#in substance

[happywebdesign]

IN SUBSTANCE

[artemideaddams]

I have ultimate Lannister stan disease sorry I really don't care about choosing asoiaf favorite based on how good those people are or on the side they are on or what is the right side of the feud or whatever. I am just going crazy for whoever slayed more in the last epidode, if they are also a little bit morally rancid and they know it and dont care about it it's a plus to me. If they are more than a little bit morally rancid but they are delusional about it it's another major plus. As long as they are being sexy and/or interesting or entrateining about this. I genuinely don't care while watching tv if my favourote characters is going to heaven or to jail.

[artemideaddams]

in the end I can say I did like Poor Things because watching it made me think about different things and start some interesting discussion between me and my mother. Both of us appreciate some things in the movie and were left confused by others and I think that's a good thing, it means the movie hasn't left any of us indifferent and has in itself enough interest elements to spark many discussions.

My mother found the feminist narrative of the movie flat and superficial (and she is right), but she was interested and captivated by how the story dealt with the theme of nature vs nurture, of biology determinism vs progress and our ability to improve and change for the better.

I, on the other hand, spent half of the movie indignated because initially I thought that this story was gothic fiction for the ones who don't appreciate gothic fiction, but after having watched the end of the movie I found quite brilliant and interesting the way they used gothic structures and pattern to narrate what in the end was a positivist fairytale. I found the mix that the movie used of gothic and positivism quite intriguing, I still could not decide if it is disrespectful toward the Gothic and what it represent or if I really liked it, but it didn't left me indifferent for sure. I really really liked how the "creature" in the end became the new "creator", but this is not a tragedy because, thanks to her experience and the growth she went through, she could be a "creator" of something good, giving a better life to her friends and using her knowleadge to punish the man who had previously ruined her life, so she's different and somewhat better than her own Creator/God/Father, despite loving her, was still oppressive like the typical gothic figure of the Father/creator, especially at the beginning of the movie, and his own father/creator was even worse. So there is a theme of children becoming theirs Fathers and repeating a pattern but there is also an improvement between all the generations. This is why I say this movie had a Positivist message of growth and improvement through experience, despite using Gothic thematics and narration. In a more classic Gothic narration, the repetition of the pattern between generations would have been a tragedy. I DO find this mix of Positivism and Gothic interesting.

But I also think that, distancing itself from a more Gothic message/style, the movie lost his opportunities to analyze better some aspects that are present in the premise of the story, because it IS a Gothic story or at least a story with a Gothic premise, because they didn't fit with the Positivist message and happy ending the movie wanted to have. Of some of them I already wrote in the other post, others I will maybe talk about in others post.

Like the fact that Bella was de facto living through her dead mother's body. How interesting was the fact that Bella was both ger own mother and her mother body's parassite, but how this could have been explored better with a heartbreaking and cathartic mother-daughter narrative but it wasn't, maybe because the story was written by a man who simply couldn't get it (which woman hasn't felt at least once in her life that she was both becoming her mother, and a burden for the mother's realization at the same time, which girl has never felt like she is at the same time the realization and continuation of her mother, and so she has pursue her freedom to pursue the life her mother couldn't have, knowing at at the same time that she has been the reasons why her mother couldn't lived the life she wanted to and pursued the dreams she used to have?). This is absolutely a thing that I would have liked to see developed more and better, but I don't think the writers have the ability or the intention to do so.

But also the fact that many of her lovers/future lovers started being attracted to her when she still had the mind of a child and for the most part behaved as such. Duncan even said to her that "reading so many books is making her loose her adorable way of speaking", aka he hates that she is becoming- again, for the second time- a woman with culture and knowleadge, who express herself as an adult, instead of being forever the creature with the ignorance and naivete of a child but with a body and libido of an adult woman he was attracted to, so there is the whole infantilization of the woman made by the man who proclaim to love her thematic, the inherent contraddiction in that, in the way men, and esp men who go for younger women, often consider them adults when it comes to sexual things but like to consider them children and treat them as such when it comes to knowleadge of the world and listening to theirs opinions, because it allowed them to mantain control over them. (Sorry if it's confused, in my mind the discourse makes sense.)

But Max too "fell in love" with Bella when her mind was...basically the one of a child, and she behaved as such, still.

Plus in the first scenes I felt there was an incestuous undertone with God that later was cut off with the detail of God being an eunuch. (Which makes sense, in a way- a man who could not procreate naturally because his own father castrated him in a delirio of onnipotence is now obsessed with creating life in others way in his own delirio of onnipotence).

Still, the scene in which Max and God arranged Max's marriage with Bella was...creepy. But the creepyness of it would have been a feature, and not a bug, in a tipycally Gothic narrative. Except that later all the Gothic undertones are abandoned and Max and God lost all theirs creepy undertones and become completely positive (even if not perfect) males figure.

In general there was the fact that this movie was...to nice on God and Max and the men in Bella' life to be Gothic? Like, the Positivist message allow a character who started as both a Gothic heroine/Frankestein creature to gain an indipency and happy ending that her prototipes in Gothic literature didn't have. But in order to do so, the movie has to minimize the evilness of the societal and family and cages in which women and children were trapped and that are the reasons why Gothic literature exist in the first place.

I genuinely think the movie would have been better if God would have been treated as a much more morally ambiguous, and even slightly negative, father figure. I think there should have been a longer and better developed conflict between Bella and God after Bella discovered her origins. I would have been okay with their final reconciliation before his death, if he was treated, by both Bella and the narrative, as a more negative and ambiguous father figure during the whole movie. As it was, I just wanted to punch him. I think the arrive of the ex-husband in the last part of the movie in a way absolve the others men in Bella's life (Max and God) of the fact that they have been her captors and jailors too, for a (long) time.