First published here on 12th March 2024: https://www.badgalfilmclub.com/journal/bella-baxter-of-poor-things-and-other-tales-of-neurodivergent-coded-women-in-film-and-tv

Poor Things (2023) presents us with the character of Bella Baxter – an unfiltered, foul-mouthed, devastatingly unrepressed woman who has been “assembled” like a pseudo Frankenstein’s monster by a man that she herself calls God. As we are to understand it, all of the her oddities, her quirks, her isms, are results of the way in which she was “created” – Bella Baxter possesses a fully grown adult woman’s body yet within the recess of her cranial cavity there sits, all too comfortably, a teeny tiny baby brain. Yup. The mind of an infant – an innocent, primordial, immature being.

Heralded a feminist tale by some, including actress Emma Stone herself, Bella Baxter is far from unproblematic when you chuck this film around the tombola of feminist discourse. That said, I personally enjoyed Bella Baxter’s lust for bodily autonomy. I cheered her on as any proud parent would as she discovers her brain to digit co-ordination and learns complex social contracts from scratch. Yet I couldn’t help but realise that we, as an audience, were invited to view Bella Baxter’s entire existence through a pathologizing neuro-normative lens via her creator (who is also literally a doctor) and the men around her. A common trapping for simply existing as a woman with neurodivergent traits. She’s pitied, patronised, fetishised, idealised, and infantilised (the last point is for obvious narrative reasons).

As we gain further understanding of neurodivergent conditions and traits such as autism, ADHD, OCD, bi-polar, depression and many others under the vast neurodivergent umbrella, my eyes are opening up to so many neurodivergent-coded characters that have existed in plain sight – I can see them in the tropes of the outsiders, the misfits, the antiheroes, the weirdos. When characters display big emotions or meltdowns, when characters possess a fierce sense of justice, when characters recognise the leftfield details that others ignore – they’re often framed negatively as the oddballs, the losers, or those that need rescuing – that something is not quite right with them. Instead of just letting them BE.

My reading of Bella Baxter contravenes this assumption – there’s nothing inherently wrong with her. She’s just neurodivergent as fu*k! She perceives social situations and abstract idioms at face value, she’s easily bored and is in constant need of stimulation, she incessantly hyperfocuses on special interests and has a wonderfully distinctive unconventional gait – all these can be seen as autistic and ADHD traits that I can’t unsee it. It’s worth noting, too, that as with many representations of any marginalised social group, no one representation is a monolith of all lived experiences – Bella Baxter is but one. So sod the whole baby brain business… I’m leaning into Bella Baxter’s adventures as a tale of a neurodivergent woman navigating life, love and her, um, sensory receptors with all manner of lovable and less than lovable eccentricities.

Bella Baxter has won awards and hearts – and it’s got me thinking about other representations of neurodivergent-coded women in films and TV shows over the years. These are characters that I have, and many have, loved and identified with (and I’m not even going to mention any of the female Disney villains!) as I’ve come into my own neurodivergent identity.

(Warning: spoilers ahead!) 

Before Bella Baxter, there was Amélie. The dictionary definition of “cute and quirky”. Thinking outside of the proverbial box is often seen as a neurodivergent super power and Amélie’s magical and abundant imagination is an absolute revelation. Who else would seek answers to such specific questions as “how many people are having an orgasm right now?” (the answer is 15). She has unbound wonder and curiosity for the world and is a seeker of dopamine spiking sensory pleasures. The way she plunges her hand into the sack of dry crunchy lentils and cracks the top of that crispy crème brûlée with the back of her spoon - pure indulgent joy!

Her deep empathy for others overfloweth and is what propels her in her missions to help others find their joy – but at the cost of her own. Amélie’s arc, like many neurodivergent-coded women, is that of overcoming isolation and loneliness – as great as it is to seek validation by helping others, it often means having to wear the mask that often hides her own cries for help. That same help that she’s so busy giving others, she really needs it for herself. Good news is: Amélie finds it. And all is well in the world of Amélie.

I’m going to just say it: Wednesday Addams is a cultural icon. The OG goth of all goths with her signature black dress and pig tails. She’s cunning, smart, and an unashamed subverter of all Western cultural conventionalities. Whoever your Wednesday Addams is, be it Lisa Loring, Christina Ricci, or Jenna Ortega (to name just a few), the fact that her character has survived for 8 decades, all the way up to the modern Netflix reboot that has incited yet another generation of would-be rebels, shows us that our capacity as an audience to appreciate neurodivergent-coded girls and women has always been there.

Wednesday has always been a sort of reluctant anti-hero – her obsession with the morbid in itself subverts conventional notions of fear – because Wednesday is afraid of nothing. She’s not afraid of speaking her unfiltered mind however unwelcomed her opinion may be – especially about social injustices (google the Thanksgiving monologue). She’s not afraid of not fitting in with her peers. She’s not afraid of cultivating her own unapologetic identity and special interests. She’s not afraid of dancing in front of other kids. And she’s not even 18 yet!

