Ignore nationalist naysayers, Poor Things is a triumph for Scotland
Those who cavil and complain are missing the bigger picture
Does it matter that Poor Things, a new film garlanded with critical praise and heading for Oscar glory, is not set in Glasgow? For some Scots, yes, it seems it really does.
The film is based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, a hero not only of the Scottish literary renaissance of the 1980s but also the political struggle for an independent Scotland.
In addition to his celebrated novels, poems and artworks, Gray wrote one of the defining texts of the independence movement, Why Scots Should Rule Scotland. He also authored a contentious essay called Settlers and Colonists, in which he condemned some English-born arts administrators in charge of Scottish cultural institutions as “colonists”.
For some Gray fans, particularly those of a nationalist bent, the decision by Greek director by Yorgos Lanthimos to set the story in London rather than Glasgow is intolerable.
In a documentary called The Poor Things Problem, film-maker Gavin Lundy laments that the Hollywood adaptation features no Scottish actors in the main roles, isn’t set in Glasgow, and wasn’t filmed in Scotland.
He says:
It would be like Joyce with no Dublin or Dickens with no London. Why did it take a Greek film director to tell this uniquely Glaswegian story? Why are we afraid of telling our own stories? Is it the Scottish cultural cringe? Is it the lack of Scotland’s independence? Or are our creative industries just absolutely skint?
At one stage in the documentary a quote from a character in the novel is displayed lingeringly on screen:
“People who care nothing for their country’s stories and songs,” he said, “are like people without a past - without a memory - they are half people.”
The slough of despond is a familiar comfort zone for a certain kind of Scottish nationalist, never more content than when bemoaning Scotland’s woes. Ochone! Ochone!
I am reminded of another Alasdair, although one with a different spelling. In 1978 the poet, translator and New Yorker journalist Alastair Reid published a short poem entitled Scotland:
It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!’
I quote Reid’s poem because its opening lines accurately describe my euphoria on coming out of Edinburgh’s Everyman cinema yesterday afternoon having seen Poor Things. This film - a glorious Hollywood interpretation of a brilliant Scottish work of art - is an actual angel. And if we allow ourselves to be blinded to its joy, whether by nationalism or kailyard parochialism, then we are all Alastair Reid’s fishwife.
Furthermore, I refuse to accept that holding this view makes me a “half person”.
Honestly, I am pretty sure some Scottish critics would have been happier with a lesser film with a lesser director and a less brilliant actress than Emma Stone, but with proper Kelvinside accents and precise Google Streetview geolocation in Park Circus.
Instead we have an international critical triumph set to be one of the cultural highlights of 2024. Bookshops are already reporting selling out of Gray’s original novel. The transgressive audacity of a Scottish writer is firing the imagination of cinema-goers around the world. I take that as a win.
What is especially pleasing is the film’s fearless depiction of the sexual appetites of Bella Baxter, played with relish by Stone, an actor who richly deserves all the honours currently hurtling towards her. In global culture Scotland tends to be associated with woad, heroin and dilithium crystals. Sex makes a nice change.
Initial grumblings about the film seem to have subsided since its actual release. In part this is because the Lanthimos adaptation is visually phantasmagorical, its world flamboyantly stylised in steampunk Victoriana. So much so, the question of exactly where it is set seems literal and ponderous.
Mostly, though, the change in the tone of the debate is down to the deftness shown by cultural figures close to Gray himself, the keepers of the flame after his death in 2019, who have gently pointed out that Gray himself was happy for a film adaptation to reflect not the author’s vision but the director’s.
Gray’s son, Andrew, was satisfied the production team treated his father’s work with all due respect.
When I met the cast, a lot of people had read the book so I was very impressed with that. My father didn't set any pre-conditions when he met Yorgos. The contract was drawn up, probably around 2012, and he was aware and in agreement with the circumstances of it. He wasn't a film director. He was happy for someone else to take on his work.
