Against Realism
This week I'm wrong about the visual impact of Emma Stone's new movie Poor Things, plus my brief addition to the sex-scene discourse
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Godzilla Minus One looked amazing on a small budget, and how films like Jurassic Park and Jaws were similarly immersive despite technological impediments to creating realistic dinosaurs and sharks. Implicit to that commentary was how high budget special effects often don’t look interesting or impressive. I’m here now to make a related, parallel argument.
Last night, I watched Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film starring Emma Stone. It’s a beautifully shot and constructed film, with stunning sets and costumes, and more than a few jaw-dropping VFX shots, and it never once looks realistic. The film is set in a world with steampunk and Victorian sci-fi/fantasy elements—monorails and animal hybrids and reanimated corpses abound—but it never tries to convince you there is a real machine filling Willem Defoe’s stomach with gastric juices, or that a chicken with the head of a bulldog is panting over someone’s unconscious body. It just shows you a beautiful, obviously constructed image and asks you to accept its reality within the film.
It’s a similar technique to Asteroid City (which I also wrote about a few weeks ago): both films are designed and brought to life with exquisite care, and are never once remotely convincing. Their sets and establishing shots and special effects have the impact of an excellent theater set and backdrop—something that compels the emotions and associations and connotations of a location but makes you fully aware you are within a contrived spectacle. You aren’t on a boat, you’re in the idea of a boat—you are thinking boat thoughts as you watch the part of the film set on a boat. But you know the actors didn’t get on an actual boat.
Thinking about how much I loved and was enthralled by both Poor Things and Asteroid City, I am here to make one simple argument about visuals in film and television—stop trying to make them realistic!
We live in a world where fifteen minute videos about scene continuity mistakes in movies get millions of views, so I know I’m fighting a losing battle. But truly perfect special-effects are almost impossible to get exactly right, and the effort to achieve them removes any stylistic agency by artists and quickly slips into an uncanny valley of immersion, where I am neither convinced or compelled by what I’m seeing. It has to stop.
This is something that I think we all know and have experienced on a gut level. It happens when we’re hanging on every word of a friend’s story or a street performance or a minimalist stage production, or even a puppet show. When I go see plays at The American Shakespeare Center, where they have pretty much no set beyond the furniture needed for blocking, I don’t spend my time thinking “they’re not actually on a remote island or a Danish castle.” I spend my time completely absorbed by the tension the actors create through their performances. The props and costumes (like the effects in Poor Things) create a sensory environment and cue me to what themes and ideas are relevant. But they never try to be convincing.
Even elaborately staged theater productions never achieve that level of believable immersion. They can only strive for engaging and thrilling spectacle and for earning the indulgence of an audience who chooses to engage with a story on their terms. And great productions do just that!
In fact, it is the choice to buy in by the audience that makes the immersion complete—it takes effort! It takes focus. It takes a willingness to engage with the material with a minimal amount of thoughtfulness. And great art, on screen and on stage, that compels that attention and willful immersion will be much more impactful than something that has a sanitized visual credibility.
The examples of this on screen are boundless, beyond the two films I’ve already discussed. Scott Pilgrim is one of the most fun and exciting comic book action movies ever made, and it plays up its cartoonish visuals in ways that support the humor and thematic aims of the movie. The Spiderverse movies are the best superhero films ever made because they embrace the impact different visual styles can have on our impressions of characters and trust us to fit disparate and contrasting visual cues into a coherent whole.
In Poor Things, Lanthimos uses the obvious artistic license in the visuals to bolster the central thematic concern of the film—Stone’s character, Bella, is slowly recognizing the artificial social rules that people use to control and entrap her and each other. We see the world around Bella as unreal and contrived in the same way Bella does, as something fascinating and often beautiful but also not real and important in the way she and other people’s freedom and personhood are. The film cues us into Bella’s human journey by making humanity the only realistic aspect of the movie, in a limited sense. That doesn’t even get into it how the film uses color, lighting, and perspective to enhance emotion and highlight Bella’s growth. The movie gains so much from refusing to strive for easy to watch, “real” visual immersiveness.
It’s not just that movies improve artistically through abandoning visual realism, but also that they sacrifice just as much by striving for it. The recent wave of adapting classic cartoons in live action flies in the face of this truth—I love Avatar: The Last Airbender BECAUSE I have to put real imaginative effort into being immersed in a world full of people with elemental powers. In previews, the live-action adaptation looks painstakingly, meticulously realistic—and the action already feels less exciting as a result.
We are capable of active imaginative work as audience members. Attempting to get us out of the joyful effort it takes to truly appreciate visual art doesn’t immerse us, it drowns us.
Poor Things and Love and Control
While I’ve brought it up, you should absolutely go and see Poor Things. It’s a beautiful and challenging movie. I’m still thinking about what it had to say about social, sexual, and physical power—it’s obsessed with the different ways we try to control one another—emotion, force, repression, guilt, desire—and how in doing so we inevitably traps ourselves, too. Willem Defoe’s character is especially fascinating as a vessel of the generational trauma created by inflicting power rather than using it to nurture and protect, and his forgiveness at the end of the film is a fascinating rejection of the illusion of control by the central characters. I’d love to discuss with anyone who’s seen it.
More Sex Scenes
Poor Things is also full of graphic sex scenes, and has played a role in the ongoing sex-scenes-in-movies discourse of recent years (which you can read a decent summary of here). As someone fully on the side of more (thoughtfully, consensually, and safely filmed) sex scenes in movies, it was amazing to see a movie film sex in such a funny, clinical, character-focused, completely uncensored way without ever being gratuitous or objectifying. We are invited to see characters have sex and how they’re relating to it—the emotions and power dynamics they are experiencing, which can’t be seen in other contexts in the exact same way—without ever being set up to be shocked or titillated by it ourselves. It’s an impressive achievement (Stone talked a bit about the importance of sex within the film here).
A lot of big movies had sex scenes this year, including Oppenheimer, which I was honestly surprised used sex so effectively within its story (a rare stylistic W for Christopher Nolan in my opinion, who is not my favorite filmmaker). A friend of mine (who is extremely thoughtful and smart, which is why I bring it up) thought the sex in that film was gratuitous, but I thought it (bluntly, ham-fistedly, maybe, which is very Nolan-esque, but also effectively) made the stakes of several emotional and political plot-lines more clear and viscerally compelling and convincing.
Anyway, let’s keep well-executed, illuminating, thoughtful sex scenes coming, Hollywood!
Agree with you on the visuals because they can actually “steal” the movie. By the way watched Saltburn the other day. Still thinking about it as a variation on The Talented Mr. Ripley, a film you should watch if you haven’t already seen it. I also recommend Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley trilogy for reading.