Tag: Poor Things

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Cultural Alasdair-isation

 

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

 

Finally, I’ve managed to catch up with the movie Poor Things (2023).  This is Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s adaptation of the novel of the same name, which was written, designed and illustrated by the Scottish polymath Alasdair Gray and published in 1992.  Early this year, it got a brief release in Singapore, courtesy of the city-state’s arthouse cinema The Projector.  But when I tried to buy tickets for it on a day I wasn’t working, I found it was already sold out.  So, I had to wait until it turned up on a streaming service I had access to.

 

Anyway, nine months later, here are my thoughts on the film and how it compares to Alasdair Gray’s novel.  A warning before I proceed – there will be spoilers about both, including about their endings.

 

I’m a huge fan of Gray, who passed away in 2019, and I consider Poor Things one of the key Scottish novels of the 1990s.  It’s a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow.  The bulk of the book has a narrator, Archibald McCandless, relating how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature.  What Baxter does is reanimate the body of a drowned woman and replace her brain with that of the baby she’d been pregnant with when she died. Thus, Bella, despite appearing to be an adult, has a lot of learning to do.  McCandless falls in love with her despite her initial infantilism (and later childishness and adolescent-ness) and there ensues a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy

 

I’m less of a fan of Lanthimos, having mixed feelings about his previous films.  I thought The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and The Favourite (2018) were all right, but I found his earlier The Lobster (2015) witless and annoying. So, I wasn’t overjoyed to hear that a favourite book of mine was being filmed by someone I was, at best, conflicted about.

 

The good news is that, for the most part, Lanthimos’s cinematic version is very entertaining too.  For me, it’s his most engaging work so far.  However, because it’s stuffed to its bulwarks with scenes of sexual shenanigans, those of a prudish disposition would be advised to stay away from it.

 

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

 

Firstly, it has many good performances.  Willem Dafoe does a decent job of playing Godwin Baxter – ‘God’ as Bella refers to him with unconscious irony – although he wasn’t the actor I imagined when I read the book 30 years ago.  I’d envisioned the late Robbie Coltrane as Baxter, whom Gray depicted as hulking and huge-headed, though with a high-pitched voice and small, dainty – practically Trump-like – hands.  Visually, Lanthimos and scriptwriter Tony McNamara rework the character.  They give him an unsettling habit of burping out bubbles and make his face malformed and stitched-together, so that he resembles a cross between Frankenstein’s creature and the 1930s-40s character actor Rondo Hatton, who in real life suffered from the disfiguring disease acromegaly.  But, helped by Dafoe’s understated, softy-spoken portrayal, Baxter retains the endearing blend of kindness and stubbornness he had in the novel.

 

Ramy Youssef is likeable as Max McCandles – the film’s renamed Archibald McCandless – though, as we’ll see, the excisions and simplifications the film imposes on the book make him a less complex character than the one Gray imagined.  Meanwhile, the most memorable male performance comes from Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, the lawyer who encounters Bella while doing legal business with Baxter and McCandles, falls in lust and elopes with her.  Or more accurately, since at this point Bella’s mind hasn’t developed much beyond that of a child, abducts her.  While Wedderburn takes her on a debauched ‘grand tour’ that extends from Portugal to Egypt and then to France – with the rapidly-evolving Bella gradually turning the tables on him – Ruffalo gloriously channels every cad, rotter and bounder who’s existed in British culture, from Harry Flashman to Terry-Thomas.

 

Even Ruffalo’s performance, though, is something of a sideshow compared to the one delivered by Emma Stone as Bella.  Mentally growing from a floor-pissing infant to a gawky child, from a rebellious (if naïve) teenager to a verbose and sophisticated adult, all the while wreaking havoc with the social, patriarchal and sexual mores of the society around her because she doesn’t have a filter and is fearless in challenging what doesn’t seem fair or sensible to her, Stone never puts a foot wrong with her portrayal. She fully deserved her Best Actress win for this at the 96th Academy Awards, though I was a little surprised she did win – films as provocative and hard to categorise as Poor Things don’t normally float the boat of the conservative-minded, play-it-safe Academy.

