The powerful representation of sex work in Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘Poor Things’
In Yorgos Lanthimos’ twisted new fantasy film, Poor Things, sex plays a significant role. At times, it’s humorous, helping to further the wild and inhibited world of the protagonist, Bella Baxter. In other instances, it’s almost hard to watch, refusing to shy away from the vulgarity. But when money changes hands, the movie deals no longer with just sex but with sex work – an important distinction that the director navigates with real nuance.
To some, the intense use of sex scenes was nothing but a shock tactic. However, that feels like a tired critique that refuses to reach the heart of the topic. The creative team have spoken openly about the level of consideration that went into the film’s interpretation of sex. “We just sat down and decided, ‘What kind of position would they be in here? What kind of thing would they do there?’” Lanthimos said in Venice, adding, “What’s missing from the experience of sex and the different desires that people have that we need to portray to make enough of a representation of human desire and its idiosyncrasies?”
To suggest that the plot line involving Bella Baxter’s sex work is nothing but a further shock mission is ignorant of the realities of the work. It erases the entire industry’s important place as a historic and enduring cornerstone of human desire. Really, sex work is the ultimate arena of desire. As Lanthimos made it his mission to portray sex in all its variety, the representation of sex work in the movie is a vital part of this.
However, Poor Things refuses to handle sex work in the way the media is used to or in the form some audience members want it to be treated. The film refuses to glorify or vilify the work. It outright denies the audience the trauma porn, the violence or the distress that people want or expect from these stories. Instead, it handles the topic with exactly the level of nuance and consideration it deserves but rarely gets.
In the moment when Bella Baxter first has sex for money, the audience seems to hold their breath. Baxter, perhaps for the first time in the entire movie, is visibly apprehensive. “Should we warm me up a bit,” she begins to say to the stranger before he thrusts into her a few times. Then it’s over. There’s a beat as if everyone waits for some breakdown, but instead, Baxter holds in a laugh.
“It was terrible,” she tells her jealous lover Duncan Wedderburn while she eats a cake she bought with her spoils. “He made ungodly noises as he thrust into me. And a mere three thrusts was all he could manage while I stifled laughs out of polite, of course.” The cinema crowd lets out a kind of chortle of disbelief. We’re so used to sex work stories ending in either tragedy, trauma or being presented like an empowering romp that this kind of utterly average response becomes comedic.
That’s really the tone of the fundamental plot line: Bella Baxter feels totally fine about her sex work. Even in moments when the audience winces or groans, as we see men eat her hair, scurry across floors to her or squash her with their fat, smelly bodies, Baxter’s response is always middling; “It was brutal, in a strangely not unpleasant way.”
In refusing to have a big breakdown scene or a moment of jovial celebration, Lanthimos’ depiction of sex work becomes perhaps one of the most honest representations in cinematic history. As the protagonist steps into the brothel, it’s like the audience is waiting for her world to collapse around it. It plays with the commonplace expectation that sex work will lead to destitution, that it’s a symptom of distress or either a response to or cause of a crisis. It challenges our perception of the industry as audiences seem to expect darkness to follow.
And when it simply does not, and when, in fact, Baxter’s sex work is the one thing that finally affords her freedom and allows her to build a real life for herself as she attends school and meets friends, our unconscious biases are thrown out in favour of a level and beautifully done view. The film continues after her time in sex work. She moves on to other callings and adventures without denying this portion of her life. Sex work gets to sit as a chapter of her story without utterly defining it, unlike other tales on the topic.
But it’s important to note that level does not mean celebratory. While the movie doesn’t villainise sex work, it also doesn’t fall into the trap of presenting it as always empowering or easy.
“I just see – for Bella specifically – sex as one element of her experience,” Emma Stone said. “I think she’s soaking in everything for the first time: food and politics and philosophy, dancing and travel and sex. She’s exploring everything and seeing what works for her and understanding society and her relationship to power, and I don’t know… To me, it’s just part of it, and it furthers what she’s learning.”
What her character is learning is what all sex workers realise: the terrifying depths of human desire and the way witnessing it inescapably affects you. There are comments online criticising the movie for exactly that, claiming that the character of Bella Baxter is two-dimensional and that, in the end, she’s in denial about the effect her experience will have had on her. Once again, this feels like a boring critique that refuses to look deeper or listen in the silent moments.
By the time Baxter leaves the brothel, after being seen in situations of increasing intensity, her character is almost unrecognisable from the start. Everything about her, from her clothes to her speech, is somewhat muted. In the moment where she seems to hit a wall in her sex work, confessing to feelings of total numbness, the film manages to capture silent trauma with the same nuance it handles even the wildest experiences.
But the beauty of Poor Things’ representation of sex work is in its utter refusal to make trauma porn out of the topic. There is no denying that sex work is an industry rife with violence and danger, as globally, sex workers have a 45-75% chance of experiencing sexual violence on the job. But how helpful is it to rehash that fact? And why should all representations of the topic have to end badly or become violent or dark to be considered?
Whether it be in crime dramas or thrillers like American Psycho, sex workers being murdered is all too regularly thrown into the mix as a mindless, violent detail in movies in a world where honest stories on the topic are still lacking. Poor Things reveals itself as an unlikely antidote.
