Watched Poor Things, had a breakdown, bon appétit.
The joy of strange scores
I am quite at a loss as to where to begin when considering Bella Baxter and her path to freedom. The quilted white silk lining on her bedroom walls like an opulent padded cell, the lobster tail-inspired bustle-like undergarment, her hybrid chicken dog, her uninhibited sexual appetite, her postcards, and her love of Pasteis de nata (Portuguese tarts) all beg for attention. I think the only natural place to begin is with my mistake; I just wrote of Bella Baxter as if she is a real person, not a character brought to life in the award-winning film Poor Things.
Based on a novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray, Poor Things follows Bella Baxter, a fast-growing child in a woman’s body and the ward/daughter of the strange surgeon Dr. Godwin Baxter, or “God,” played by Willem Dafoe. The film takes the puff sleeves and fascination with death, sex, and scientific inquiry that haunted the Victorians and combines it with a steampunk-adjacent aesthetic that feels like a Victorian child's imagined future. Bella learns what it is to be a person as she navigates Europe, philosophy, men, money, and her own beliefs about the world.
Bella’s development is documented meticulously by Baxter’s student Max McCandles, played by Ramy Youssef, but also through the set designs, costumes, and Bella’s language. But it is the score by Jerskin Fendrix that I feel best captures her emotional growth. Bella tells her kidnapper/lover Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), “I am a flawed experimenting person,” which is an essential element of her character. She has the playful and curious mind of a child and a scientist. Early in the film, we see Bella sitting with both feet on the piano bashing out sounds not for pleasure but curiosity. Fendrix’s score captures this through repetitions of motifs and twisted effects that repeat as Bella repeats the words she is learning. At the beginning of the film, the emotional tone is simple, with spikes in intensity when Bella is angry or excited. The combinations of warped jarring sounds elicited from a wide array of instruments, and less traditional musical tools, echo Bella’s free experimentation and total lack of shame. The score does not try to be contained or digestible, only accurate to Bella’s state and experience.
The score grows in emotional complexity as Bella grows. Baxter tells McCandles, “She [Bella] is an experiment and I must control the conditions or our results will not be pure.” Her home in London is shot in black and white, demonstrating the control and carefully selected limits Godwin and Max place around Bella under the guise of scientific inquiry. When Bella leaves their home in London for Lisbon, the film shifts to colour. The score also echoes an opening to new sights and experiences and incorporates Portuguese influences and begins to tackle Bella’s more complex emotions like desire, rage, and confusion. “Portuguese Dance I” is played at the painfully reduced speed and inconsistent timing of a child learning a piece, although there is now a more recognisable melody. It is in Lisbon that Bella dances for the first time to an abrasive beat overlaid with what sounds like a version of a piano accordion playing something that resembles a folk tune. She is pulled into the music and onto the dance floor, followed by her lover Wedderburn, who attempts to conform her movements to the traditional gendered choreography of a leader and a follower. While he seems to enjoy her spontaneous breaks for free movement, he also enjoys bringing her back to the choreography he is comfortable with.
When her interest in Wedderburn eventually ends in Paris, Bella has seen dying babies in a slum, experienced rage, read Emerson, and dismissed cynics as hurt children who “can’t bear the pain of the world.” She is employed in a brothel, has a socialist girlfriend, and has found her inquiring mind is hungry for the science of medicine and the story of herself. The score grows to fill the nuanced and advanced perspective Bella has cultivated in a way that is both emotionally clear and yet new and unknown. In an interview on The Dolby Institute Podcast, Fendrix explains that even for larger pieces each instrument was recorded separately. This let him adjust and warp each instrument’s sound with surgical precision. The audience feels the film with Bella; we are in love, and we are horrified, but the experience is just as novel for us as it is for her because although the score elicits an emotional response, it remains just outside of what we know and expect.
When Bella returns to London to find Godwin unwell, the wind instruments serve as a painful and poignant reminder of the impermanence of breath. This contrasts well with the use of accordions and bagpipes, which either manufacture or augment breath. By the end of the film, the score, like Bella herself, is distinct, nuanced, reflective, and hopeful, with “Finale and End Credits” striking a symphonic moment of becoming, of stepping into the world complete and yet still curious.
While in Lisbon Wedderburn introduces Bella to Pasteis de nata and tells her “nuns and monks would starch their clothes the egg whites, and with the yolks; make these tarts” which must be “devoured with gusto like life itself.” The Pasteis de nata, things of value and pleasure, are in fact the byproduct of the mundane process of laundry. Bella’s life and score are anything but dull, but it is her openness to every experience, good, bad, mundane, and novel that allows her to have her Pastel de nata and eat it too.