Rodge Glass, an author and academic who worked at Gray’s side as his secretary for many years, tweeted:
Poor Things is about colonialism, feminism, sexuality, shame, control & much more, inc. Glasgow. It's also a clear reply to Frankenstein, a novel written by an English author. AG declared influences & remade stories of others for Scotland. Now others are responding to him. Good.
Henry Bell, managing editor of Gutter, a Glasgow-based literary magazine, pointed out Gray’s own tendency to borrow, adapt and transform. He said:
What could be more fitting than to take a Gray story and to rearrange and re-situate it, in order to explore what it can mean!
Sorcha Dallas, a former gallerist who is now custodian of Gray’s archive, said on Twitter:
Still processing watching [Poor Things] for the first time yesterday. Lanthimos is a brave and unique maker, and the team he has assembled from set, costume, hair & make up, cinematography and score are outstanding. In its aesthetic sensibility there are echoes of Alasdair Gray’s seminal text. Places are named but are visualised in otherworldly ways which makes the question raised around Glasgow’s omission seem a moot point. The novel and film are distinct and separate. Lanthimos has interpreted Gray’s text, creatively reconfiguring it in a tradition which Gray upheld throughout this own creative life. The book presents the story of [Bella] from a range of perspectives, layered within it are Gray’s distinct artworks, hand-drawn letters, maps and ‘historical’ material. Like with other Gray texts he presents this in a way that forces the reader to critically evaluate and draw their own conclusions of the ‘truth’. This allows the text to draw on multiple themes including feminism, colonialism and gender fluidity…Can’t wait to watch it again, and again and again.
None of this is to deny the distinctive role Glasgow plays in the novel. The city is a character in its own right in much of Gray’s writing and art. Moreover, there is a body of criticism that detects in Poor Things (the novel) a compelling narrative about the history of Scotland and its place in the Union. Gray himself flags such an interpretation with a drawing of Bella, in a Mona Lisa pose with famous elements of the Scottish landscape in the background, labelled “Bella Caledonia'“. The name has since been adopted, with Gray’s blessing, by Scotland’s foremost independence-supporting website, which uses a drawing of Bella as its logo.
Sorcha Dallas says she hopes one day another film of Poor Things gets made with the Glasgow elements and Scottish themes foregrounded. One can only agree. But its absence today is no good reason to lament or regret the making of the Hollywood version.
For the record, Lanthimos felt it would be “disingenuous” of him - a Greek man with limited experience of Glasgow and who currently lives in Athens - to believe he could make an authentically Scottish film. That seems an honest and reasonable position. There is one significant Scottish element. Godwin Baxter is portrayed as a mad Scottish scientist. Willem Dafoe, who plays Godwin, studied recordings of Gray’s voice and tried to incorporate some of its quirks in his performance. Works for me.
A favourite slogan of Gray’s, one that crops up repeatedly in his artwork and book designs, is: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”
Here it is, in all its graphic beauty, on my own first-edition hardback copy of Poor Things:
So I end with a question. Which is the better nation? The one that is dutiful, painstaking and respectful? Or the bravura one whose creative generosity, whose elemental vigour, whose liberating spirit is capturing the imagination of the world?
-o0o-
Agree? Disagree? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Do you know someone who might like this post? Please feel free to share it.
Are you a subscriber to The Jaggy Thistle? If so, thank you! If you’re not a subscriber, why not sign up now? Say no to FOMO! Carpe Diem! It’s free!
100 percent agree! I think gray would have been delighted with the film esp all the sex as he was a naughty minded man! 😂 film and books different mediums and faithful film/play adaptations of novels are hardly ever good. What better homage to the uniqueness of Alasdair Gray then to have an equally unique director give the narrative their own film flavour.
Re Alasdair Gray's 'naughty' behaviour. The character Bella Baxter, is a play on Bell Baxter, a school in Cupar Fife. Re film not being "Scottish based"...i always felt it had more universal appeal than some of his other work.