BREAKING: Poor Things and Barbie Are Movies That Tell Similar Stories

I went to the movie theater, where my incredible wife and I watched a film called Poor Things. Emma Stone is in it.

The night before we watched Poor Things at our favorite theater, we watched the Barbie movie at home with our children. Out of the blue they developed an interest in watching it, having shown no interest in it prior to that. If anything, they were hostile to the idea, until the other night.

Both Poor Things and Barbie are about women who have been created by other people and kept in strict confinement. It’s for their own good, think the people who keep them in their places. In each movie, the woman protagonist escapes her cozy prison and experiences the world outside. She see its ugliness and wonder, and at first she is disgusted, and rightly so—but then she grows acclimated to the difficult realities of real life. She learns more about herself and the world and how she might fit into it. She grows powerful, thanks not only to the knowledge she gains but to the ways in which she’s learned to wield that knowledge to her advantage.

I don’t know what more to say about the significant ways in which these two very different movies overlap. If I knew what to say, I’d write a long essay on the subject. I’d submit it to a whole bunch of literary magazines, over the course of the next year or so, and give up after it was rejected enough times to make me feel like there’s no use in doing anything anymore.

But at first, as we watched the first act of Poor Things, I thought mostly of how interesting it is that our culture, or those who consume it, is/are fascinated by fictional women who are unbelievably ignorant to how things work, to an extent that is unprecedented and can only be the result of extraordinary circumstances. Because it isn’t just Bella from Poor Things and Barbie from Barbie who start off absolutely clueless as to what people are like and how the world is. Eleven, from Stranger Things, emerges into modern life so emptyheaded she needs to have a middle-schooler explain waffles to her. The prostitute robot played by Thandiwe Newton on Westworld knows only what she’s programmed to know, until the system breaks down and she gains knowledge that makes her powerful. I’ve been watching, in increments, the movie Logan, which I like very much. It’s a comic book rendition of Children of Men. I never saw it before, because when it came out I was caring for a two-year-old and an eight-year-old. I couldn’t watch movies. But there’s a preteen in Logan who doesn’t seem to talk or understand anything for much of the movie. She was grown in a lab, but like Barbie and Bella, and Eleven and the Westworld prostitute, she learns about people. Unlike most of them, she stabs guys to death.

There are, of course, narratives in which men are the naïve ones who enter the world and must learn its ways. I’m a Virgo comes to mind. Maybe that’s also what Starman is about. I’ve never watched that movie.

I have the sinking feeling there is a word for this kind of narrative, that it’s something that’s been identified and written about at some length by lots of people. Am I just now catching on to something that’s obvious to everyone else?

Is the kind of story I’m describing a picaresque? Is that all it is?

Back there in the theater, where my thoughts distracted me, I made plans to write this newsletter. I thought at the time I would write about how fascinating it is, when you really think about it, that the world can’t seem to get enough of women who don’t know anything. Because Barbie at the start of Barbie and Bella at the start of Poor Things are incapable of performing basic tasks. Bella can’t even form words; the first few times we see her, she hops from one foot to another, grinning and making odd noises.

But to focus on how emptyheaded the women are at first in these movies is to leave out an essential part of the narrative of the clueless woman, which is that she doesn’t stay clueless. She learns. She gets smart, and thereby gains agency and achieves some kind of liberation.

It’s not quite the same thing, but this narrative arc is not dramatically unlike “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” the famous short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Or maybe the arc of that story is an inversion of what we see in Poor Things? In “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” a woman is confined to one room by her doctor and husband. She can’t leave, she can’t read anything, she can’t write anything. Her life is strictly circumscribed, and she loses her mind as a result. But in doing that she escapes from the grasp of those who would keep her imprisoned. She experiences her madness as newfound knowledge. She wins, in the end, even though she also loses.