 

Poor Things also netted an Oscar for its production design by James Price and Shona Heath and set decoration by Zsuzsa Mihalek, which are the film’s other great strength.  Price, Heath and Mihalek place Bella and her associates in a world that draws on our popular images and stereotypes of the Victorian era, puts them through a mincing machine and reassembles them as somewhere both familiar and trippily different, one where everything is that much bigger, stranger and more baroque.  One where the traditional Hansom cabs mingle on the streets with chugging, steam-powered ones that have ornamental horses’ heads on their fronts, where Lisbon’s tram system has been replaced by an airborne network of cables and capsules, where the Mediterranean is ploughed by absurdly top-heavy and castle-like steamships churning out yellow smoke under psychedelically tumultuous skies.  I don’t think I’ve seen a live-action film that comes closer to capturing the vibe of the sci-fi subgenre of steampunk.

 

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

 

I think the design team went too far with one detail, though.  Populating Baxter’s house and grounds are bizarre hybrid animals – a half-dog, half-goose creature, for instance, and a half-pig, half-chicken one – which are presumably the results of past experiments.  Doomed to wander around as house-decorations, with their anatomies horribly messed up, those hybrids can’t have much of an existence.  They suggest an uncharacteristic cruelty in Baxter’s nature.  Yet as we see from his fatherly concern for Bella, he isn’t Dr Moreau.

 

A bigger flaw in a generally excellent film is that, at 142 minutes, Poor Things is too long.  And its final stretch is a bit dissatisfying because it has a tagged-on feeling, involving a new character, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is Bella’s husband.  At least, he’s the husband of the woman whose corpse Godwin salvaged, revived and turned into Bella.  He takes her back to his house, proves to be a brute and imprisons her until, once again, she turns the tables on this latest antagonist.  Blessington appears near the end of the book too but Gray takes less time to deal with him – a few pages, if I remember correctly.

 

Unfortunately, as a last-minute villain, Abbott’s Blessington can’t quite match Ruffalo’s splendidly scenery-chewing Wedderburn who preceded him.  Also, the film ends with a weak punchline that, again, implies some out-of-character cruelty on Baxter’s part.  (Actually, it made me think of the 1944 Universal Studios potboiler House of Frankenstein, wherein Boris Karloff’s villainous Dr Gustav Niemann tried to transplant a man’s brain into the body of a dog).

 

Its length and final act aside, Lanthimos’s Poor Things gets a definite thumbs-up from me… as a self-contained film.  As an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel, I’m less enamoured with it.  One issue is that it makes no attempt to replicate what happens at the book’s end.  This is when Gray turns everything on its head because he lets Bella take over as storyteller.  She denounces Archie McCandless’s version of events and makes him out to be devious and delusional.  She claims to be not a Frankenstein-type creation but an ordinary 19th-century woman – though one ahead of her time because she passionately believes in and campaigns for gender equality and social justice.  What we’ve read to this point is an insecure man’s gothic fabrication.  Thus, the book’s last part serves as a rebuke of male attitudes towards women that combine possessiveness with mad romanticism.

 

© Bloomsbury Press

 

This is both more disorientating and more satisfying than in the film. There, yes, Bella becomes an emancipated woman, fiercely intelligent and independent. But she remains a male fantasy creation, something that was made on a man’s laboratory table, reared and tutored in the ways of the world by men and used as a sexual plaything by dastardly men like Wedderburn – Bella, with her brain still trying to make sense of her experiences and her vocabulary still limited, describes those carnal encounters as ‘furious jumping’.  However, Gray pulls the rug from under us, making us question men’s treatment of women and their whole interpretation of women, in a way the film doesn’t.

 

The other thing the book has but the film doesn’t have is Scotland.  Gray’s Glasgow setting has disappeared, supplanted by a sprawling, steampunk-styled, Victorian London one.  And what was generally a very Scottish book has been turned into a film where the only hints that Scotland exists are Dafoe’s low-key Scottish accent and a few Scottish-sounding character names.  This de-Scottification of the story strips from it a layer of symbolism that was obviously important to Gray, an enthusiastic supporter of Scottish independence.

