Poor Things.
When I saw the trailer for Poor Things, I both knew I wanted to see it and wasn’t exactly sure what it was about. I thought it was something like Ex Machina or Her—AI come to life and fallen in love with. I thought with a cast this star studded (Emma Stone, Ramy Youssef, Mark Ruffalo, Jerrod Carmichael and so on), the film would either be spectacular or a little crowded. Even if it was the latter, I marked it down as something to see.
My boyfriend was just as intrigued, and we—AMC A-Listers and movie obsessed—made a plan to go, but life kept getting in the way. School, especially, got in the way, as I’m about two weeks out from my comprehensive exams, a milestone within my PhD program where you go from someone who’s vaguely interested in different areas of study to someone who has read extensively on these areas and can speak to what you know.
I’ve been reading for this test since June and the sheer amount of what you need to encounter, read, watch, think about to be thoroughly knowledgeable in an area of study (mine are Black American Literature and Culture, Black American Cinema, and Black American Philosophy) has been wiping me out a bit. Race is an enigma in a lot of ways, a problem that feels obvious in its solution (stop insulting and killing us, oh and please pay back us back for slavery), but a problem that has nonetheless replayed on a loop for the last four hundred years. It’s exhausting, and that plus teaching plus wanting to see my friends plus all of the other things my boyfriend and I like to do together meant Poor Things kept being pushed further and further into the things we would do in the future.
We vowed we would see it this week. I wrote in my calendar “Have to see Poor Things this week,” as if the movie was an obligation, like going to the doctor or paying a ticket. I wrote without writing, You can’t keep putting this off—it’s getting ridiculous.
We studied together at a coffee shop for a few hours first because he’s in school too which is a godsend for me because—as much as I try to cultivate a balanced life, to not be all work all the time—I think about school a lot, spend a lot of time on it. I guess the doggedness of my approach to learning is in part because when I was in college, I got really involved in an intense church and dropped out of school, and as much as I tried to assure my mom of otherwise, I might not have gone back. I spent a whole year in a program at that really intense church where I read the whole Bible and talked about the Bible and there were guest speakers who came and talked about the Bible and everything was about the Bible, and I—a nerd since I came out of the womb—became a little intellectually restless. At that time in my life, anything that was not explicitly about the Bible and Christianity was understood to me and those around me as sinful, as tempting, as something that would make you far from God (the worst thing you could be). There was a lot that I intentionally didn’t read or encounter during that time, and that time could’ve been the rest of my life if a few important things didn’t happen—a breakup, a move to a different part of town, the end of that year of church school which was also a chance to look up and wonder what the heck I was going to do now—that got me back on track.
Since then I’ve seen the chance to study anything—everything—as a gift. I’ve become very acutely aware of the time I have and protective of how I use it. I do not want to look up again and wonder how I got here and have to try to figure out how to get back on track. I want to meticulously remain on track as long as I can, understanding that as I get older, what it means to be on track might change.
So I’m a big school person, and I love that I have a partner who will sit with me at a coffee shop for hours while I stare at my iPad and read—switching every twenty-five minutes, shoutout to the Pomodoro method—three novels at a time.
We studied and then we went to this talk by Emily Nagoski, who is this incredible sex educator who wrote this book I love called Come As You Are. She has a new book out called Come Together about fostering and maintaining your sex life in long-term relationships. She’s brilliant and charismatic and inspiring as someone who’s also done a lot of work to get her PhD. She talked about how people who have vibrant sex lives in their relationships long-term tend to have these three things in common: they’re friends with each other, they prioritize and value sex in their relationship, and they’ve done away with what sex is supposed to look like, have cultivated their own sexual culture instead of absorbed all of the outside messages coming in.
When we watched Poor Things (finally!), this last aspect Nagoski mentioned—doing away with outside sexual messages—was strangely and beautifully present throughout the film. It’s about a woman named Bella (played by Emma Stone) who because of strange circumstances I won’t reveal (because it’d definitely be a spoiler) is slowly realizing what it means to be alive, including—especially—sexually. The film is well done in part because it doesn’t explore sex and womanhood in a way you’ve seen a thousand times but instead in such an unexpected way that when the movie first started I was supremely skeptical about how it would all play out. I think I actually had my arms crossed, I think I might’ve checked the time, wondered how long I was to endure this very suspect way of exploring sex and womanhood.
But then things become increasingly more interesting and more quirky and more hilarious while sometimes taking a moment to break from the romp and be still. Emma Stone kills this role (as do a lot of her supporting characters), and as I watched her character Bella grow and change and become more sure of herself as time goes on, I thought about how gorgeous life is in that way. One day you can be nineteen, reading the Bible, listening to talks on the Bible, afraid of anything that doesn’t adhere to the Bible, and then you can blink, be twenty-nine and consuming a world of literature, of culture—a world that echoes your own experiences more deeply and makes you feel—if not like Emma Stone, grasping for everything outwardly—just as curious and hungry to experience all that being alive can mean.
Image: Searchlight Pictures
