Not such poor things
I loved 'Poor Things" by the director Yorgos Lanthimos. Pity he had to mar it by the inclusion of a gratuitous Jewish stereotype.
Despite winning two Golden Globes and being nominated for 11 Oscars, it cannot have escaped your attention that Poor Things has been dividing the critics.
To some, Yorgos Lanthimos’s adaption of the Alasdair Gray novel in which a Frankenstein-like scientist re-animates a recently deceased woman played by Emma Stone is a “feminist masterpiece” and a paean to sexual liberation.
To others, Stone’s portrayal of Bella Baxter as an ever-curious, ever-available sex kitten with the mind of a child, is an “offensive male sex fantasy” and a “banal rendition of sexual freedom”
Certainly, the film veers between female empowerment and familiar paedophiliac tropes, with Stone presented alternately as a self-possessed medical student with a brilliant mind and an insatiable desire for self-knowledge and as a Lolita-esque figure who likes nothing better than “furious jumping”, as she euphemistically refers to sex.
Although the film treads an uneasy line between voyeurism and satire, I loved it, not least of all for Stone’s mesmeric performance as she matures from an awkward toddler trapped in a woman’s body to a sexual and intellectual sophisticate.
However, Lanthimos’s movie also made me uneasy and not because I’m a prude or squeamish about body parts - at one point, Bella threatens to sever the penis from a cadaver using a scalpel she’s lifted from an operating table.
For me, the alarm bells started ringing at the midpoint of the film when, finding herself penniless in Paris, Bella approaches a brothel keeper for work. To say that the brothel-keeper, played by the American-British actress, Kathryn Hunter, is an antisemitic stereotype is an understatement. Part Shylock, part Fagin, Hunter’s madame is mash-up of several familiar Jewish tropes.
“We must work, we must make money,” she says, eyeing up her new charge. “But more than that Bella, we must experience everything… Now go and fuck someone and bring me ten francs”.
At one point, she tries to bite Bella’s ear in a vampire-like attempt to draw blood. In another, she strips to her underwear, revealing a series of bizarre tattoos, before crawling lasciviously along Bella’s body, like a lizard creature from a David Icke Illuminati conspiracy. Hunter even gives the brothel keeper a thick mittel-European accent and – in what struck me as an echo of the Jewish blood libel – reveals that the money Bella brings in is vital to sustaining her own baby, who she keeps concealed behind a curtain. Oh, and did I say that the madame’s name is Swiney, as in pig.
I have no idea if it was Hunter’s idea to give her character Jewish attributes. Hunter, who is of Greek heritage, previously played an autistic Jewish girl in Spoonface, Steinberg, to wide critical acclaim and in Andor, Disney’s prequel to Rogue One, she plays the character of Eedy Karn, the mother of an ambitious security operative hoping to curry favour with the Nazi-like Galactic Empire.
I don’t subscribe to Disney and haven’t seen Andor, so am not in a position to judge, but according to Salon Hunter’s portrayal of Karn “hits all the major notes of the ‘Jewish mother trope’ belittling, manipulating and aggressively meddling in her son's life” (for what it’s worth, the Salon critic also accused the makers of Andor of “trafficking in antisemitic tropes while calling out fascism”).
So what, you say? Perhaps, the Jewish mother is Hunter’s default look? Or perhaps I’m being overly sensitive and reading too much into the Swiney character and Lanthimos’s rendering of the brothel scenes. After all, what do you expect from a director famous for his steam-punk mashups of cultural tropes?
However, I can’t help but feel that at a time or rising tensions in the Middle East and increasingly vitriolic denunciations of “Zionists” this is another example of the way that Jewish stereotypes are being normalised – so much so that many people can no longer see them even when they’re staring them in the face. How else to explain the failure of critics to notice Swiney’s grasping ways or her mittel-European accent? The brothel is in Paris, for God’s sake – why not give her a French accent?
As I write this, pro-Palestine protestors are once again marching through central London, except instead of calling for an end to the “genocide” in Gaza, they are now brandishing signs equating Israeli’s military action with the Holocaust (“stop the new Holocaust” read one yesterday).
Meanwhile, at the BBC, a TV scheduler no one had ever heard of before has been allowed to stay in post despite breaking the broadcaster’s rules on impartiality by describing Jews as “lying scum AshkeNazi” and referring to the Holocaust as the “holohoax”.
But I guess if you’re Jewish and white these days you can’t expect any sympathy, much less to be considered a poor thing.