Emma Stone's Baby Punching Line In Poor Things Has A Comical True Story Behind It
The second time I saw "Doctor Strange" in a theater (I liked it enough to watch it more than once), I was seated next to a young boy. I vividly recall the scene where Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) crashes his car on a mountain road and violently flips over several times before landing in a body of water below. There was a brief pause, at which point the boy next to me said (loud enough for me to hear), "I sure wouldn't want that to happen to my Lamborghini!"
Kids sure do say the darndest things. They can also be somewhat sociopathic. It's not because they're all secretly the Antichrist in disguise (although it happens more often than you'd think), it's because they simply don't know any better. This can make things particularly awkward when they're potty training or discover that their genitals have multiple uses, like Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) in "Poor Things."
A grown Victorian-era woman who died and was revived with the brain of her unborn child implanted into her by the twisted scientist Dr. Godwin "God" Baxter (Willem Dafoe), Bella is still far from emotionally mature when she's convinced to run away from home with the caddish Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). However, Duncan starts to regret that decision one night while the two are out dining with some of his acquaintances, where Bella proceeds to spit out any food she doesn't like and talks openly about going down on Duncan — at one point casually announcing, "I must go punch that baby" and very nearly clocking a nearby crying newborn before Duncan stops her.
Noting that kids can behave "like narcissistic sociopaths" during an interview with Variety, "Poor Things" writer Tony McNamara recalled the real-life incident that inspired this especially memorable line from the film.
'That baby was really crying a lot'
"I blame my son for that," McNamara explained. As he told it, he and his family were out at a restaurant one time when his then-young son responded to a screaming baby at a different table by proclaiming, "Someone punch that baby!" After getting the go-ahead from director Yorgos Lanthimos, McNamara incorporated it into his "Poor Things" script, "much to the delight of [my son.]" On a related note for fans of McNamara's sadly-canceled historical TV series "The Great," he's actually married to Belinda Bromilow, who played Aunt Elizabeth in that show. That really says so much about so many things, doesn't it?
Separately, in a video for Vanity Fair, Ruffalo remembered what it was like on the day of filming the scene: "That baby was really crying a lot. I don't think it was hard for Emma to build up those feelings of anger."
"Poor Things" is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by the late Alasdair Gray, but it's a film that Lanthimos and McNamara very much succeed in making their own. Both of them love to flip the rules of so-called polite society on their head to point out how absurd those rules can be, like when a young Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) learns the hard way just how differently they do things in Imperialist Russia in "The Great." With Bella, you have the twist of someone who's not only naive but also chaotic and unwilling, in that distinctly kid-like way, to abide by any social practice that seems designed to inconvenience them. It's no wonder all the women in her vicinity admire her, while men like Duncan are equal parts unsettled by and infatuated with her.
Punching babies is still a no-go, though.