Yorgos Lanthimos
Povere creature!

“Scopa liberi tutti” or “Bella” starts anew

I can say that I enjoyed the viewing, but I didn’t really like the film. It may seem like a contradiction, indeed. I found the film aesthetically appealing, but somewhat naive in the presentation of its content. The most important reason to go see this film might be the opportunity for many viewers to finally get to know Lanthimos. So, use “Poor Things” as a pretext to explore the director’s previous filmography. Above all, “Dogtooth”. I consider “Poor Things” a rough repetition of themes the director had tackled with more acumen in his earlier films.

Everything has already been said about the technical and scenographic aspects and the fine performances of the protagonists. I wonder what the film would have been like if it were handed over to the Gothic surrealism of Tim Burton. Who knows! And since I am fixated with the “off-field”, regardless of our thoughts, I stress that this is one of those films whose construction remains always “open” to new interpretations and translations. The image I have selected and that I propose for reading Lanthimos's work is exactly the figure of "Bella" who here I read as yet another allegory of nostalgia for a mythical "State of nature", where the individual conscious Self would be free from internal constraints and hypocritical social conventions. Instead, I would advocate the historical and daily battle of the 'Homo societatis' against the restoration of an illusory and essentially feral condition.

It is true that “superstructures” limit individual and collective freedom in many ways, but, beware, it is also true that they are functional and necessary for the birth of “rights” that allow individuals to live in peace within the same environment and that control aggression while making space for mutual respect. Not easy at all, as is well known! Indeed, at the level of Homo societatis, things are a bit better, but not much, to the point that we have invented the "superstructure – State -", which continues to fulfill its function, as "conformist" as it may seem, of mediating between opposing interests. Thus, I find this approach to the theme of "social superstructure" really naive. Especially if the criticism of the “superstructures” is reduced to advocating for “sexual freedom” unconditionally and always longed for in the collective erotic imagination, which perhaps even the most hardened and ideologically driven feminists don’t believe in today. Are we still stuck in the “free love” of the 60s/70s of the last century as the panacea for all our present and future woes? Okay, let’s talk about it.

Here it actually seems to appeal to a legendary “State of nature” opposed to a “State of culture” as the bearer of nearly every evil. But the risk of such an assumption is to then end up invoking a misunderstood sense of "the autonomy of individual consciousness" without intermediaries. After all, "Bella" sometimes strikes me as the prototype of the human being who claims to draw solely from herself, thus paradoxically laying the ultimate foundations of that ideology (therefore, "superstructural," by definition) that identifies freedom as a fact independent and preceding the presence of the Other. A freedom that will be master of itself, in the absence of the limit constituted by the Other-than-me. "Bella" appears to ascend to a figure who feels solely the bearer of inalienable rights and answers only to her own conscience. But is such a premise really plausible in a context where people must share spaces, ideas, intentions to survive? The "Others" are not always a "nuisance" that you can erase from the face of the earth. You will have to come to terms with them sooner or later (hence the need for a "superstructure").

I mean that I always perceive in the depths of certain "childlike naivety," a certain perverse thought that secretly wishes nature would simply take its course, after all. A mix of misunderstood sense of Darwinian evolution, along with an unconfessed appeal to some social Darwinism always peeks out in some enthusiasm for a past too unjustly idealized by certain intellectuals, philosophers, and common folk.

Thus, through the fairytale structure and the typification of some "archetypical" characters, one could say of the unfolding path of "individuation" and "political self-management" of "Bella," a child in an adult body immune from "viral social superstructures," a modern "candide" lampoons all the major hypocrisies of society (of all time?) and not least opposes the domination operated by millennia of unabashed patriarchy. The arguments are complex and essentially shareable, but the language used seems a bit too simplistic to me.

But let’s talk about Bella’s language: robotic, metallic almost devoid of inflection, at the edge of aphasia (or "psychosis") mixed with literal expressions (equally "cold") belonging to scientific terminology. Equipped with such a vocabulary, Bella sets out to observe and designate the world around her. That her sparse, essential, almost prototypical language, rather than highlighting the hypocrisy of the "superstructure-world," actually risks hiding - the incapacity of a conscience to carefully evaluate the world around it -. With her poor language, she paradoxically ends up reducing the very complexity of that world she sees burdened by useless and false conventions (if we start from the assumption that "denominating reality" means interpreting it). Her knowledge of the world is reduced to simple and isolated passive impressions. She doesn’t live the world. She describes it, without much emotion, all in all, and with all the detachment and informational bulimia of which only an AI could be capable today. This vision of Bella's world is too impressionistic, too sketchy, ultimately it becomes fatally basic, lacking real depth. To the point that you conclude that her very naive (bare-bones) worldview is equally false, equally "superstructural," in the sense that it ends up giving you an always distorted, that is, partial view of reality. Hers is not rightly a "consciousness," but only a "passive awareness"; pure "passivity in action," therefore. I hope this is clear even if I sound like our version of the most hermetic Lanthimos of some films ago.

After all, Bella who claims to be able to do everything and wants to try everything, called to revive a tedious and conformist morality, falls into an almost ontological mistake: the human being is not a mere data accumulator, is not a simple information processor. It’s not simply by storing knowledge that "consciousness" is formed. The human being is not even a tabula rasa on which anything can be written. Otherwise, even "Bella" would end up being a victim of her own "purity," of her own "uncontaminated nature" as she would end up being molded by every single piece of the world she appropriates. So much for freedom. So, “Must you try everything?” urges the “philosopher keeper.” Let me paraphrase a “legendary” song by Vecchioni (forgive me): “And the “Bella” conquered knowledge after knowledge and when she stood in front of the sea she felt foolish (Vecchioni used a more targeted term) because she realized that beyond that she couldn’t know anything.” - And so much road to see a desperate sun. And ever the same and ever as when she started -.

