“WHAT A PRETTY RETARD”:
POOR THINGS
AND ABELISM

I remember hearing that Stella McCartney, at the wedding of her father Paul McCartney to Heather Mills, decided to take her cigarette and whilst Mills wasn’t looking, stub it out on her prosthetic leg. She told the story with pride, like she’d got one over on the evil stepmother. The story lodged in my mind for its weirdness and gothic Victoriana. Stella McCartney is snarling at the wedding dinner, dressed in a starched white high collar. She lifts the wine-stained tablecloth up and catches sight of Mill’s plastic leg. Mills is turned the other way busy talking to the chirpy Liverpudlian groom, she too is smoking a cigarette. The cigarette elongates her arm and makes her gestures bloom with elegance. 

Stella seizes her chance and takes a final drag of her Davidoff slim. Then, with venom in her eyes she stabs the cigarette into Mill’s leg with a twisting flourish. Burning ash cascades down the artificial limb. Heather is none the wiser. McCartney tells the story without conscience or consequence. Cunt? Or cunt.


Back in the 00’s there was a vogue for transformation reality tv, Channel 4’s Faking It, BBC’s changing rooms, that sort of thing. Big Brother brought polarised personalities and backgrounds together. It was a time when people were publicly changing their minds and having their minds changed. I remember seeing this show where a celebrity accompanies someone with a disability for the day. In the episode I saw the person being shadowed was blind. I remember the celebrity saying to this person, “But you’re gorgeous! It sounds so stupid. But I didn’t expect you to be so beautiful.”


“What a pretty retard!” McCandless exclaims in Yorgos Lanthimos’ film Poor Things (2024) when he is first introduced to Bella Baxter, the brainchild (literally) of Glaswegian mad scientist Godwin Baxter, played by a face-hacked Willem Dafoe. In the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray, Baxter is asked by his apprentice whether he and Bella have ever, you know... Godwin replies matter of factly that the reason he hasn’t fucked her is because a physical affliction resulting from his father’s experiments on him as a boy prevents him from doing so. Furthermore, he laments, an irritating paternal feeling has stoppered the urge. 

“If Bella was bald and fat, butch or hairy, older or racialised, how would this thing play out?“

As I was watching the gothic, Nosferatu-like Baxter King-Konging her home, I imagined whether Godwin would have bothered fishing her out of the river if she had been less, well, pretty. If Bella was bald and fat, butch or hairy, older or racialised, how would this thing play out? The ghosts of the many women he didn’t choose are contained in Godwin Baxter’s decision to take Bella’s body home.


In Gray’s novel McCandless asks Baxter how he explains the presence of Bella to the servants that rattle around his gothic house. “Baxter hesitated, then muttered that his servants were all former nurses trained by [his father], and not surprised by the presence of strange people recovering from intricate operations.” In the film this line is omitted. Instead, we get lots of squawking cameos from Baxter’s living experiments, dog/chickens and flayed pigs, to indicate the many mistakes the scientist made before making Bella. There is a cowardice in Lanthimos’ choice to portray Baxter as solely testing on animals. Who are the strange people that Gray’s novel offers us clues of but Lanthimos’ film keeps secret? And what are the nature of the intricate operations that have been performed on them without their consent?

Perhaps you have heard of J. Marion Sims? He is often referred to as the ‘father’ of modern gynaecology. Born James Marion Sims in 1813 in Lancaster County, South Carolina, Sims was a prominent physician known for his pioneering work in the surgical treatment of gynaecological disorders. One of Sim’s most significant contributions to gynaecology was the development of a surgical technique to repair vesicovaginal fistulas, a devastating complication of childbirth that causes a hole to form between bladder and vagina. Sims developed his technique through a series of experimental surgeries on enslaved black women in Alabama during the 1840’s. The surgeries involved repeated and often painful procedures performed without anaesthesia. Enslaved black women like those that Sims abused were not granted the status of humans, they were treated like property. The women he operated on endured significant suffering without their consent.

Many things are skated over in Poor Things, including the question of consent. The one thing we know about Bella prior to becoming Bella was her desire to leave the world. She wished to kill herself. Baxter had the option to save the child, and also to revive the mother but he chose not to. In the novel Baxter cites Bella’s diseased mind as a reason for discarding her brain. But sick brain or no, the future Bella had in mind for her body was certainly not on the operating table. It was a watery grave. Her body endures without her consent and in its enduring, it suffers further mistreatment. Godwin Baxter prioritises his libidinal fantasy over Bella’s desire to end her life. She is the exact confluence of scientific events he has been dying for, the perfect specimen to produce a conventional beauty with the unsullied mind of a toddler. In brief: a doll.

Poor Things and the Barbie movie have been compared and I can see why. They are both films about ‘unnatural’ child-like women who encounter the world without the cultural prejudices of their time. In the final scene of Barbie, Robbie’s character strides into an office with a megawatt grin on her face and announces, “I am here to see the gynaecologist!”


