[May as well warn you up-front: There are going to be spoilers throughout this piece. If you haven’t already, go ahead and check out Poor Things and Under the Skin. You won’t regret it.]
Okay, I’m going to give you a title, don’t think about it too hard: James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). What came to mind? Was it the creation scene, the thunder, the lightning, the sparking electronics? Was it, “It’s alive! It’s alive?” Was it the scene by the pond with the girl and her flowers?
Here’s what I think of: The moment when Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) gives his monster (Boris Karloff) its first taste of sunlight. In stark silence, without the benefit of an underscore (King Kong would innovate that in a couple of years), Whale lingers on the creature as it tries to decipher what is pouring into its eyes. It reaches up to the rays, strains to touch the light, tries to absorb as much sensation as it can. When Frankenstein closes the shutter, the monster extends those hands beseechingly to the scientist, begging for more.
Men may have screamed and women may have fainted at their first glimpse of the monster, mere seconds ago. But here, one can gaze into its eyes and feel empathy for the creature. We’ve all been there, in the moment when the senses are awakened to something new, amazing, overpowering. We know the impact it can have.
There’s a parallel moment in Yorgos Lanthimos’ fractured take on Frankenstein, Poor Things (2023), based on the novel by Alasdair Gray. Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is wandering the streets of a fantasy Lisbon. She watches the movements of whimsically designed cable cars high overhead, gorges on some pastries from a street vendor, marvels at a public aquarium. Then she is drawn away from the aquatic display, lured by the sound of a mandolin and a woman’s voice. A fado singer (Carminho) sits perched on a balcony, serenading the people below. Lanthimos provides no reason why the woman is doing this; it is not unreasonable to think that the singer does it for the sheer joy that she can.
As Whale did with his monster—albeit more dramatically—Lanthimos positions his camera below Bella’s sightline, tracking in as the woman gazes up, entranced by a sound she has never heard before. She’s then distracted by another sound: A couple having a violent argument some distance away. Fleeing the scene, she climbs a stairway and reaches an overlook where, as she takes in the vista of an amazing cityscape, sensory overload takes hold, and she promptly pukes.
Her reaction can be excused. Not all that long before she arrived in Portugal, Bella was a corpse, a pregnant woman who had committed suicide by leaping off a bridge in 1880s London. She was pulled from the waters by the deformed Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who extracted the fetus from her womb, removed the unborn child’s brain, and inserted it into Bella’s skull. From that point forward, the infant grey matter has been playing a furious game of catch-up with an adult’s body, under the careful watch of Dr. Baxter and Max (Ramy Youssef), the doctor’s assistant and Bella’s eventual fiancée.
By the time Bella reaches Lisbon, she has been lured away—quite willingly—by the scurrilous solicitor Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who in fine Victorian villain fashion, promises to deliver the world’s adventures to her, plus the thing that actual Victorian drama only tended to imply: Tons of what Bella refers to as “furious jumping”—what we more commonly call copious fucking.
Poor Things is the tale of a woman becoming her own person—without inhibitions or apologies—at a time when such a thing, if not completely forbidden, was by-and-large regarded dimly. (By the end of the film, she has resolved to become a doctor and has transplanted the brain of a goat into the body of the abusive husband who originally drove her to suicide.) But it’s also about how the act of becoming is inextricably tied to how we open ourselves up to the world, how our senses are a potent tool in personal growth.
There’s an interesting contrast here with Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013). Leah Schnelbach recently analyzed one particular sequence from this film here on Reactor. In the course of their analysis, they briefly glanced upon another moment that, while not as consequential, to me feels crucial in conveying the value of a life of the senses.
In Under the Skin, Scarlett Johansson plays an alien come to Earth for a classically cinema sci-fi reason: To harvest humans for some obscure purpose—fuel, food, litter for extraterrestrial cat boxes, something like that. Her tactic is also pure ’50s sci-fi: Dress sexy, troll the streets of Glasgow for thirsty males, and lure them into a building where they’re trapped and digested in viscous goo. The problem: She becomes so immersed in the chaotic whirlpool of humanity that she can’t resist its seductive pull. Midway through the film, she enters a restaurant somewhere in the countryside, and orders a piece of cake. As diners chatter and eat all around her, she takes up a forkful of the dessert, puts it in her mouth, chews a couple of times, and immediately retches it out.
I want to highlight one particular shot, here. Cinematographer Daniel Landin does beautiful work throughout, whether capturing the night-swaddled Glasgow streets or the eerie void of the alien processing house. Here, he captures in close-up possibly the most beautiful piece of chocolate layer cake in the history of the world. There’s nothing ornate or over-indulgent about it; it’s a simple wedge of frosted cake, centered on an elegantly understated plate. When the fork cuts through, one small crumb breaks off and falls on the dish, somehow making the dessert even more tempting. Anyone would yearn for just one bite, and yet the alien can’t eat it, so cut off is she—by biology or something more intangible—from the basic pleasures of human existence.
Fiction writers are counseled to make sure they’re activating all the senses when writing. Characters should taste victory, smell subterfuge, suffer the pain of rejection. It’s a little trickier in film. Sight is one of our most complex senses; it tends to commandeer a large percentage of brainpower when it is active—it’s why you might close your eyes when performing calculations or trying to remember something; you’re redirecting your vision-processing energies to more cerebral activities.
That’s a powerful tool for a filmmaker. The lazier ones will just cram in enough explosions, battling CG robots, and general visual noise to overwhelm, letting the adrenaline overload do the work for them. (Personally, it’s why I’ve become bored with the action sequences in many genre films.) Deployed right, though, the visceral impact of sight can not only dazzle the eye, but trigger a whole variety of sensations.