 

You can read Poor Things-the-book as an analogy for the relationship between Scotland and England.  When Archie – falsely – portrays Bella as a creature of gothic fantasy, this parallels how the common image of Scotland was fashioned by 19th-century English monarchs like King George IV and Queen Victoria (with, admittedly, help from locals like Sir Walter Scott) into a fanciful, ethereal never-never-land of castles, mountains, lochs, heather, tartan, kilts, bagpipes and so on.  When Bella finds her voice, refutes Archie’s fantasizing and finds her true identity as a campaigner for feminist and socialist causes, it can be seen as Gray’s wish for Scotland to cut loose from fusty old history-obsessed England / Britain and become a new, egalitarian and forward-looking nation.  Mind you, the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s independence referendum, which ended in failure for Gray’s side in 2014, is just a day or two away – so such a thing probably won’t happen for a while yet.

 

© Estate of Alasdair Gray / From Scottish Poetry Library

 

I don’t think Gray – a man so idealistic that in 2019, rather than have a funeral, he left his body to science – would have been too annoyed had he lived to see the cinematic Poor Things.  I don’t think he’d have indulged in literal ‘furious jumping’.  Rather, he’d have understood why Lanthimos, a Greek, probably didn’t feel comfortable with the Scottish aspects of the story and elected to leave them out.  (It also wouldn’t have surprised me if Gray had donated his royalties from the film to his nearest foodbank.)

 

I suspect, though, he’d have been depressed that no Scottish filmmaker had tried to make a celluloid version of Poor Things that was closer to his original, Glasgow-set vision.  Or that there seems to be zero funding and infrastructure in Scotland’s modern-day arts world to support a local filmmaker wanting to adapt the book to the screen.

 

And I don’t agree with certain Scottish commentators – invariably of a ‘Unionist’ hue – who’ve argued that it doesn’t matter that Scotland has been omitted from the movie.  Journalist Kenny Farquharson, for instance, has claimed that “Poor Things is a triumph for Scotland,” which makes no sense at all.  How can it be a triumph for Scotland if Scotland isn’t in it?  It’s like saying The Godfather (1972) is a triumph for Indonesia.  Or Blade Runner (1982) is a triumph for Birmingham.

 

Incidentally, there is one magical moment where Poor Things-the-film achieves an alchemy with Poor Things-the-book.  That’s the scene at the end where Bella and Archie snuggle up beside the dying Godwin Baxter – a visual reference to the image Gray created for the novel’s cover.

 

© Bloomsbury Press

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The big Gray man

 

From pinterest.co.uk

 

Today, January 25th, 2021, has been designated ‘Gray Day’ on Scottish social media in honour of the celebrated Glaswegian polymath Alasdair Gray, who died in December 2019.  As my way of marking the occasion, here’s a reposting of a blog entry I wrote shortly after the great man’s death.

 

Much has been written about Alasdair Gray, the Scottish novelist, poet, playwright, artist, illustrator, academic and polemicist who passed away on December 29th, 2019.  I doubt if my own reflections on Gray will offer any new insights on the man or his works.  But he was a huge influence on me, so I’m going to give my tuppence-worth anyway.

 

In 1980s Scotland, to a youth like myself, in love with books and writing, Gray seemed a titanic cultural presence.  Actually, ‘titanic’ is an ironic adjective to use to describe Gray as physically he was anything but.  Bearded and often dishevelled, Gray resembled an eccentric scientist from the supporting cast of a 1950s sci-fi ‘B’ movie.  He once memorably described himself as ‘a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glaswegian pedestrian’.

 

He was also a presence that seemed to suddenly loom out of nowhere.  The moment when Gray became famous was in 1981 when his first novel Lanark was published.  I remember being in high school that year when my English teacher Iain Jenkins urged me to get hold of a copy and read it.  I still hadn’t read Lanark by 1983 when I started college in Aberdeen, but I remember joining the campus Creative Writing Society and hearing its members enthuse about it.  These included a young Kenny Farquharson (now a columnist with the Scottish edition of the Times) explaining to someone the novel’s admirably weird structure, whereby it consisted of four ‘books’ but with Book Three coming first, then Books One and Two and finally Book Four.  And an equally young Ali Smith recalling meeting Gray and speaking fondly of how eccentric he was.