Director Greta Gerwig, whose own mother was a gynaecologist, wanted to create a Barbie liberated from shame around her body and its desires. It is hard to resist the urge to see the ending as big time trans-coded. This Barbie… gets a neovagina!


In her landmark work Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix (1993), trans theorist Susan Stryker tussles with the chequered history of trans medicine. Early doctors working in the field were motivated by a desire to mould their patient into a cis-passing heterosexual model of their desired sex, thus creating a defanged transexual monster who would embed themselves into society without much fuss. Stryker’s hybrid essay searches for the monstrous trans person among the Frankensteinian origins of trans medicine. She fundamentally locates herself and her comrades in the humanising forces of self-creative rage.

At the same time Stryker is working on her famous essay a bunch of Dutch doctors are messing around in a lab with puberty blockers. In their early experiments these doctors couldn’t believe what they’d managed to achieve with the right drugs at the right time. Yes, they had created angels. Real angels! They were shocked at how cis-passing the kids that medically transitioned before their natal puberty set in had become. As Pygmalion did before them, they fell madly in love with their statues and deeper in love with themselves for creating them. And yes, perhaps less store was given to the inconvenient and un-aesthetic problems of internal sexual function than the miraculous capacity to pass that early transition had gifted these children, but swings and roundabouts.


During the famous Dutch study, it was discovered that blocking puberty at tanner stage 2 complicates future genital surgeries due to insufficient tissue. Of the study one out of the 70 youths studied died due to complications from her genital surgery. This is likely to have been a direct consequence of early puberty blockade. I do not cite this to provide further grist to the mill to the anti-trans lobby but rather to question the methods and motives of cis-gendered surgeons and doctors who fall foul of their unchecked desires and unconscious bias. Medical institutions profit from our distress. Mental Health professionals and private doctors are not our friends. Sing it back.


Like Barbie, Like Poor Things, Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) is another film that fetishises naivety. As in Barbie, in Burton’s emo classic heteronormative sex is not possible. Barbie has no working junk. Edward’s hands are murder weapons. “Hold me,” Winona Ryder, who plays love interest Kim, says to Edward. “I can’t.” Edward replies, eyes welling with sadness. Edward ends up being driven out of town by a white, straight suburban mob baying for blood and wielding garden tools. He has made the unforgivable transgression of being a freak and falling in love with a normal person. In his Edward, Tim Burton reveals the pathological cruelty of American aspiration. Edward lives on in the minds of the townsfolk as a loric bogeyman but also as a beacon of hope for weirdos, queers and goths born without their consent into psychic-deathsville, USA.

Where Poor Things differs from both Barbie and Edward Scissorhands is that loving the alien is suddenly possible. Bella has full sexual function from the off. She is an infant in a woman’s body. Not gonna lie, I found it morally abhorrent watching adult men (especially those resembling the director) having sex with Bella. There were a lot of lingering cum faces and slow motion nip slips. But, as I pondered shimmying my way out of the cinema, I told myself art does not have to perform a social good. In fact, it has a social responsibility not to perform one.

“All art is immoral” wrote Oscar Wilde. “All sexuality is immoral.” Godwin Baxter pronounces in what feels like echo. To desire submissiveness is neither good nor bad, wrong nor right. To find passivity hot, likewise. Age play with full adult consent – go off! But there is an existential ick, a buzz that won’t be batted away, when older cis straight men are displayed desiring passive, infantalised and ‘damaged’ women without the roles that power and patriarchy play in that desire being properly addressed by the filmmaker.


In James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) there is an episode, dubbed Nausicaa, in which Leopold Bloom masturbates behind some rocks on Sandymount Strand, a beach in Dublin. He is aroused at the sight of Gerty Macdowell, a young working-class woman who has come to watch fireworks on the beach with her friends. After ejaculating he watches her walk away and with disgust realises that she is disabled. “No. She’s lame! O! Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl!.. A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn’t know it when she was on show. Hot little devil all the same. Wouldn’t mind. Curiosity like a nun or a negress or a girl with glasses.” Bloom engages in a double objectification of Gerty. Firstly, by openly masturbating over her without her consent and then in his relegation of her to a fetish object when he discovers the ‘curiosity’ of her disability. Part of the cinematic fantasy that Lanthimos creates around Bella Baxter is her status as a curio. She is a strange experiment to be worshipped. As Wedderburn says, “I want to pinch you and see if you’re real”, with his hand already in her knickers.

“I guess this is my animating question, who gets to experience the wonder of childhood, if at all and for how long?“

The theory of ‘adultification’ or ‘age overestimation’ is used to describe how white society mediates its fantasies of POC children. Black and brown children are often perceived as older and less innocent than their white counterparts, leading to unfair treatment, such as harsher discipline and increased suspicion even when they are young. Tamir Rice, for example, was a 12-year-old African American boy who was playing with a toy pellet gun when he was fatally shot by a Cleveland police officer on 22 November, 2014 sparking riots across the country.


