FM Weekly 4.43

29 January 2024

content notice for this issue: childhood sexual assault in the movie Poor Things,

Poor Things is an artistic, philosophical, well-acted movie about sexual violence paraded as sexual autonomy. Poor Things is an artistic, philosophical, well-acted movie about sexual violence paraded as sexual autonomy. Childhood sexual assault, to be precise.

Spoiler-filled rant below. I can’t believe my wife and I didn’t walk out on this movie at multiple points, so unfortunately these spoilers go until the end of the movie. I am raging in my hatred for this movie, and I’m sure what I’ve typed below will be dripping with it. I get angrier every time I think about how many awards this has won. If you loved the movie, because I hear many people do, I would appreciate reading how you’d counter what I’ve written. The only discussions of sexual assault as a movie plotline I’ve found are in Reddit - please link any others you’ve read below, I’d greatly appreciate it.

My own summary of the movie’s primary storyline is as follows:

OG Bella dies by suicide. Her body is recovered by a corpse hunter and sold to a physician known to purchase bodies for rogue experiments. She is pregnant at the time of her death. The physician transplants her fetus’ brain into her own skull and shocks her back to life. Bella then becomes an adult body with an infant’s brain, developing “rapidly” but on an unknown timeline and developmental scale. Let’s call her Baby Bella, because that was the point of the plot. She cannot walk well, she speaks in third person baby talk, pees on the floor, and does not know how to eat food. Supposedly, according to her physician captor, her development has already been and will now continue on an accelerated scale. Over the course of the movie, Baby Bella encounters a series of men who - by her own naive assessment, are all taking care of her in one way or another, sometimes sexually - but by a capacitated assessment are all violating her, usually sexually. The primary plot is that Baby Bella has a “childlike” freedom of her body and sexuality because - and it’s not a buried plotline in the least - she is a child based on her brain capacity. This childlike approach to life is misappropriated into a superficial narrative of sexual exploration all at the hands of fully capacitated adult men - adult in mind and body - who take advantage of Baby Bella every which way. The movie reads like a philosobro circle jerk wherein feminism is the debate at hand, and the central question is, “what prices do women pay for sexual freedom?”

There is zero recognition that at any point Baby Bella can say no to sex. Zero support for a developmentally-supported engagement with pleasure and sexuality. Zero questioning of adult men taking advantage of her, which even if she was Adult Bella it would have been obvious that she was vulnerable and with manipulating men but somehow it just kept not being enough to get someone to stand up for her.

Summary of fucking disgusting men: