No, I am not a philistine for pointing out child abuse themes in Poor Things

 

 

Warning 1: This piece outlines some history of child sexual abuse and grooming of children. There are no descriptions of acts but I will talk about organisations and events. It's shocking reading but it's important. Be careful.

Warning 2: I will announce spoilers, promise. I hate spoilers, I get it. I don't discuss the second half of the film at all.

Warning 3: this is a long ride but stay with me.

I use language like "paedophilia" and "gay rights" deliberately in this piece while I'm discussing histories of these concepts and movements  I am aware that these terms are not always acceptable now. Where writing about contemporary issues, I try to use accurate and current terms.

 *****

About a week ago, my mum said “Have you seen Poor Things?” 

I told her I hadn’t.

“You have to see it. I don’t know what to think. I want to talk to you about it.”

Normally mum loves an art movie. And Mum doesn’t mind a nudey rudey art movie. I remember how much she loved The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover. She loved The Pillow Book when it still made me squim. They were "beautiful films". Ew, I'd think. But I was a kid.

This was different. “Just… see it.”, she said. “And then we’ll talk.”

Mum’s not tertiary educated, but she’s smart, and she has devoured cinema and theatre since she was a young adult. She can talk about art movies and how they made her feel in great detail. 

It felt like she didn’t have words for Poor Things. I think she was looking to me for the words. She seemed to be saying “I should love this… but I can’t.”

*****

Last night someone I've recently met asked me to go to the movies, on a whim. He said someone he knew had raved about this movie and he wanted to see it. So we headed over to the new cinema, grabbed choc tops and popcorn, and sat back.

At the end of the movie, he said “That was amazing. What did you think?”

I told him I was watching the credits, looking for the writer and the director.

“Bet you a tenner they’re both blokes.”

He waited with me while I watched.

“I knew it.”

*****

Last year, I was seeing someone who was lovely whenever he wasn't swinging wildly between being sozzled with alcohol and in a state of paralysing terror. He had long legs, a twinkle in his eye and a sharp mind. And it was a disaster. More than once I picked him up off the floor, gave him food and put him to bed. I suffered terrible ghostings, and would return again. Because I knew, down to my bones, that he was in so much more pain than I would ever be.

I knew he’d left school early, and one day when I asked him about it, he told me why. As a young teenager, he’d been groomed and sexually assaulted by an older man. His case was prosecuted, and despite confidentiality orders, he was identifiable in the local media. His classmates teased him mercilessly, word got around and he left school.

The abuse destroyed his education, it destroyed his marriage, and now it is destroying his health.

It possibly destroyed our chance of a relationship, but there were two in the picture, and I admit I'm no picnic. I'm also a survivor of childhood abuse. If I've learned anything, it's two abuse victims will instantly attract and then most likely drive each other around the bend.

These are the scars we bear.

*****

Last year I listened to two podcasts about child abuse. One was called The Commune, by stuff.co.nz. It was about a commune where ideas of sexual rights were tangled up with the “right” of children to be sexual. The podcast is excellent and should be listened to – it doesn’t engage in trauma porn and has moments of breathtaking journalistic integrity.

But the thing that is truly shocking from the podcast is that those who ran the commune (now closed) continue to advocate for a particular thing: that the fact that children have sexual aspects to their lives means that they can be sexually “liberated” and should even be encouraged to have sexual relationships with those much older than them.

The second podcast, Think Twice, was about Michael Jackson. We all know the US justice system has a habit of swerving wildly to avoid convicting famous people (hello, Johnny Depp and OJ), and whether that happened or not, Jackson was not convicted of any child sex offences in criminal courts. Civil lawsuits brought by families whose boys spent nights at Neverland with Michael were settled out of court.

Michael advocated vociferously for the emotional benefits of sleeping with boys he invited to Neverland. In Michael's view, this was different from the abuse by his own father. He was engaging in something "natural", or "loving", a relationship of mutual understanding and support.

There were plenty of witnesses in the trials and inquiries into Jackson's behaviour who testified that Jackson was taking baths with boys aged around 11 or 12, cuddling them and sleeping in their bed.  Some of his accusers (those without non-disclosure agreements) were interviewed as adults. They all talked about how confused they were by his constant grooming - Jackson was continuously in an act of convincing them that mutual love was the foundation of their physical closeness.

But we were kids and we knew better. I remember the jokes.

What’s the new duet with Michael Jackson and Elton John called? Don’t let your son go down on me.

Jarvis Cocker, bless him, at least got a punch in.

*****

After this conversation with my leggy Londoner, I - of course - started reading: parliamentary reports, ancient news articles, lots of things.

But I started with Google, typing in "South London paedophiles 1980s". And in the first search, one acronym popped up over and over again: PIE. What I discovered was astonishing.

In the 1970s and 80s there were well known paedophile rings in South London. And they were represented by an organisation incorpoated under the name “Paedophile Information Exchange”, or PIE. We know this because PIE were open about their purpose, which was to campaign openly and directly over ten years for the abolition of age of consent laws, so children could consent to sexual contact with adults.

(if you're ever curious about why we have age of consent laws, there is an interesting history around the prohibition of child prostitution in the late 19th century - coincidentally the apparent setting of this film - which was also opposed by some pretty notable members of the aristocracy and upper class at the time) 

PIE was mainly young, professional (upper class) men. Its official membership numbers were around 250 proud paedophiles.

The narrative that PIE used repeatedly was that it was healthy, liberating, and even educational for children to be sexually active, and repealing these laws would “alleviate the suffering of children and adults”. 

PIE and similar groups believed this view should be considered as acceptable as the (adult) gay rights movement, and regularly tried to ingratiate itself with the movement. They would attend campaign conferences and make speeches about matters like "child sexuality rights”. 

The evidence indicates gay rights groups pushed them away, hard. Many members of gay rights campaigns were horrified by their presence, and many were victims of child sexual abuse. But if you ever wondered why so many people in the UK (and probably other countries) conflate homosexuality with paedophilia, you can include the fact that these groups deliberately set out to blur the issues, time and again.

Other mainstream movements and groups didn't push PIE away at all. PIE established links with respected psychotherapy organisations, published journals and books (with titles like Understanding Paedophilia) and funded academic articles and publications. They sought to ingratiate themselves with the National Council on Civil Liberties, chaired by judges and senior barristers, and made parliamentary submissions seeking to abolish "public morality laws", that they were repressive and old-fashioned. They spouted Freud and Lacan and looked down on people who didn't understand. 

And yet they were also far from accepted – rejected not just by the gay community but by women and the working class. Mothers pelted them with rotten fruit at a conference. At another, all the venue staff walked out and refused to work until the hotel evicted PIE. And occasionally, if outed, members were sacked from their jobs.

From 1978 through to 2016, members of PIE were, one by one, nicked for child sex abuses, and according to some sources, by 2006 most ended up with convictions. Notoriously, one PIE member turned out to be a senior member of MI6 and was later the High Commissioner to Canada. In 2014, following reinvestigations by various UK news sources, a parliamentary inquiry was held. In 2014 the chair of Liberty apologised. She said "It is a source of continuing disgust and horror that even the NCCL had to expel paedophiles from its ranks in 1983..."

But it was around 1983, into this environment, that a lovely cockney lad, finishing primary school, met a predator. And probably many, many others did too.

And my point here is that there is very solid evidence that the overarching narrative of all of this was that many adults believed, and continue to believe, that children should be sexually “liberated”.

It still exists. And it is an unresolved thread running throughout this film.

*****

So here it is: SPOILER ALERT

What I’m about to reveal is the theme of the movie. The secret of the main character’s identity is revealed within the first hour.

*****

Poor Things feels like Jeunet and Caro meets Frankenstein meets The Scarlett Letter. That's the good part. It has a boring overlay of manic pixie dream girl and an unnecessary endnote of female torture porn. That's the annoying part. 

When I asked my local coffee shop workers if they'd seen it, two of them chorused "Lolita!". So the film is also Lolita, but with the social critique replaced by a convenient excuse for the many, many Humbert Humberts featured in it. That's the really troubling part.

The setting appears to be…Victorian? There are a lot of puffed sleeves, bustles, twisty moustaches and spats. London is the setting, and it’s a caricature of the 19^th century, claustrophobic and Dickensian. 

We are introduced to a scientist surgeon, digging through a cadaver’s entrails in front of a theatre of students, through fish eye lens and monochrome (I half expected the Beastie Boys to jump out). At his home, we meet the main character, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a woman who can barely speak. She bangs at pianos with her feet, spits out food at dinner and has tantrums because she can’t have ice cream.

Oh, did I mention she has breasts? Yes she does. We know that, because we start seeing them on a regular basis. Oh, there’s breasts, breasts, breasts, breasts. When she’s draped on a bed, when she’s cracking the shits, the nice men around her lovingly cover them up for her because she doesn’t know better. Poor thing.

(When I got home and described this aspect of the movie to my housemate, he said "It's Emma Stone, right?" I confirmed this and he laughed and imitated a movie exec saying "Wonderful script! Green light!")

Bella is mouthing words, staring at things with monstrously wide, extraordinary eyes. She is an innocent. And at the same time, she is utterly sexualised and ogled at. She is a childwoman. She finds a cucumber and starts playing with herself and has an orgasm. Full closeup on that mouth, guys. On those closed eyes. It’s ART.

We’re told she has a brain injury. Ok.... so let me get this straight. We’re being flooded with a male gaze perspective of passionate, primal outbursts and highly sexual activity from a woman who clearly has a cognitive disability. Not problematic at all. Not at all. Everything is FINE.

But…there’s a twist! Into the Victoriana whimsy steps a storyline that is like Get Out but weirder and way more crazy problematic.

Bella, it turns out, is a child’s brain in an adult body. Her carer, the surgeon, found a pregnant woman dying under a bridge and brought her home. He then removed the brain of her own baby and transplanted it into the woman's body.

