More Suffering?
We watched a 2023 film entitled Poor Things. This is a fantasy, steampunk Frankenstein takeoff, that picks apart default moral assumptions of cultured society. Bella Baxter is brought back to life. Bella, waking with the brain of a newborn, learns to physically function as an adult female. The twist of this tale is Bella’s guilelessness as she learns how the circumlocutions of speech in “polite company” cloak traditions of male domination of the female. Inequality becomes particularly hazardous in reference to sexual relations. Bella experiences double jeopardy of being exploited victim and then, morally stigmatized. Bella’s strengthening sense of self is accompanied by palpable outrage at the injustice that she feels…
Viewing the film was emotionally intense. The odds seemed against Bella’s survival in this morality tale, — this “revaluation of values” as Nietzsche famously wrote. Bella does survive. The film invites the viewer to imagine a humanity when men and woman relate as equals. Dare we believe such a “new creation” is possible?
To be alive means that we suffer. As if that is not sufficient, we fabricate social practices many based upon religious tales – which add “insult to injury.”
A single drop of blood
too much or too little
in the brain
may render our life unspeakably miserable and difficult,
and we may suffer more
from this single drop of blood
than Prometheus from his vulture.
But the worst
is when we do not know
that this drop
is causing our sufferings
—and we think it is “the devil!”
or “sin!”
The Dawn of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 83
