We Are The Poor Things

No, Bella Baxter would not wear Pillow Talk Big Lip Plumpgasm Lip Gloss.

Poor Things is like Barbie in that an undead woman enters the land of the living only to prove she is more alive than those the modern world has deadened. Poor Things is unlike Barbie in that its explicitly stated villain is not patriarchy but polite society. 

“Polite society,” as multiple characters tell Bella Baxter, the zombie-doll of Poor Things, “destroys one’s soul.”

Viewers meet Bella (Emma Stone) in Victorian-era London. She’s a female version of Frankenstein’s monster, assembled and animated by a scientist named God, formally known as Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Much has been made of this character name — oh, God creating his ideal woman, how trite, how misogynistic, etc. — but God is named after Frankenstein author Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, who inspired the character of Victor Frankenstein, and Poor Things is based on the 1992 Alasdair Gray book Poor Things, which is itself inspired by Frankenstein.

Traces of Shelley’s mother, women’s rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft, show up in all three works as well. “Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison,” Wollstonecraft once wrote. She wasn’t talking about capital-B Beauty — poetic beauty — but a specific kind of physical beauty: obedient beauty, beauty that communicates an understanding of and submission to the rules of womanhood, beauty as the literal application of the rules of womanhood to the body. Beauty as the aesthetic of polite society.

And what if women weren’t taught to keep up appearances “from infancy”? 

This is the question at the center of Poor Things, one it attempts to answer by putting an infant’s brain in Bella’s adult body¹ and sending her out into the world, uncaged, without the gendered lessons of girlhood to guide her. As her mind matures — from that of a toddler, to an adolescent discovering masturbation (with an apple! origin of all sin!), to a horny teen fucking (“Why do people not just do this all the time?”) and reading philosophy (“Emerson speaks about the improvement of men … Perhaps he does not know any women”), to, finally, an embodied adult — her behavior highlights how social norms sever us from instinct, curiosity, common sense, caring. 

Bella asks us to see the absurdity of normalcy. 

When I received a press release about Emma Stone’s beauty look for the Poor Things premiere in December, I had to wonder if Stone’s glam team had seen the film. 

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“I partnered with the legendary Pat McGrath Labs to create this gorgeous ethereal makeup look, which was inspired by Emma’s character Bella Baxter: a woman who feels incredibly at home in her skin,” makeup artist Rachel Goodwin said, sharing 10 products she used to cover the skin Bella is supposedly so comfortable in. “I wanted every aspect of this makeup to have an element of transparency to it. The kind that doesn't cover but rather embellishes her own natural beauty.”

Bella Baxter would find every aspect of this description ridiculous. Wearing three layers of faux-skin (foundation, concealer, powder) in the same shade as her real skin to show how “incredibly at home in her skin” she is? Absurd! Coloring her eyelids, lashes, cheeks, and lips with over one hundred individual cosmetic chemicals and calling it “transparency”? Absurd! Mystifying the makeup that’s literally covering her face by saying it “doesn’t cover” her face? Absurd! 

This is not to say Emma Stone shouldn’t have worn makeup or even the movie is teaching us a moral lesson about being at home in our skin — it’s not — but just to say that words mean things. Bella, unconditioned by beauty culture, would emphasize the silliness of assigning beauty products meanings they do not have and invite us to examine why we do it: Is wearing makeup simply for the sake of wearing makeup so objectionable that we feel we must bolster our decision to wear it with claims of self-knowing and self-assurance? Is the idea of being “unnatural” so distasteful that we feel we must justify our unnatural tastes by reframing them as mere “embellishments” of the natural (which is, in fact, a definition of unnatural)? If the wearer’s values are, as stated, “transparency” and “natural beauty,” why not live those values — expose the actual skin? And if those are not the wearer’s values, why insist that makeup meets them if it doesn’t? 

A more Bella-appropriate explanation for the night’s look would have been, “Emma is an actress in the public eye and her job more or less demands a bit of makeup.”  

This is, at least, how cosmetic products are utilized in Poor Things.

