Rude Mechanicals
On the joy, yearning, and horror of a first-time film composer's score, Poor Things
Last weekend, I went to see Poor Things, a film by one of the more obvious contemporary “auteurs” of contemporary cinema, Yogos Lanthimos, and it left me with that vague, ruminative melancholy that tells you a film got to you for some reason. Days later I worked out what that reason was.
A very loose adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s satirical fantasy, Poor Things enlarges a corpus of shocking or cringey interrogations of social norms that Lanthimos began with 2009’s Dogtooth. It follows a young Victorian woman, Bella, who was resurrected after a successful suicide by an eccentric Scottish surgeon who then implanted her with a baby’s brain and adopted her as a kind of acutely discomfiting goddaughter: a 28-year-old blank slate whose explosive motor, cognitive, and sexual maturation fast outpaces any sense of social propriety or shame.
The film’s a visual feast, thanks to Lanthimos’s regular DP, the fisheye-lens adept Robbie Ryan, and production designers James Price and Shona Heath, who created a dreamlike world somewhere between 1930s studio musical, Aubrey Beardsley, and Albert Robida with the pointedly artificial look you might see in one of Terry Gilliam’s plusher fantasy epics. But some days after seeing it, I realized that this film is staying with less for its vision than for its sounds, specifically for its score. Which I since learned is by a total film novice from South London’s experimental pop scene, who adds insult to injury by having the Harry Potterish name of Jerskin Fendrix.
It turns out this sobriquet improves upon dude’s birthname, Joscelin Dent-Pooley, which is about the poshest-sounding thing I’ve ever heard. And while the 28-year-old Cambridge grad, who structured and titled his 2020 debut album after Schubert’s Wintereisse, may or may not be a genius, I’m convinced that his work on Lanthimos’s film is a once-decade reunion of two lost Platonic halves — closest in spirit to Michel Gondry meeting Charlie Kaufman for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though director-composer unions like Greenway/Nyman, Fellini/Rota, Leone/Morricone are clearly relevant.
While so many aspects of this film are obviously brilliant — particularly Emma Stone’s rendition of Bella, leapfrogging through developmental stages to a state of horny innocence — I’d argue that Fendrix is the real Dr. Frankenstein here. His score — a kind of punk, slapstick, avant-garde chamber-music, a musical equivalent to cinema “practical effects” — breathes such rude, visceral life into Bella and her world that this tale of a bewitchingly tweaky freak who evolves from full-grown, pre-verbal spastic to a manic, gimlet-eyed sex adventuress on a Candide-like quest for enlightenment somehow felt, bizarrely, personally relevant to me — even after she’d turned her abusive former husband into a goat and lived happily ever after. I think this film’s music aligns its story with some deeper, empathetic vision of humanity, a forgiving, God’s-eye view of buggy, twitchy, striving humanity you might hear in the title phrase, “poor things.” Which feels like a real balm in this AI age of anxiety about the self.
You can hear the central argument in “Bella,” Fendrix’s theme for a protagonist who’s part Richard III — unfinished, sent before her time into this breathing world, half made up — and part the ambling nymph he’d court. The motif is six tentative chordal plucks on a harp, each one detuning as the note decays, wavering perilously like the early, faltering steps of a toddler before it blossoms into a plaintive Romantic orchestral swoon. That warping six-note motif — the Beatles’ “Blackbird” soaked in ketamine — is, like Bella, in a constant state of becoming.
The score makes this same jolie-laid essence seethe or frolic throughout, reaching a giddy peak with “Portuguese Dance II,” the wheezing atonal accordion stomp that powers Bella’s furious ballroom freestyle with Mark Ruffalo’s pencil-mustachioed roué, its farting ostinato building into a Seussical riff on Astor Piazzola performed by Harry Partch. The pieces “Victoria,” named for Bella’s pre-suicide self, and its effective b-side, “Reanimation,” with its car-alarm pipe organ, both cast a spell of ‘50s sci-fi horror that reminded me of Mica Levi’s score for Jonathan Glazer’s film Under the Skin, whose keening microtonal viola theme, apparently triggered by a keyboard, works an uncanny blend of the acoustic and the synthetic in its evocation of another errant female traveler whose humanity is also in question.
Having given the madcap, James Blake-ishly-vocal-processed MIDI fever dream Wintereisse a few listens, I’m inclined to give the majority of credit to Lanthimos, for his uncanny sense for potential in other artists, and for the anachronistic sonic palette that his previous film, The Favourite, provided as a primer. That earlier film, squarely in England’s actually early 18-century period of Queen Anne, explored a similar musical space but drew on existing works from the ruder, more sackbut-driven side of the early-Baroque, twisted and mutated by the contemporary composer Anna Meredith.
For the more gaily-colored Art Deco-Belle Epoque-Victorian-steampunk mash-up of Poor Things, Lanthimos found someone who could posit an entire imaginary musical period without audibly (to me at least) quoting a single composer. Maybe this kind of heedless and seemingly primary-source-less experimentation can only come from someone too young and inexperienced to know better. Or maybe Fendrix represents a new, late-Millennial breed of omnivorous art-pop, techno, contemporary-classical musicians, young people steeped in digital culture’s oceanic sound bank, whose hypertrophic musical growth matches that of a stitched-up Wunderkind who’s his same age.
Or maybe it’s me. Maybe Poor Things’ sounds, sights, and story are simply hitting me where I live. A few years ago, I realized what a sucker I am for stories about artificial people who are more human than most of us. Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, even so-so films like After Yang just kill me.
Maybe it’s being the son of a mechanical engineer, who strove so hard to make his creations work well that I still find images like Wall-E trundling along a post apocalyptic wasteland more heartbreaking than many images of actual human suffering bombarding us every second. Maybe it’s having a kid, whose ongoing discoveries of adult limitations, hypocrisy, and frequent shittiness I still find so hard to bear.
For whatever reason, this film is the latest nudge that’s made me wonder how to keep ourselves from forgetting how miraculous each human being actually is — what a belief-defying creation. To sign onto Bella’s fearless, ecstatic consumption of everything in front of her — orgasms, desserts, maps, music, Socialism — embracing it all with some heedless, fascinated version of Beginner’s Mind.
So that if we ever do meet our Creator, we approach him in the same spirit in which Rutger Hauer’s replicant approaches the bioengineer Tyrell midway through Blade Runner: batting away His paltry offers to update or enhance our user experience, and simply stating our basic demand: “I want more life. Fucker.”