The sardonic, deadpan, teenage lead character of the self-titled adult animation series Daria (1997-2002) was peak MTV youth-ness from 1997 to 2002. Starting off as a side character on the massive hit show Beavis and Butt-Head, during which her smarts were used to foil the plans of the idiotic duo, earned Daria her own series for five whole seasons.

Daria remains a critically intellectual, albeit cynical, oasis of cool and calm in the sandstorm of madness that comprises of her insufferably idealistic, norm-abiding highschool peers and family. She’s the antithesis of all things we were ever told by Hollywood that a teenager should aspire to be – she’s disinterested in fashion and trends, despises being told what to do especially via illogical methods, and actually thrives on interrogating social norms. She’s pretty lo-fi until her strong sense of justice kicks in, after which she’s not afraid to speak her mind which pushes against the grain of everyone around her. Also, her friendship with the artsy and the equally intellectual Jane is a great example of a Queer platonic relationship – something that neurodivergent folk are great at cultivating (because not all deep and meaningful connections have to involve romance or sex!). Their shorthand sass is goals.

Anya is an ancient (and when I say ancient, she was born in 860) ex-vengeance demon made mortal in the “modern day” of the Buffyverse – which is late 1990s/early 2000s. At first, you’d be forgiven for attributing her stream of conscious thinking, her inability to read the room, her brutal honesty and lack of tact to the fact that she’s literally a 2000 year old being – yet we eventually see snippets of Anya before she was made a demon, when she was a mere mortal called Aud, and we realise: nope, her neurodivergent traits were always there! We learn that she didn’t have many friends because she would interrogate things that didn’t make sense to her, often asking inappropriate questions and branding illogical things as “foolish” to the point of annoying those around her. An iconic scene that many fans will remember is Anya's heart-breaking monologue as she struggles to comprehend the “right” way to behave and grieve after Buffy’s mum’s death.

Also, her strong sense of justice IS her character and story as a vengeance demon – her need to right the wrongs and speak up for the unspoken (especially wronged women). Anya is fiercely loyal and someone I’d always want on my team.

Enid is a misunderstood, disaffected, wistfully melancholic misanthrope. But that’s just being a normal teenager, right? But here in Ghost World (2001), a darkly comedic tale of two friends who are staring down the barrel of post-high school graduation and pre-adulthood unknowns, there’s something about just how disenfranchised Enid is with the world that peaked my curiosity of her bi-polar and depressive traits. Enid’s whimsical mania can be seen in her ideas to deceive Steve Buscemi’s character, Seymour, simply for sport which seems to encourage her defensive sense of self-importance. To her, she’s having a bit of fun, but she’s unable to recognise the harm that her actions are causing, not just to those around her but also to herself. Her only friendship – with Rebecca, played by a boxfresh Scarlett Johansson – is slipping away. When the realisation eventually hits, she plumets into what feels like a irreconcilable deep depressive state of hopelessness and guilt which culminates in the highly debated ending.

Enid’s earlier confession to Seymour hits differently as the out-of-service bus drives Enid away in that final shot: “I used to think about one day, just not telling anyone, and going off to some random place. And I'd just... disappear. And they'd never see me again.”

Where is Enid going? We’ll never know, really. Ghost World is a biting meditation on not just alienation from the world but alienation from within your own mind.

To say that Beth has a special interest in chess would be an understatement – it’s an obsession, a hyperfixation from day 1. But alongside all this is tragedy and trauma – as a child, we see that her mother is killed in an accident and then her adopted father abandons her, which all the more easily explains away her “odd” withdrawn behaviour such as her need for order and her flat manner – her monotonous voice and her lack of expressive emotion. Beth’s neurodivergent traits are easily pathologized too by showing that her hallucinations are brought on by her dependency on tranquilizers and eventually alcohol as an adult – these meds are the cost of her genius and we’re meant to believe that without them, she’d be nothing. 

This series does well to call out mental health clichés – in Ep3 the journalist from Life magazine, whilst interviewing Beth, unwittingly projects her own life’s disappointments of being a woman in a man’s world by flagging that creativity and psychosis, genius and madness are often two sides of the same coin. There is evidence in it. Beth sure can spot all the patterns on the board and has always been able to command her abilities – but what happens when the board begins to rule her and she’s not in the driving seat? We see her spiral – descend into a very familiar hole of self-harming, self-sabotaging actions. Only when she no longer needs her meds to play can she finally claim her passion for chess as truly hers and not just a pathologized trait that she needs rescuing from. I was going to end on a cheesy quip about check mating her addiction – but I’m far too rook and roll for that (sorry!!).