away with a Duncan Wedderburn, the bachelor obsessed with her physical beauty, and not much else. But he offers Bella a way out of the emasculation with his sense of adventure being put into action.

            Their whirlwind sexual escapades being disguised as romance to Bella quickly comes to a head as she experiences reality for the first time. People, interactions, and the layers of society begin to intrigue her more than sex. In a further example of the relationships taking dominance, Duncan attempts to put her back in captivity, just through a new lens that she wouldn’t recognize. The pair go on a cruise ship, exploring areas of the world she couldn’t have imagined in her time in existence. It is here that she meets fellow passengers Martha and Harry. The pair are far less judgmental and constrained in how they perceive the world compared to Duncan, God, or even the assistant. They introduce Bella to reading books, but more importantly than that, philosophy and conflicting perspectives on how society should function. Bella’s reaction to this only further expands her intelligence and awareness to Duncan’s control. She learns about death and destruction, and all of the other terrible aspects of humanity that are shoved under the rugs of the world. She takes a new approach to dialogue, advancing beyond her entirely human counterparts. This is where the story takes an incredibly unique path towards its finale, emphasizing the protagonist’s personal advancement in society, which might seem vanilla, but through a graphic and disturbingly vivid set of scenes.

Bella, in an effort to break free of Duncan’s chains, begins prostituting herself through a brothel, where she is encouraged by those around her to explore her sexuality as a way of learning more about herself. I won’t even pretend to understand the underlying dialogue about society here, as my personal beliefs may stem from this argument, but it is undeniable that how these arguments are presented to the viewer are dramatic enough to open a conversation on the topics. What I will comment on, as it pertains to the brothel encounters of the film, is that Duncan Wedderburn’s meltdown after finally being officially rejected by Bella is absolute comedy gold. The assimilation of the man-woman power-dynamics throughout the story with the self-exploration Bella experiences throughout the second half is done so with grace, and moreover comic intent, that really hits the sweet spot. The man descends into a child at the realization of his “betrayal”, as he sees it. I also see this moment as when the commentary on the relationship-aspect of the story comes to a head, combining the dark humor with the dissection of Duncan, and many of the other characters’ obsession with Bella’s beauty, not her ever-advancing intellect and empathy in a bleak world. How this is shown in the film is not only very obvious to the viewer, but simultaneously breaks down many preconceived barriers by disarming the audience with high-concept comedy and drama.

            This is where a key issue with Barbie arises in comparison. Where Poor Things is very nuanced and layered with its approach to displaying messages on feminism and problematic perspectives of the times (that remain relevant), Barbie takes the surface-level route to rally the masses more easily. Not that this is a detriment to the film as a whole, but it definitely detracts from the power of its message overall. Poor Things takes the former with such ease and delicacy that by the concluding sequence you’ve not only consumed more than two-plus hours of media, but you’ve had doors opened to different ways of thinking. Even if you’re against the message of female empowerment (for whatever reason, sometimes best not to pry with certain individuals), the sly way that Lanthimos injects the ideasagainst so cleverly that you’ll be second-guessing yourself as Bella ventures to the final act, even if not consciously. This is a testament to this style of filmmaking. The artistic, backseat approach is far more impactful to the audience, even if they’re not entirely prepared for what they’re about to see.

            The largest advantage Poor Things has over its competitor, however, is its apolitical stance. As much as everyone loves to virtue-signal and get on their high horse, and this applies to both sides of the American political spectrum, we forget that there is always the other side of the argument. When making a piece of activist media, one must consider their objective; which is almost always, without fail, to bring attention to a cause or problem in society. If you go out of your way to alienate half of your potential audience with the surface-level messaging of your piece of media, whatever it may be, you’re only hurting your own cause. And if your inherent cause is to try and spread a message to enact change, how does it help to push away potential converts to your mission? The answer? It doesn’t. No matter how well your piece of activism may do in the box office, it is its artistic merit and societal impact that determine whether it will stand the test of time.

So, what exactly does Poor Things accomplish, that Barbie thought it did? We must first establish whateverything is, as it pertains to Barbie’s activism. Between every feminist blogger and TV personality, the movie was being hoisted in the air as a trophy of women’s rights, all in the post-Trump 1.0/Biden’s far more progressive administration era. The breaching of a long-chased after seal of approval from Hollywood, that in fact, women’s voices are being heard. As I said before, credit where credit is due, the box office numbers speak volumes about the audiences reached. What message does it carry? That girls can grow up to do and be whatever they desire to be. And that’s about it. There are Pixar films with stronger, more intelligently laid morals than that. Let me be clear here, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that message, but to suggest that Barbie was promoting anything beyond that is plain silly. The understanding argument to this is that Barbie was aimed at the masses, and Poor Things was marketed to nerdy adults who read too much, making the former far easier to take, say, a whole family to see. It’s exactly this simplistic approach to marketing that diminishes the strength of its activism, in turn depreciating the value of the film over the years. One of my favorite metrics for this approximation of strength over time is through IMDb’s metacritic score being put side-by-side with the user’s ratings. The higher the spread, the more one should focus on the user’s reviews. How does this stack up for Barbie and Poor Things? As of writing this, Barbie rests at an 80/100 metacritic score, with the user’s review average at 6.6/10. Fair. What about Poor Things? 88/100 and 7.8/10 for metacritic and users’ average respectively. And if you begin to dig into some of the specific reviews for Barbie, you’ll find many 1-star listings that are specifically those alienated by the simplistic, “men are dumb” trope beaten throughout. Yet another detriment. Where Poor Things also dismantles men, it does so with elegance and grace that you don’t even realize it’s happening. Because it is nuanced, a word I use again. That’s what it ultimately boils down to. The competition between the two films, in the context of cultural impact, comes to exactly that, cultural impact. Especially if the goal is to spread the message of feminism, Barbie has only shortchanged itself for the quick thrills of the KAM camp (don’t make me spell it out, you all know who I refer to). Poor Things not only avoided this trap but subverted it altogether by existing in its own unique genre, and by making all worldviews welcome throughout its runtime.

            The Academy’s decisions came and went, and Oppenheimer took all the glory. Which, as for that year, in my personal opinion, was the star winner, as far as technical filmmaking is concerned. The talks of the town have since come and gone, and as the dust has settled, I feel confident that Poor Things’ cultural and societal impact will prove the more significant when put against Barbie. The only award taken home that night may have been for Emma Stone as lead actress, but I believe that was enough to cement it in the Academy’s and cinema’s history books. For comparison, the only thing Barbie took home that night was best original song, for I’m Just Ken… Take that for whatever it’s worth, the song’s catchy as hell, I’ll admit. I conclude by asking the reader to do a simple task before forming or responding with one’s opinion: watch Barbie, and then watch Poor Things. After that, I’d imagine a lot of what I’ve just said will click just fine.