Sonic Youth – "100%" (1992)

I’ve been around the world

A million times

And all you men are slime

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film, Poor Things, is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by the late writer and artist Alasdair Gray. 

It is undoubtedly the most abhorrent movie I’ve ever watched.  (Before I settled on “abhorrent” to describe Poor Things, I thought about describing it as “abominable,” “atrocious,” “loathsome,” “nauseating,” “repugnant,” or “vile.”  But I chose “abhorrent” because I thought it was the strongest of all those words.)

After watching Poor Things, I fired up my trusty computer and researched whether the movie is true to the book – which I haven’t read – or whether screenwriter Tony McNamara took significant liberties with the novel’s plot.  I needed to know the answer to that question so I could assign the blame for this deplorable piece of crap.

It turns out that while the movie follows the book pretty closely, the most disgraceful single element of the film is the responsibility of screenwriter McNamara.  Apparently he didn’t think the shameful Poor Things book was quite shameful enough, so he wrote a really shameful new ending for it.

That truly depraved denouement was the final nail in the coffin for me.

(My thanks to Oxford Languages for their excellent online dictionary – without it, I probably couldn’t have written the previous paragraph without repeating myself.) 

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[SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen Poor Things, you should really read the rest of the post despite the fact that it contains a number of spoilers.  Unless you’re a truly depraved weirdo, you’ll be so appalled that you’ll choose to eschew viewing the film.  (Trust me, you’ll be glad that you did.)]

The heroine of Poor Things is a young woman named Bella, who throws herself off a London bridge and drowns in the Thames.  Dr. Godwin Baxter, a demented genius, fishes her out only moments after her death and takes her to his laboratory.  (Accent on the second syllable, please!) 

Emma Stone as Bella Baxter

Bella was great with child when she jumped from the bridge, and Baxter was able to deliver her unborn baby alive.  But instead of nurturing the baby, Baxter decides to transplant his brain into Bella’s body in order to restore her to life.   

The procedure is successful.  Bella is mentally an infant, of course, but physically she is a growed woman – which results in some rather shocking behavior on Bella’s part.  In one scene, she joins Dr. Baxter in his laboratory – where she diddles the penis of a male corpse before inexplicably grabbing a spare scalpel and gleefully stabbing it into the corpse’s eyes and face.   

[NOTE: Emma Stone, who won the “Best Actress” Oscar for her portrayal of Bella, had this to say about the character: “She was the most joyous character in the world to play, because she has no shame about anything. . . . It was an extremely freeing experience to be her.”]  

Baxter is the survivor of a number of gruesome medical experiments at the hands of his father, who was an even more demented genius – the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.  I won’t tell you what was done to young Baxter by his dear old dad because you may be eating your lunch, but suffice it to say that Dr. Mengele’s monstrous experiments on concentration camp prisoners pale in comparison.

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Screenwriter McNamara apparently decided that one odious brain transplant wasn’t enough, so he added a sequence involving  a second such operation.

Near the end of the movie, her husband – and the father of the unborn child whose brain was transplanted into Bella’s skull – makes an unexpected appearance.  (It’s a real deus ex machina moment.)

The husband is convinced that Bella’s unhappiness results from an excess of libido, and he decides to take care of that surgically.  But Bella manages to turn the tables on him before he can execute his extremely nasty plan.

Willem Dafoe as Dr. Godwin Baxter

Dr. Baxter – Bella’s creator and surrogate father – is dying of cancer at this point in the movie, and I thought Bella might take care of two birds with one stone by transplanting his brain into her husband’s healthy body.

Silly me!  Bella removes and discards her evil husband’s brain and gives him a goat’s brain instead.  As the movie ends, Bella is sipping champagne in the garden with her friends while her goat-brained husband contentedly grazes on the shrubbery.

So much for saving Dr. Baxter – Bella apparently decided it was more important to punish her husband in this particularly horrific fashion.  

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Most of the critics l-o-v-e-d Poor Things, calling it “an insanely enjoyable fairy tale,” “a virtuoso comic epic,” and “a brilliant tour de force.”

Here’s an excerpt from a fairly typical review: 

[The movie] is at once daring, funny, beautiful and surreal.  Poor Things is a staggering accomplishment of a movie, a film . . . with a heart and a shocking amount of joy . . . . Poor Things is a visionary delight [and] potentially the best film of 2023.

I couldn’t disagree more.  Poor Things is the most heartless and joyless movie I’ve ever seen.  Did something terrible happen to the director and screenwriter when they were children?   They must hate their fellow human beings very deeply.  How else can you explain their seeming delight in a movie that so glibly depicts such unspeakable tortures?

Or maybe they’re unfeeling and utterly cynical people who are capable of intellectually distancing themselves from the on-screen horrors they have wrought.

In any event, they had the last laugh.  Poor Things was nominated for eleven Academy Awards – and won four.  

The folks who give out the Golden Globes one-upped the Oscar voters.  They awarded Poor Things the Golden Globe for “Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy.”

Poor Things was certainly not a musical – so the Golden Globe voters must have thought it was a comedy.

You have GOT to be kidding me.  

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Not everyone loved Poor Things.  One reviewer said the film was “a 141-minute mistake,” while another called it “a seriously misguided take on female empowerment.”  

The New York Times critic wrote that the movie’s “design is rich, [but] its ideas [are] thin. . . . It isn’t long into Poor Things that you start to feel as if you were being bullied into admiring a film that’s so deeply self-satisfied there really isn’t room for the two of you.”

My favorite “review” of Poor Things was a post in Reddit:

I feel like critics are complete bullsh*tters after I watched Poor Things.

Midway through the film I almost walked out of the theatre.  [NOTE: She’s not alone – a story in Variety reported that a stream of moviegoers had “bolted for the exit” during one Los Angeles showing of Poor Things.]

The theme of a baby being inside of its own mother’s head, and how she basically followed the path the men in her life wanted her to follow made me uneasy – how she was having relationships with men who knew that she was a baby technically. . . . It felt like honest to God pedophilia.

I found it weird how people where hyping up how “bad” Saltburn was . . . People online kept talking about how disturbing it was [but] they’ve clearly not seen the shit show that is Poor Things. . . .

I wanted to vomit at the end.

Amen to that.

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In the last 2 or 3 lines, I promised you more Sonic Youth – and what 2 or 3 lines promises, 2 or 3 lines delivers!

The Dirty album cover

Click here to listen to “100%,” which was released on the band’s 1992 album, Dirty.

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon.