“Poor things” and “fight or flight”
An attempt to find a connection between films and everyday life.
Yorgos Lanthimos expresses what he sees from a demanding perspective. Demanding for the audience, who, in order to meet him halfway and see what he has already discerned, will first undergo rapid training to acquire the skills of a thinker-climber, combined with practice as a tightrope walker, above tigers weighing a ton each.
Subsequently, he will perform a vertical rock climb with minimal equipment, providing content for an investigation into the metabolic changes that occur due to the nervous system being in a state of constant alert — a condition known as the “fight or flight” response.
His films provoke this survival dilemma. It has been like this from the first second of his filmography until now, perhaps with the only exception of a gentler flow in “The Favorite”. He could have become more commercial, but hey, in the end he won’t do anyone any favors.
As for us — the audience — is our collective, unprecedented addiction to every kind of screen beyond the point of no return? Or is it not? We consult them, we practically beg them, right up until the very last nanosecond before a film, a performance, or a series begins — or before we start reading a book (…a book, you say????…what on earth is that????).
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More and more movies, TV series and plays begin with something sweeping, not necessarily violent (though, well, probably), in case they manage to make us detach from the addiction to screens and whatever other stressors we have wired into us. We bring the “fight or flight” response with us — already fully primed — into the theater or in front of our screens. We are under generalized stress; the whole planet is going that way for a billion reasons.
So, while we’re dragging this whole “thing” -stress- “Poor things” comes along and from the start it evokes additional extreme electric potentials, of surprise, repulsion, sensuality, symbolism and ultimately tension and question marks. These local electrical storms merge into a cyclone, which meets all the requirements to be upgraded to a hurricane. Whether someone confronts it, eventually learning something about his/her own limits, or gets up and leaves, ends up being a personal matter.
Not everyone has the exact same endurance and margins at the particular time they choose to watch the movie, nor climber training.
However, Lanthimos, his actors, the screenwriter, the director of photography, the set designer, the costume designer, everyone, do not negotiate it. They cause the viewer to be almost totally involved in Bella Baxter’s journey as she completes the puzzle in her mind — which makes her more “streetwise” than all those who played a role in her transformation. She invents many of the pieces of the puzzle herself, with whatever materials the circumstances bring her. This does not come without a price, it is sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes humiliating, sometimes violent, but in any case, it provokes every few minutes a “fight or flight” type episode in the viewer, in addition to what is likely to have already happened in the perceived reality.
In the theater where I saw the film, very few mobile screens lit up. I don’t swear that the same thing happened everywhere, I don’t know. The “fight or flight” situation caused by the play seems to have prompted the viewers to think, for two and a half hours straight, about their own half-finished puzzle, left to its own devices due to a fragmented daily life.