So when we meet her, as a living, feeling, learning person, she is an infant. And, presumably, she will be, developmentally, a child for at least 18 years ahead. But the movie doesn't allow this time to pass. At an age when she is still only just learning speech (presumably around four?) she is whisked off to Lisbon by a lawyer friend of the surgeon and starts to enjoy having wild amounts of sex with him. Unabashed, joyful, immoral sex with him.

Did I mention breasts? There are so many breasts. And now full nudity, bottom nudity, all kinds of nudity and sexual acts. Sex, sex sex. 

And the whole time she is a child.  

*****

I will stop there, because I actually didn’t hate all of the movie. I hated it way less than I hated the Fifth Element, which had just as much haute couture but a lot less empowerment for the central character. 

It’s just that it has multiple obvious themes, and they are all valid, but one of them is decidedly problematic. And that theme is being shut down. 

I got home and googled “Poor Things” and “paedophilia” and immediately I was presented with a list of reviews telling me that I'm missing the point. That this is not paedophilia, it is abstract, intellectual, and high art, even feminist.

It seems (from my undergraduate arts degree background) that the filmmakers want the film to be read as a creative exercise in psychoanalytic theory. As a baby in an adult's body, Bella is an outsider, an innocent, shining a light on public morality with her childlike simplicity and untainted morality. In parts, she is observing the cruelties of the world, in others discrimination, and, like most of us did, she is threading her own path as she makes the discovery that the world can be deeply unfair.

This is old schtick - Splash springs to mind, The Fifth Element, Weird Science, even First Rock From The Sun. 

At times the film directly confronts patriarchal norms of ownership over women's bodies and lives - big tick, although it is undermined by so much of this being done using scenes that are characterised by an obsessive male gaze on Bella’s body.

When looked at from the point of view of the male characters, appears kind of legitimate. None of the men who have sex with Bella as a child are aware of her developmental age, they're simply dazzled by her fresh look at the world.

It’s quite possible that these approaches to this film is why it hasn’t been more viciously criticised. And I think that’s why the author and director thought is was ok as well. But I think they’re missing the point.

And the point is this: that is that the image of a woman who we know is a young child enjoying sex with adults, dangerously aligns with the malignant narrative of every groomer - that children can choose to engage in sexual acts with an adult.

In a movie world of infinite possibilities, I am baffled as to why the author (and then director) chose to create a babywoman as the vehicle for an "outsider" film which directly challenges sexuality boundaries. In pretending there is no injury here, it does exactly what Freud did to Dora: silences the truth about what is actually going on.

I wrote about PIE not just to offer a fascinating and horrific history of the movement to legitimise child sexual assault. It was because the arguments PIE used to legalise child sexual abuse are uncritically presented as a central feature of this film - and are even fetishised. This movie celebrates a young child having a “liberated” sexual life, an adult sexual life with adults who have more power than her. 

And that was and remains at the heart of every effort to defend and legitimise child sexual abuse. It’s why grooming is so effective and devastating, because abusers groom children by convincing them that the abuse is what the child wants. And that properly fucks kids up.

If you have a stomach of steel, try reading some of the accounts from the multiple commissions of enquiry across the globe about clerical sexual abuse in the twentieth century. I have had to read Australia’s Royal Commission reports for work from time to time. The gaslighting of victims is… I just tried to write some words for it and I have none. I have none. It’s life destroying.

And this is why this movie is wrong. Because I looked at this woman and I didn’t see an innocent adult, or an outsider. I saw a CHILD. 

This movie gives oxygen to this perspective. And none of it was interrogated.

*****

The tone of the reviews I read were clearly that the film's critics can’t tell the difference between ART and PORN. Who are these prudes? Who are these philistines? Each critic chose to continue to simply silence those who are trying to articulate critically the child sexuality themes.

This makes me furious. Because child sexuality is front and centre in this film. You can't exclude it. If you’re going to make this film, or talk about it, you need to start making a really good case for why it isn’t fuelling the very ethos that child sex abusers use to justify their activities . And I haven't seen that in any of these criticisms.

That's a lack of complexity, not an indication that you know better than me, my New York dude. Do your work.

I’m not interested in banning the film. I want to hear the discussion. I want it to begin. Because nothing hides this stuff like silence and snobbery. Just ask the victims of the upper middle class professional gentlemen in London.

I have lost contact with the Cockney. I am scared almost every day that he’ll lose his job and I’ll trip over him while walking to work. Or, worse, that I won’t even know he’s dying somewhere. He has a child of his own, the same age as one of mine, who he loves with all his heart.

*****

As we left the theatre, my date asked me about what I thought of the film. I said I couldn’t work out exactly how much I hated it, even though it had so many moments where I felt enthralled and thrilled for Bella, calmly exposing the hypocrisy and violence of the class and gender norms surrounding her.

I said I can see that there are two overlapping meanings, but the fact that one was disregarded was nauseating and infuriating.

And he said “I am so glad I went to that with someone who thinks differently from me”.

And that’s why we’re catching up again tomorrow.

*****

But enough about blokes. I’ll see mum for dinner next week. And we’ll talk. Hi mum. This is for you.