 

In fact, I didn’t read Lanark until the following summer when I’d secured a three-month job as a night-porter in a hotel high up in the Swiss Alps.  In the early hours of the morning, after I’d done my rounds and finished my chores and all the guests had gone to bed, I’d sit behind the reception desk and read.  It took me about a week of those nightshifts to get through Lanark.  I lapped up its tale of Duncan Thaw, the young, doomed protagonist of what was basically a 1950s Glaswegian version of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which constituted Books One and Two; and I similarly lapped up its alternating tale of the title character (mysteriously linked to Thaw) in the grimly fabulist city of Unthank, which constituted Books Three and Four.  A quote by sci-fi author Brian Aldiss on the cover neatly described Unthank as ‘a city where reality is about as reliable as a Salvador Dali watch’.

 

© Canongate

 

That same summer I read The Penguin Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka (1983) and the fantastical half of Lanark struck me as reminiscent of the great Bohemian writer.  Gray himself acknowledged that Kafka’s The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927) had inspired him: “The cities in them seemed very like 1950s Glasgow, an old industrial city with a smoke-laden grey sky that often seemed to rest like a lid on the north and south ranges of hills and shut out the stars at night.”

 

The result was an astonishing book that combines gritty autobiographical realism with fanciful magical realism.  Fanciful and magical in a sombre, Scottish sense, obviously.

 

With hindsight, Lanark was the most important book in Scottish literature since Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair trilogy (1932-34).  By an odd coincidence I read A Scots Quair four years later when I was working – again – as a night-porter in a hotel in the Swiss Alps.  So my encounters with the greatest two works of 20th century Scottish literature are indelibly linked in my mind with nightshifts in hotels decorated with Alpine horns and antique ski equipment and surrounded by soaring, jagged mountains.

 

Lanark also appeared at a significant time.  Three years before its publication, the referendum on establishing a devolved Scottish parliament had ended in an undemocratic farce.  Two years before it, Margaret Thatcher had started her reign as British prime minister.  During this reign, Scotland would be governed unsympathetically, like a colonial property, a testing ground, an afterthought.  So Lanark was important in that it helped give Scotland a cultural identity at a time when politically it was allowed no identity at all.

 

Whilst telling me about Lanark, Iain Jenkins mentioned ruefully that he didn’t think Gray would ever produce anything as spectacular again.  Not only did it seem a once-in-a-lifetime achievement but it’d taken up half of a lifetime, for Gray had been beavering away at it since the 1950s.  He once mused of the undertaking: “Spending half a lifetime turning your soul into printer’s ink is a queer way to live… but I would have done more harm if I’d been a banker, broker, advertising agent, arms manufacturer or drug dealer.”

 

© Canongate

 

However, two books he produced afterwards, 1982, Janine (1984) and Poor Things (1992), are excellent works in their own rights even if they didn’t create the buzz that Lanark did.

 

Janine takes place inside the head of a lonely middle-aged man while he reflects on a life of emotional, professional and political disappointments, and masturbates, and finally attempts suicide whilst staying in a hotel room in a Scottish country town that’s either Selkirk or my hometown, Peebles.  (Yes, Peebles’ two claims to literary fame are that John Buchan once practised law there and the guy in 1982, Janine might have had a wank there.)  The protagonist’s musings include some elaborate sadomasochistic fantasies, which put many people off, including Anthony Burgess, who’d thought highly of Lanark but was less enthusiastic about Janine.  However, it seems to me a bold meditation on Scotland in general and on the strained, often hopeless relationship between traditional, Presbyterian-conditioned Scottish males and the opposite sex in particular.

