Poor Things And The Limits Of The Female Gaze
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things presents Bella Baxter’s sexual awakening as a rebellion against Victorian patriarchy. Its lavish production design, comic violence and fearless nudity can feel like a direct challenge to the decorum that has historically constrained women on screen. Bella names her desires, pursues pleasure and refuses to behave like a respectable woman.
That surface disruption has encouraged the film’s reputation as a feminist triumph. Yet the female gaze is not simply a matter of placing a woman at the centre of explicit scenes, or allowing her to enjoy sex without shame. It asks who controls the image, whose interiority matters, and whether a character’s body is being used to explore freedom or to decorate somebody else’s fantasy.
The distinction matters because Poor Things often treats graphic content as evidence of liberation. Bella’s nudity and sexual experimentation are framed as progressive before the film has fully considered the power relations surrounding them. Her body becomes a visual argument: because she appears uninhibited, the film assumes that the audience is witnessing emancipation.
For Australian viewers, this tension is especially visible within a media culture shaped by streaming, festival cinema and classification debates. A film can be marketed as daring in Sydney or Melbourne while reaching much of the country through private screens, group chats and algorithmic recommendations. A provocative image may travel faster than the politics needed to interpret it.
The Female Gaze Is More Than Visibility
A female gaze should create a shift in power, rather than simply reverse the gender of the person being looked at. It can involve attention to women’s subjectivity, the textures of their experience, the social conditions affecting their choices and the contradiction between desire and danger. It is not a certificate awarded to a film because its central character is a woman.
Bella’s perspective is frequently foregrounded through her strange language, curiosity and refusal of social rules. Those choices are compelling. However, the film also makes her body the primary site through which the audience is invited to measure her development. Sexual availability becomes shorthand for intellectual growth, as though discovering pleasure automatically means becoming free.
That equation narrows feminist representation. Women can be sexually adventurous, ambivalent, traumatised, romantic, celibate or simply uninterested. A genuinely expansive gaze would make room for all those possibilities instead of treating graphic sex as the clearest proof of agency.
Bella’s Agency Is Carefully Manufactured
Bella appears to control her sexual life, but her circumstances are engineered by men. Godwin Baxter creates her body and supervises her development, while Duncan Wedderburn attempts to possess her through charm, money and movement across Europe. Her rebellion is real, yet it takes place inside a narrative designed by male characters and a production shaped by male authorship.
This does not erase Bella’s choices. It makes them more complicated. She learns to identify exploitation, earns money, works in a brothel and develops political awareness, but the film often turns those experiences into stylish episodes in a picaresque adventure. The suffering attached to sex work, poverty and colonial inequality is softened by whimsical pacing and ornate spectacle.
The result is a familiar liberal fantasy: a woman becomes free by rejecting shame, while the structures that organise her life remain mostly theatrical scenery. Bella’s education is emotionally legible, but the film is less interested in the collective conditions that would make freedom possible for women without her extraordinary narrative protection.
Graphic Sex Does Not Automatically Equal Feminist Politics
The film’s explicit scenes can disrupt the tradition in which women’s pleasure is hidden while male pleasure is treated as ordinary. Bella speaks plainly about sex and resists the expectation that desire must be paired with romance. That frankness has value, particularly in a culture where women are still judged for wanting pleasure.
Still, the camera’s fascination with Emma Stone’s body can reproduce the very objectification the film appears to critique. The exaggerated sets and fisheye lenses announce that viewers are watching a constructed fantasy, but self-conscious style is not the same as ethical distance. A film can acknowledge its artifice while continuing to invite spectators to consume a woman’s body.
The distinction is useful for Australian audiences navigating the national classification system. An R18+ rating may signal strong sex, nudity or violence, but it does not tell viewers whether those images challenge gendered power. Classification regulates access; it cannot supply a feminist reading. Nor can a film’s prestige status, festival reception or awards attention settle the question.
What The Film Leaves Outside The Frame
Poor Things is energetic when depicting Bella’s individual rebellion, yet less curious about the women around her. Working-class women, sex workers and women shaped by race, disability or colonial violence are often supporting figures in Bella’s education. Their experiences help her become worldly, but they do not receive equal narrative depth.
