Poor Things: Theme and Meaning

This week, we are going to be talking about Poor Things, by Yórgos Lánthimos and Tony McNamara.  You could describe Poor Things as a hyper-sexualized, dark, feminist, Forrest Gump. But what is the movie actually saying?  How does Yórgos Lánthimos get away with such wildness while still telling a story that is both interesting and commercially successful? How does he both break the boundaries of what we typically think a movie or a screenplay could be, but also invite viewers in? We’re not only going to be exploring the theme, structure and character development of Poor Things, but also connecting these concepts to profound questions about what holds us back as writers, and as human beings, from expressing our pure voices.  Along the way we'll look at some of the countless movies that are referenced and twisted in the structure of Poor Things, from Frankenstein to The Wizard of Oz, and hopefully simplify this tremendously complex screenplay by exploring the core thematic oncepts that underlie its structure. What is Poor Things actually about? What does the story mean? How did Yórgos Lánthimos and Tony McNamara build it as a screenplay? And what can we learn from Poor Things as screenwriters?  The weirder your movie is, the more you need to understand what you are building. The more complicated your movie is, the simpler its premise needs to be. Where does this begin in Poor Things? Like all screenwriting, it begins with character. In Poor Things, it begins with Emma Stone's character, Bella. In order for you to understand the premise of Poor Things, I'll need to give you a couple of little spoilers from the beginning to the middle. I'm not going to spoil it all the way to the end without first warning you. So here's the premise: God, or Godfrey (Willem Dafoe's character) has attempted to create a woman who has no shame, no past, no history, no external or internal factors standing in the way of just being herself.  He has attempted to make a girl who is pure voice.  God is the product of horrific experiments that his father performed upon him. Unlike Bella, he bears the scars of his history on his face and has spent his whole life trying to rationalize them. Bella, on the other hand, bears none of the scars of her history. She is coming at the world with fresh eyes. How has she been created? I am going to spoil it a little bit more now. A woman has killed herself for reasons we don't know. Even God, (the character), doesn't know. She has hurled herself from a bridge in the opening frames of the movie. And, as we'll find out later, the stories God has told Bella about her past aren’t true. He’s made up a false history to preserve her innocence and sense of herself. The truth is that God, a brilliant scientist and doctor, discovered the body of the suicidal, pregnant woman from the beginning of the movie, and he has implanted the baby's brain into the body of the woman.  Poor Things is a Frankenstein story, inside out.  In this case, the scientist, God, as Bella calls him, is a long, suffering, twisted, deformed creator, who carries the wounds of his tortured past. He's the one who looks like Frankenstein.  And Frankenstein's monster looks like Emma Stone. She looks like perfection, or, to quote the film's ironic joke, like " what a very pretty retard."  And she has no past. Bella has been brought up inside a world that has been cultivated...