 

Poor Things, a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow, initially seems very different from Janine but in fact it tackles similar themes.  The narrator, Archibald McCandless, relates how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature.  McCandless soon falls in love with her.  There follows a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy, but near the end things are turned on their heads because Bella takes over as storyteller.  She denounces McCandless’s version of events as a witless fantasy and portrays herself not as Frankenstein-type creation but a normal woman, albeit one ahead of her time in her views about feminism and social justice.  Again, the book is a rebuke of male attitudes towards women, especially insecure Scottish ones that are partly possessive and partly, madly over-romanticised.

 

© Canongate

 

Gray’s other post-Lanark novels are entertaining, if less ambitious, and they’re never about what you expect them to be about.  The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985) looks like it’s going to be a comic tale of a Scottish lad-o’-pairts on his way up and then on his way down in London, but it turns into a caustic commentary on the loveless nature of Scottish Calvinism.  Something Leather (1990), which is really a series of connected short stories and again features much sadomasochism, isn’t so much about kinkiness as about Gray’s disgust at the politicians and officials who oversaw Glasgow being European City of Culture 1990, something he regarded as a huge, missed opportunity.  A History Maker (1994), a science-fiction novel described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘Sir Walter Scott meets Rollerball’, isn’t an absurdist sci-fi romp at all but a pessimistic account of how humanity can never achieve peaceful harmony with nature.  And Old Men in Love (2007) promises to be a geriatric version of 1982, Janine, but is really an oddity whose ingredients include, among other things, ancient Athens, Fra Lippo Lippi and the Agapemonites.

 

Gray was also a prolific short-story writer.  He produced three collections of them, Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), Ten Tales Tall and True (1993) and The Ends of out Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories and had several more stories published in Lean Tales (1985), alongside contributions from James Kelman and Agnes Owens.  I find the quality of his short fiction variable, with some items a bit too anecdotal or oblique for my tastes.  But many are excellent and Ten Tales Tall and True is one of my favourite short-story collections ever.

 

The fact that Gray was also an artist meant that his books, with their handsome covers and finely detailed illustrations, made decorous additions to anyone’s bookcases.  The illustration by Gray I like best is probably the one he provided for his story The Star in Unlikely Stories, Mostly.

 

© Canongate

 

He also liked to make mischief with the conventions of how books are organised, with their back-cover blurbs, review quotes, prefaces, dedications, footnotes, appendices and so on.  For example, he wasn’t averse to adorning his books with negative reviews (Victoria Glendinning describing Something Leather as ‘a confection of self-indulgent tripe’) or imaginary ones (an organ called Private Nose applauding Poor Things for its ‘gallery of believably grotesque foreigners – Scottish, Russian, American and French.’)

 

As an artist, Gray was good enough to be made Glasgow’s official artist-recorder in the late 1970s and to enjoy a retrospective exhibition, Alasdair Gray: From the Personal to the Universal, at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in 2014-15.  His artwork included a number of murals on the walls of Glasgow and it’s a tragedy that some have been lost over the years.  Among those that survive, perhaps the most famous is at Hillhead Underground Station.  It contains the memorable and salient verse: “Do not let daily to-ing and fro-ing / To earn what we need to keep going / Prevent what you once felt when wee / Hopeful and free.”  Also worth seeing is the mural he painted, Michelangelo-style, on the ceiling of the Òran Mór restaurant, bar and music venue on Glasgow’s Byres Road.  It looks gorgeous in the photos I’ve seen of it, although regrettably when I went there with my brother a few years ago to attend a Bob Mould gig, I was already well-refreshed with several pints of beer… and forgot to look upwards.

 

I never got to meet the great man, though I’m pretty sure I saw him one night in the late 1980s in Edinburgh’s Hebrides Bar, talking with huge animation to a group of friends and admirers.  I was, however, too shy to go over and introduce myself.

 

One writer in whose company I did end up during the late 1980s, though, was Iain Banks, whom I got to interview for a student publication and who then invited me on an afternoon pub crawl across central Edinburgh.  Banks was delighted when I told him that his recently published novel The Bridge (1986) reminded me a wee bit of Lanark.  “I think Lanark’s the best thing published in Scotland in years!” he gushed.  Come to think of it, it was probably the favourable comparison to Gray that prompted Banks to take me on a session.

 

From austinkleon.com