The Pursuit of Knowledge

What this year's crop of Oscar nominees and winners can teach us about how to live and what kind of world we want

“If I know the world, I can improve it,” says Bella Baxter, portrayed by last night’s Oscar-winning Best Actress Emma Stone in Poor Things.

I finally saw Poor Things Saturday night, in time to watch the Oscars. The film is about many things, but particularly the central character’s hunger for and pursuit of knowledge.

This is an updating of the Frankenstein story: A young woman (Emma Stone), who literally threw her life away, is given a new brain by a pioneering surgeon and the chance to start life all over again. From the beginning, we can see that Bella Baxter has not just been reanimated, she’s a quick learner with the desire to understand the world around her and herself.

Her language evolves, her motor skills improve, her insights multiply—and eventually it’s not enough to stay in the controlled environment of the experimental doctor’s lab and home. Offered marriage by the doctor’s assistant, she chooses instead the proposal of a lustful suitor to take her out in the world. The beautiful Bella wants experience and adventure, not just for its own sake, but to learn.

The visually gorgeous film offers plenty of Bella’s sexual awakening, which surely appeals to Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos, but may distract many moviegoers from its larger theme. I hope that Bella’s pursuit of knowledge—which continues to accelerate as Bella learns more and more about the reality of life—is the the theme that lingers.

It struck me that this theme is at the heart of many of this year’s crop of best pictures, including the newly crowned best picture winner, Oppenheimer. It’s a theme as old as human consciousness itself, but one of particular importance in these times we’re now living in, as our society is under threat by fascistic bad actors devoted to the degradation of peoples’ capacity to know what is true and what is false; a body politic endangered by malignant politicians and their enablers who are committed to gaining power and ending democracy in order to expand their control and serve themselves.

What was Oppenheimer about? A brilliant theoretical physicist with a hunger for knowledge who eventually commits himself and many others to the development of the atomic bomb—an ultimate scientific experiment—in order to defend against the Nazis and other Axis powers. And Barbie? A plastic doll who’s becoming human, a woman who wants to understand what it means to be a woman and what her purpose can be in the real world. The Holdovers? A boarding school classics teacher rigidly devoted to expanding the historical knowledge of his often-uninterested students, but who eventually experiences his own self-discovery.

And then there’s the flip side, offered by Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest (which won the Oscar for best international film). Like Oppenheimer, both are historical stories, based on true events, and could not be more relevant to our own times. Killers of the Flower Moon is a painful story of money and power involving white settlers who gained control of rich oil fields by marrying and murdering Indigenous members of the Osage tribe. Their success depended on denying knowledge, doing anything to ensure that law enforcement would not investigate their actions. The Zone of Interest is the horrific story of ambitious Nazis and their families who ignored or denied what was happening just beyond their fences in the Auschwitz death camp; the last thing they wanted to do was pursue knowledge, to face the facts.

Events of recent days are a reminder of the real-life battle that is underway between truth and lies, between the pursuit of knowledge and the effort to deny peoples’ capacity to know. It took independent journalist Jonathan M. Katz to dig into the supposed facts presented by Alabama Sen. Katie Britt in her State of the Union rebuttal—intended to attack President Joe Biden’s border policies—and showcase the brazen lies Britt was telling.

With a breathy, overwrought delivery, Britt recounted a terrible tale of rape and sex trafficking., yet failed to state that this did not happen under Biden’s watch or in the U.S. at all. On TikTok this weekend, Katz explained that the activist who experienced the sexual abuse had actually told her story to Congress back in 2015 based on her experiences from 2004-2008 when George W. Bush was president.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s welcoming of Hungary’s racist, anti-democratic, autocratic president to Mar-a-Lago on Friday freshly displayed his attraction to dictators and white nationalist leadership meant to deny the will of the people. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban,” Trump said as Orban beamed and Melania Trump looked on with a bouquet of flowers from Orban. Communicating his preference for authoritarian rule, Trump continued by saying Orban is “a noncontroversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss. No, he’s a great leader.”

This is the way it’s going to be. Don’t question it. Don’t purse the truth. Accept the will of the leader. He’s the boss.

That’s not democracy and that’s not America.

“I love the poorly educated,” Trump enthusiastically said in 2016, telling us everything about what he thinks it takes to lead, what kind of people he wants to lead and what kind of education policies he prefers to achieve his ends. It tells us a meaningful detail about what the next four years would be like if he finds his way back to the White House.

Contrast Trump with his predecessor, a literary man and former Illinois senator, who published his searingly honest memoir in 2004, four years before his run for the White House. Barack Obama’s lyrical Dreams from My Father tells the story of a young man of mixed racial heritage who longs to understand who he is, the meaning of his life and how he fits in America as a Black man who grew up in Hawaii with a white mother.

Obama takes readers on his journey of self-discovery, including the hard truths of his Kenyan father’s life and the reality of America’s racism. This memoir displays his hunger for and belief in the value of pursuing knowledge and telling the truth. It told millions of Americans who bought his book and later heard his story in speeches what kinds of values he would share and what kind of leader he would be.

If he were capable of writing, just imagine what kind of memoir Trump would produce. The Art of the Deal, penned in 1987 by Tony Schwartz, is already more than enough to know this was a man who only sees knowledge as a tool to gain advantage and con people. Truth be damned. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” Trump/Schwartz wrote. “I call it truthful hyperbole.”

Over the next eight months, we can express where we stand in the battle between truth and lies, between expanding knowledge for good and subverting knowledge in order to expand power. In a significant sense, the outcome of the election will express which path the country at large wants.

This past year’s movies just might help some of us decide what’s really important. As Bella Baxter’s knowledge in Poor Things is accelerating, she comes to realize what it’s all for. “If I know the world,” she says, “I can improve it.”

Sounds about right to me.

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