For the majority of the film, Stone’s character is bare-faced. “Yorgos [Lanthimos, the director] always insists on no makeup when it’s not specific for a character and in this instance that is completely right,” said Nadia Stacey, the film’s Oscar-winning hair, makeup, and prosthetics designer, in an interview with Wallpaper.

In the book², God notes that Bella “has never been taught to feel her body is disgusting” — she is shameless. In the movie, this sentiment is communicated visually. Bella knows nothing of beauty norms (or “shametenance” practices, in the language of philosopher Clare Chambers) and feels no need to conform to them. Her skin stays naked, her brows stay bushy, and her long hair flows to the backs of her knees, never to be twisted into a period-appropriate updo. “Her hair was left down intentionally as a marker of her non-conformity to society,” Stacey explained.

That Bella Baxter is “naturally” beautiful enough to gain entry into upper class spaces anyway — despite possessing the intellect and motor skills of a child — is not a failure of the film to prove its point, as some critics have suggested, but its point precisely, I think. Polite society often prioritizes surface over substance. (There are other missteps, though. Where is Bella’s armpit hair? Her leg hair?)

Bella wears makeup only once: during her stint as a sex worker in a Paris brothel where, in order to make a living, she must first be picked by the potential client out of a line-up of other sex workers. “Sir, would you not prefer it if the women chose?” Bella asks a customer. The Madame later reprimands her: “Some men enjoy that you do not like it.”

Stacey painted Bella with purple eyeshadow and red lipstick for these scenes — the same cartoonish color combination that’s been used to signal “female” in cinema since Fantasia. (See also: Jessica Rabbit, Greta Gremlin, Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast, Megara in Hercules, etc.) “That makeup is part of the process of presenting herself to the men visiting the brothel and also what that means,” the makeup designer said. It isn’t meant to communicate comfort in one’s skin or transparency; it’s meant to earn attraction, attention, and money³. (The joke is that the same is true of the more subtle makeup preferred in polite society.) 

Yet the makeup here isn’t meant to condemn, either. It’s meant to challenge. If Bella — beauty! — is constructed by men, and the world Bella lives in is constructed by men, can she not still exercise agency within it? Consider the Poor Things poster:

“This artwork was among the very first ideas when I started working on the Poor Things poster: to have Emma Stone — the protagonist — with makeup that consisted of the three main male characters: Ramy Youssef, Willem Dafoe, and Mark Ruffalo,” Vasilis Marmatakis, the graphic designer behind this and many other Yorgos Lanthimos projects, told me in an email interview. The three brushstrokes of makeup on Bella’s face are “composed out of the three male figures, three masculine elements,” Marmatakis says. “But these strokes are smeared, so the standard clichés of beauty and femininity which are constructed by masculinity, here are misrepresented, displaced, and wrongly applied. This imagery could be taken out of a fashion magazine but at the same time it is not, since in a way undermines the feminine stereotypes of such magazines. Maybe she intentionally put this kind of makeup on herself or maybe someone else did. Maybe someone tried to ‘effeminate’ her or she ‘effeminated’ herself. Or maybe someone physically interfered with it.”

Maybe Bella physically interfered with it herself.

Last week, Emma Stone wore a coat of Charlotte Tilbury Pillow Talk Big Lip Plumpgasm Lip Gloss as she received the Academy Award for Best Actress for her work in Poor Things. The product stings; it’s formulated with cayenne pepper extract “to deliver instant heat” and “reduce the look of lip lines and age signs.” Vanity Fair claimed Bella would be delighted by it, but I’m not so sure.

Can’t you imagine her furiously rubbing the Plumpgasm from her lips as soon as the cayenne hit, spitting, polite society be damned?

Can’t you imagine her saying, “Why would people wear this? Don’t you feel that? Poor thing, to burn yourself and call it beauty!”

1. Much has been made about this as well — oh, how creepy, how infantilizing, that these male characters want a toddler brain with boobs! — but that is also the point.

2. Read the book! It is fantastic. The ending will address any feminist reservations you have about the movie.

3. Which are, again, perfectly acceptable reasons to wear makeup! It’s the insistence that this kind of makeup is something else — a natural, transparent show of comfort in one’s skin — that perpetuates the idea that attraction, attention, and money are not acceptable reasons to wear it.