"I can only perceive a sucesssion of cruel splendours whose very movement re- quires that I die: this death is only the exploding consumption of all that was, the joy of existence of all that comes into the world; even my own life demands that everything that exists, everywhere, ceaselessly give itself and be annihilated" — Bataille in The Accursed Share
Yorgos Lanthimos'
Poor Things is a tragic rendition of sexual liberation, albeit a complete farce. It is satire that probably fails to execute itself due to the unneglectable oddity that is Bella's mental age and begs to be forgiven by the most adamant Letterboxd feminist critics. Satire, nonetheless. As much as
Poor Things makes a parody of pseudo-socialist comrades whose selling point for their case of labor alienation or, even, George Bataille's discontinuous existence is vampiristic images of the worst injustices, suffering, and death of the Other, the film is equally, positively, and productively interested in positing a world beyond individuality through sacrifice— even as far as potential suicide—, drunkenness, rambunctious laughter, throwing of plates, and eroticism. As a visual feminist manifesto,
Poor Things fails miserably, although this misery might be the fertile grounds for visual and theoretical kinship. Taken for its visual glory, only, Bella Baxter's sexual pleasure is not so much appropriated as a principle both production and consumption, but also criminally expanded (over and over again) productive excess in the general economy, which is rather normative and hasty conclusion. Each time Bella orgasms and her eyes widen, she does not become closer to herself, but the opposite: she disavows her Self.
Reading Poor Things through Bataille's conception of death and eroticism, notably in The History of Eroticism and The Accursed Share, Poor Things can be reimagined as an economy of intersubjectivity whereby the embrace of the erotic as the embrace of death signals an existence besides one's body— to be mother, daughter, and an impoverished Alexandrian—, an inherently feminist project.
