There is a type of person who has no parents, no childhood. Who look like other women and men on the street, but who are devoid of knowledge. Who sniffs the world for the very first time. He or she has not got used to being alive, is not dulled by upbringing and norms, does not know how society works. How is it for such a person to look at us? How is it for us to look back? I am referring to a person who is not natural, but who has been created more or less from scratch by other people. So far, this figure does not exist in reality. But in art, literature and science there are many of them. NEW HUMAN: Emma Stone plays the woman with the transplanted brain of an infant in “Poor Things”, here in a scene with Mark Ruffalo. Photo: Atsushi Nishijima The last page for the time being is Bella Baxter in “Poor Things”, which has its cinema premiere this week and which caused news’s film reviewer Birger Vestmo to roll an excited six on the die. This weekend, the film won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical. Lead actress Emma Stone won the award for best actress in the same genre. The premise of the film is pretty well known already. But anyone who wants to be as untainted as an artificial human before they buy a movie ticket should probably stop reading now. “Poor Things” is a kind of science fiction set in London at the end of the 19th century. Bella is actually a heavily pregnant woman who has taken her own life. She has been brought back to life by an experimental doctor (Willem Dafoe), who has transplanted the unborn child’s brain into the mother. Bella is an infant in a grown woman’s body. She learns about the world as quickly and clumsily, through eager trial and error, as a child in its first years of life. MAN MEETS THE SCIENTIST: Willem Dafoe plays the experimenting doctor who himself was exposed to experiments in childhood in “Poor Things”. Photo: Yorgos Lanthimos Telling stories about artificial people opens up a number of possibilities. The stories can, among other things, be heavily satirical. Society’s dark sides can appear even darker to an adult who is in many ways like a child. They can be philosophical. For whoever portrays a human being who comes into being must also decide what that actually means. What characteristics make something human and not something else. It can be self-awareness, empathy or rationality, but it has to be something. And they are often moral. The story of a blank and empty person who will learn how to travel in the world will also be a story of an upbringing. As a rule, however, it is the scientist himself who is judged the hardest. He is the one who unleashes forces he is not in control of. Because people are smart and stupid at the same time. They use their intelligence to create beings larger and stronger than themselves, but do not anticipate that these beings will turn against them. They are able to do that precisely because they have human free will, which cannot be controlled once it is there. A FAVORITE: “Poor Things” won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy/Musical, and Emma Stone won Best Actress in the same category. Here together with filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and fellow actors Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef. Photo: AP It is no coincidence that filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has set “Poor Things” in the Victorian era. It was a time when explorers and scientists could be cultivated. Stories of daring expeditions and archaeological excavations were followed with breathless excitement by newspaper readers. Sacrificing life and health to provide humanity with as much knowledge and as much progress as possible was noble, worthy of admiration. That this chase could be ruthless, that animals and people could join in the drag, was not so important. Technology advanced, people could fly into the air in hot air balconies and cross the continents by train. There was something magical, something haunting about it all. It was natural to think that people can achieve anything, as long as they want it enough. Including creating new versions of themselves, in their own image. The 19th century is full of such stories, one more dramatic than the other. Because this is where the modern age interferes with religion. Whoever wants to create a human being will be god. It can’t go well. And in most stories about such projects, things go so wrong that they rush. ICONIC: Boris Karloff shaped generations’ perception of what Frankenstein’s monster looked like after he played the role in “Frankenstein” from 1931. Photo: unknown / Universal studios One of the earliest and most famous stories about the artificial human is Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” , published in 1818. The Swiss Doctor Frankenstein succeeds in creating a man similar to a human, but bigger, stronger and uglier. The Doctor flees from his own creation. The creature, which he calls “the monster”, follows. He blames Frankenstein for giving him a life not worth living. Because he is human, the monster longs for closeness, community and family. But since he is a non-German with no family, he will never be allowed into the human community. He kills on foot, but until the end Shelley allows him to insist that he is not evil. He was driven into evil by those who would not receive him. When Shelley’s novel was published, the author ETA Hoffmann had already written the short story “The Sandman”, which in 1870 became the basis for the ballet “Coppélia”. It is about a young man who is engaged, but who one day becomes captivated by a beautiful young girl in a window. THE MECHANICAL GIRL: In the ballet “Coppélia”, the mysterious title character is admired because she is so beautiful. But then it turns out that she’s not quite human. Image from the Romanian National Ballet’s production in 2021. Photo: AP The girl, Coppélia, turns out to be a moving doll. Her father, Doctor Coppélius, is actually the inventor who created her. He plans to capture her young suitor in order to transfer his life force to Coppélia and make her alive. And in 1883 Italian Carlo Collodi published the children’s novel “Pinocchio”, about the wooden boy who wants to come alive. The novel is considerably darker than Disney’s family film from 1940, and bears the stamp of being written in a dangerous world. There is no automatic happy ending for young children who are stupid or disobedient. MOST FAMOUS VERSION: Disney’s Pinocchio, from the cartoon of the same name, is the most famous version of the boy made of wood. But the novel about Pinocchio already appeared in 1870, the same year that “Coppélia” was danced for the first time. Photo: Mary Evans Picture “Poor Things” is, by comparison, light-hearted. At first, Bella is the perfect victim, the one everyone wants to take advantage of. The scientist will use her to gain knowledge about human development. The seducer wants to sleep with her. The rebel wants her to share his view of the world. But the more Bella experiences, the more she slips away from them, the more she becomes herself. It probably also helps that she is a beautiful woman. She is not destined to be an outcast quasi-human, like Frankenstein’s monster. But the two fictional characters nevertheless share a common experience. They become something completely different from what their creator envisioned. Everything will be. And now, in the age when artificial intelligence is coming storming towards us, it is not so stupid to keep in mind.
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Whoever wants to make a human being is playing god. It always goes wrong. – Speech