The pervasive adultification of young black boys in America means that the murder of black and racialised minorities at the hands of police is normalised. And can be seen, together with the practice of mass incarceration of this demographic for petty crime, as ‘mowing the Lawn’ – a strategy employed by the Israeli army to maintain superiority and military control. Up to October 2023 brutal military operations were periodically carried out in the Gaza strip, killing scores of Palestinians. These operations were seen as temporary measures to degrade the capabilities of the Palestinian resistance to fight their occupiers.


14,000 children have been murdered by the Israeli defence force in Gaza since October 2023. That number has no doubt risen exponentially by the time you read this. Fundamental to the Israeli state’s genocidal project in Gaza is to ‘civilise’ Palestine through the ethnic cleansing of its people. Systematic methods of debilitation are used by the IDF to maim and disable, mentally torture and thwart the Palestinian people and their efforts to resist. The Israeli army and their backers are using the assault on Gazan civilians to test new and horrific ways of eliminating life. They have fabricated special bullets cultivated for the maximum abuse with the minimal exertion. They are data collecting. We have seen evidence of explosives packed into cans of food. We have heard how Israel’s deadly drones play the sounds of babies crying to lure civilians from their homes. We know that never before seen weapons of war have been evidenced in Gaza. Robotic dogs have been loosed on civilians. Robotic dogs. Wounds so deep and serrated were found in the body of a full-term mother outside Al Shifa hospital that not a single expert could fathom what weapon had caused such damage. What goes on in the head of the person who is paid to design such weapons? Do they feel an inventor’s pleasure seeing their work in action? Does conscience ever interrupt the totting up of their calculations?


On May 1st CNN referred to 6-year-old Hind Rajab as “a woman killed in Gaza.”


Bella Baxter is 2 years old. Jorgos Lanthimos makes his audience complicit in her adultification. And, to my mind, produces shame in those of us who do not ‘progress’ in a linear way or learn to speak on time, or ever. 

“She has all the adorable qualities of a child, the waddly walk and funny sentences, but none of the anti-social monstrosity of a disabled person.“

Bella is shown to acquire language just the way an average baby would. She has all the adorable qualities of a child, the waddly walk and funny sentences, but none of the anti-social monstrosity of a disabled person. That said, there are unmissable and glaring visual parallels between Bella’s early behaviour and patterns of speech and the movements and speech of someone who has suffered a brain injury or has a neurological condition. But, phew, what a relief, she grows out of them. She is a comfortable place for us to project our discomfort about the unpredictable ways in which real disabled people behave; people who do not progress in a linear fashion and who will be described in mental ages below 10 their whole life by people who would never see the absurdity in ascribing a mental age at all.


Many physically disabled people are de-sexualised and have their desire confiscated from them because of the problem their bodies present to a malnourished mainstream imagination. Yet here is a disabled character, Bella Baxter, who is sexual. But she is not like all the other crips. She has none of the physical ugliness, none of the grunts and snorts of the disabled, none of the unsightly limb flailing.


Poor Things tells us that we cannot accommodate the sexuality of disabled people in real life, so we have this bizarre pantomime in which the able-bodied perform freakery for our amusement. For those wanting a CRIP4CRIP take on sex and sexuality I steer you towards Antonio Centeno and Raul de la Morena’s “Yes, We Fuck!” (2015). This documentary explores the intimate lives of people with disabilities and highlights the desires, needs, and experiences of a group so often overlooked in discussions about sex and relationships.

Why do I feel let down by Bella and Godwin Baxter’s ultimate articulacy, their conventional ways of walking and talking, and Bella’s normative developmental arc in the film? Poor Things is a fantasy after all, it does not owe me neurodiversity. But the absence of the non-linearity, frustration and shame involved in recovery is felt. And for me this oversight proves that an assimilationist drive is at work at the core of Lanthamos’ fantasy. It is a common thread in films about crips and queers that are not by crips and queers: the fantasy ultimately insists on normativity. 


In my eyes Poor Things does not benignly conform to a status quo, it pushes an already crushed demographic out of the frame. And in that dissonance, makes it more permissible to laugh at them/us. The audience in my showing were out of their minds cackling at this film. It was wild. There is a growing its-not-that-deepism that I see present in the reception of this film that seems to reflect the cruelty of the time we are living through in the UK and beyond. It is so much easier to laugh at the word retard in the dark. It makes you start to think you have a right to. And then you start to think you might have a right to fight for your right to laugh at the word retard… even vote for your right to. In the easy laughter of the audience at the Rio was the silent absorption of dead and mutilated babies and children into our social media feeds.


Actually, thinking about it now, I wonder whether it was really the sound of laughter that terrified my lover and I in the dark. Or the deafening silence.