This limitation becomes clearer when the film’s language of liberation is compared with feminist criticism of popular culture. The discussion of bisexual identities has shown how visibility can still erase complexity when media treats identity as a stylish sign rather than a lived social position. Poor Things similarly turns freedom into an aesthetic mood.
The film’s fantasy setting permits it to gesture towards class politics, medical ethics and gender hierarchy without committing to the slow work of structural analysis. Bella can announce that she wants to study, work and think because the plot keeps clearing obstacles for her. Most women do not receive that kind of narrative generosity.
| Film element | What appears progressive | What remains unresolved |
|---|---|---|
| Bella’s sexual autonomy | Women’s pleasure is spoken about openly | Sex becomes the main proof of liberation |
| Nudity and explicit scenes | Female desire is visible rather than hidden | The camera may still turn Bella into an object |
| Rejection of Victorian manners | Respectability is exposed as restrictive | Individual rebellion replaces collective change |
| Sex work storyline | Labour and exploitation enter the story | Workers around Bella remain underdeveloped |
| Surreal visual style | Artifice questions conventional realism | Style can disguise unequal power |
A Local Reading Of Sexual Freedom
In Australia, conversations about sexual representation sit alongside practical concerns about consent education, workplace harassment and uneven access to healthcare. Viewers in Brisbane, Perth or regional New South Wales may encounter Poor Things through a cinema chain, a festival screening or a streaming service, but the social meanings of its images are not identical across those settings.
Australian viewers also live with a strong habit of discussing films through quick online reactions. A scene clipped for social media can become evidence that a film is either empowering or offensive before its narrative context survives the journey. The local market’s reliance on imported prestige cinema makes that shorthand particularly influential: awards language often arrives before sustained criticism.
A feminist reading should therefore ask what the film teaches audiences to recognise as freedom. Is it the ability to say yes to sex? The ability to leave a man? Economic independence? Political solidarity? Poor Things offers some of these answers, but it gives the most visual emphasis to sexual transgression, which is the easiest form to package and sell.
The Fantasy Of An Unpunished Woman
Bella’s privilege is part of the film’s fantasy. She is able to travel, experiment and make mistakes with a resilience that protects her from many consequences. Her body is treated as both newly born and endlessly available for experience, allowing the story to avoid the ordinary accumulation of social judgement that shapes women’s lives.
That fantasy can be pleasurable, especially for audiences exhausted by stories that punish female desire. But refusing punishment is different from imagining accountability, care and mutuality. A woman should not need to be childlike, beautiful or narratively exceptional to deserve sexual autonomy.
The film’s comedy also blunts its critique. Men are ridiculous, institutions are grotesque and social conventions are exposed as absurd. Yet making patriarchy look silly does not necessarily make it less powerful. Satire needs a clear target; here, the spectacle sometimes absorbs the politics it initially raises.
Reading The Film Beyond Its Reputation
The most productive response is neither to dismiss Poor Things as anti-feminist nor to accept its feminist credentials without scrutiny. Its contradictions are the point at which analysis becomes useful. Bella’s self-determination is meaningful, while the film’s visual treatment of her remains shaped by voyeurism, authorship and commercial appeal.
This tension extends beyond cinema. Online culture frequently rewards the appearance of transgression: a bold image, an explicit scene or a woman making an unapologetic choice. The platform economy can place a feminist essay beside a commercial site such as Yoder’s Red Barn, reducing very different kinds of content to interchangeable recommendations. Visibility is abundant; context is not.
Poor Things deserves attention precisely because it makes progressive intentions look so seductive. Its female gaze is strongest when Bella thinks, works and challenges authority. It is weakest when her naked body is asked to carry the entire burden of feminist progress.
Read the film critically, share space for disagreement and support feminist media that connects representation to material conditions. Subscribe to independent commentary, recommend thoughtful criticism to friends and resist treating graphic content as proof that a story has escaped the old power structures.