The alien of Under the Skin travels among the humans, but is not of them—she cannot experience the sensations of life as we do. Earlier in the film, as she is in the process of tracking a potential victim, she is swept up in a gaggle of female club-goers. They literally surround her, overwhelm her with their incoherent chatter, drag her physically into the club. Once there, things get worse: She’s assaulted by flashing lights and loud music, immersed in a crush of bodies. You can fairly feel the heat, smell the sweat, the alcohol, the cigarettes. Overwhelmed, she flees the scene.
Everything is similarly alien to Bella, but she has the advantage of a child’s open-mindedness. Confronted with the floof of hair of a fellow shipboard passenger (the sublime Hanna Schygulla), she insists on touching it. Eagerly mimicking the surgical procedures of Godwin—the man she pointedly calls “God”—she toys with the penis of a cadaver before stabbing the body in the eyes while chanting, “Squish, squish.” Most profoundly, once the child-brain discovers the sexual responses of the adult-body, she becomes an unabashedly avid sensualist, experimenting with foodstuffs at the dining table (Max wisely snatches a cucumber out of her hand); engaging in extended bouts of “furious jumping” during her travels with Wedderburn; and eventually becoming one of the leading lights of a Paris brothel, where each client represents a new experience to be evaluated and archived.
And why not? Sexuality is one of those aspects of humanity that succeeds in corralling all the senses—touch, smell, sight, sound, even taste (as an aside, the madame at the brothel [Kathryn Hunter] eventually reveals herself to be quite the vore). Lanthimos manages to frame Bella’s sexual awakening and adventuring as something more charming than salacious; in that mission he’s more than capably aided by Emma Stone’s performance, unabashed not just in the coital sequences, but in the sweet openness with which Bella recounts her exploits to shocked—and sometimes not-so-shocked (thank you, Hannah)—listeners. I’d mentioned in my recent article on The Curse how well-deserved was Stone’s Oscar win this year. The way she limns Bella’s carnal openness is not the only reason—overall her delicate, witty portrayal of a person coming into her own made the award well-justified.
By contrast, Under the Skin provides a disturbing portrait of what sexuality would be like without sensuality. Johansson’s alien dresses the part of a tempting seductress, but she’s divorced from the sensations that would provide meaning to the charade. (The original novel by Michel Faber takes it several steps further, implying that the alien’s actual physiology is so incompatible with a human’s that the invaders have been forced to compensate by equipping her disguise with what we in the industry refer to as Maximum Boobage.) In the latter half of the film, her doomed attempt to enjoy one small bite of cake sends her into a spiral of desperation, as she struggles to court a humanity that remains tantalizingly out of grasp. By the time a prospective lover attempts penetration, her response is not a blossoming of desire, but a panicked examination of her crotch with a table lamp (arguably the film’s only overt attempt at humor).
Meanwhile, courtesan Bella, somewhat dismayed by the hygiene of her clientele, implements a kind-of practical, pre-coital flirtation process: The man tells her a memory; she tells him a joke; and then she performs a sniff-test to determine if perfume might be in order. Again, her disarming openness and insistence that all should enjoy and grow from any experience provokes our consideration of how we once took in the world, when our brains were new, when we ached to absorb as much as possible. (When a co-worker informs Bella that some clients would rather she not enjoy getting fucked, she is shocked—apparently not so much by the notion that such people exist, but by the idea that there could ever be an instance when sex was not enjoyable.)
Poor Things is heralded as a feminist fable, and I don’t argue with that. What makes it distinctive is that it not only champions women embracing their power, but explores how part of that power derives from escaping those who would rob them of life’s full measure. The feckless Wedderburn becomes so hopelessly smitten with Bella that he attempts to sequester her away on a cruise ship; when she escapes his grasp and finally stands at the altar with Max, Wedderburn—once again fulfilling his role as mustachioed Victorian villain—summons the husband of Bella’s previous life to whisk her away to the grim prison of his household, with the intention of quelling her spirit via a clitorectomy. By comparison, the alien of Under the Skin has power and agency, but without a sense of connection with the world, it’s meaningless. When she tries to experience as humans do, it only opens a Pandora’s box that condemns her to death.
There’s an holistic aspect to humanity. It’s not just brain, and it’s not just body, it’s both, working together and informing each other. It’s all too natural for the senses to become muted as the years pass; we accumulate so many sensations that it’s easy to become jaded. Maybe that’s the way it goes, but we don’t have to acquiesce to it. Opening ourselves up to our senses can revive our own sense of purpose, and help us appreciate the gift of being alive. Like Bella, we can be children in adult bodies, rediscovering the joy of the world and of each other.
I won’t hesitate to proclaim my love for both Poor Things and Under the Skin. Their auteurs take different approaches to stylizing their worlds—Lanthimos with a whimsically artificial production design by Shona Heath and James Price that never manages to overwhelm the characters within; Glazer by conjuring an otherworldliness through the thick accents and stark environs of Glasgow, and the eerie, ambient music of Mica Levi. The results are the same, though, taking us into worlds that allow us to measure and appreciate our humanity. But what do you think? What films do you feel champion the gift of our senses and our amazing ability to learn and grow through them? There’s a comment section below; you’re free to post your thoughts—whatever they may be—there. Just remember: Friendly and polite is the way to go. It’s a long trip we’re on, let’s make it an pleasant one.