It’s strange, “Bella” sometimes would like to hit the human cubs, other times she feels compassion for their suffering and seems almost prey to a hint of guilt. And where would she have learned it from? From reading Emerson? She devoid of superstructures, little used to shame, suddenly feels responsible, if only symbolically, for the suffering of other people. The cruel survival instinct seems to have degenerated into collective persecution delusions and social sadism of which we are the first promoters even just indirectly with our indifference towards certain injustices of this world. And "Bella" despairs because she thus comes into contact with a reality that doesn't satisfy her innate (therefore biologically determined) "sense of fairness?". Or maybe the truth is that no one is truly innocent and the myth of the good savage miserably breaks on the awareness that biological order is founded on "injustice" just like social order. Are we "naturally" and then culturally led to ignore, subjugate, and abuse the other just to survive?

And let's say this is the narrative of a hope: that of the affirmation of female power over male power. Or rather, of female sexual power that would not know a refractory period unlike the male one? What social, moral, ethical upheavals might follow the day when women become completely aware of this power and indulge their desires for enjoyment without worrying about the judgments and prejudices of others? Who knows, instead, that the definitive emancipation of women does not lie in “extracorporeal pregnancy” (but that’s another film) Is this the whole issue then? Is it all reduced to exercising sexuality and, in particular, female sexuality, in the end? Very Freudian as an assumption. Is it always on the woman's body that the destinies of humanity are decided in the end? But what would be "natural," then? Bisexuality? Transsexuality? Pansexuality? Or would it be more "natural" for everyone to have the faculty to choose without incurring the ostracism of the community? Or perhaps the future that awaits us is Allen's "Orgasmatic," in the end? In fact, "Bella" reminds me a bit of a wilder version of the more sophisticated "Luna Schlosser" (Diane Keaton) the ditzy "poetess" from “Sleeper”. Sure, artificial autoeroticism, even if in groups, could resolve all moral superstructural elaborations, but would it be equally fun? Who knows! We just hope that libertarianism does not reduce solely to a matter of choosing the preferential sexual object. However, a liberated woman who frees herself from all taboos might push the male to come to terms with it eventually, with the consequence that there would be fewer neurotic men and their violence and aggression might potentially be neutralized? In short, the “fixation on possession” innate to the human male would magically disappear?

In my opinion, “Bella” landed here among us to give us the good news. Not that “the individual is better than society” or similar pleasantries, but wants to tell us that, in essence, we are “victims” of “a dual approach to life”. That is to say, "the basic assumption" is that society is understood, in the minds of its members, men and women, as essentially an ensemble of relationships fundamentally based on pairs. Of such a narrowed worldview, the first victim is the woman within the pair itself many times. At the more collective level, this concept leads us on one hand to neglect the group or to perceive it as potentially hostile, or at best the pair-based affiliation system degenerates into “familialism” expansion of one's horizons. The socialist soul of Lanthimos manifests with all its egalitarian impetus? Here the problem is not so much the suffocating inhibiting presence of the superstructure, but exactly the opposite, perhaps. Using certain terminologies of Freudian meta-psychology, we might even dare that today’s “society” lacks “Super-Ego,” i.e., superstructures. I mean the figure of “Bella” could express all its revolutionary power if in society there were still “conflict.” But "instincts" (today "motivations") no longer provoke "conflict" because they remain still compatible, as a rule, with the demands or dictates of society as a whole. No more conflicts to remove, but only unmet desires to “repress”.

Essentially, two conditions that would be in conflict, instincts and environmental demands, can finally coexist without creating confusion, guilt, shame, or anxiety on the conscious level. And so I end up feeling “free” anyway.

And so, “Bella” mine, welcome among us incorrigible superstructured, but you arrive late. As perhaps, even before escaping "the prison of the couple" your, our first "responsibility," would in fact be to free ourselves from some form of fatalism: that which claims it is not possible to "understand" life, that deludes us that it cannot be acted upon, but seeks to convince us that "one must approach it with the simplicity of a child or the wildness of the Homo neanderthalensis not yet contaminated by that other myth that is "social structure". That myth that wants us all “condemned to our respective talents and roles.” All prisoners stereotyped within the order of "male discourse." - The cure does not reside in regression (to the state of nature, to adolescence) -, not this time, at least.

In my opinion, Lanthimos's progressive urge here sadly flowed into an alter-globalist or alter-mondialist vocation, but it missed the target. That is, it is not by appealing to the mythical purity of the "noble savage" or the transgressive nature of adolescence, possibly, that one effectively opposes "neoliberal globalism" and its distortions.

I come to say that “Bella” is Lanthimos himself regressed also to adolescence. Indeed worse, fixated at the phase of infantile omnipotence. I find there really is a regression in Lanthimos's thought. Perhaps he was tired of cryptic intellectualism and needed to be lying on the bed for a while staring at the ceiling, just to unplug a bit. And so here comes an easy little thing to detox from complex braininess, but at the same time granting (us) a very sophisticated visionariness, no doubt about it. And whatever the case, long live Lanthimos, but after the Hollywood-style binge, we “await him at the gate,” certainly not to strike him, but to try following him once again in his renewed path of artistic growth. We hope. Enjoy the viewing!