“The Substance”: Breaking the Cycle Was Never an Option
In defense of what C. Fargeat’s sophomore film has to say about self-hatred and the mortifying torment of beauty.
My brain won’t let me not take this new writing about film & TV thing seriously. It was once, twice for shits and giggles, and all of a sudden we have to talk about The Substance: a picture in the race for, if not movie, then cultural discourse item of the year, about which much has already been said and written to the point of my reluctance to even grab a seat at the conversation pit. Yet look at me go. I am grabbing it.
As part of the unlucky bunch who had to wait until its official release date in their country to witness The Substance’s gut galore in its full, big screen glory, I knew there wasn’t much of an option for me to go into the film in all innocence. At one point, being a citizen of the entertainment world, you have to embrace the inevitability of carrying the preconceived consensus of the internet to a theater near you. Most times, that means entering an arbitrary process of interrogation mapped out to conclude in either concession or refutation of said consensus; In the case of The Substance, and any other cultural object of emotional extremity, the process may lie in attempting to parse out a bunch of dialectical voices. Unless the experience itself pierces right through instead.
Director Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore feature splatters acid green and blood red against clinical white; its highs shine glitter-like and its lows smell and taste of decay, suited to elicit equal amounts of disgust and laughter in a theater. The premise is simple: An injectable, black-market drug that promises washed up Hollywood star turned (newly fired) fitness TV personality Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) the sharing of existence with a younger, prettier, “more perfect” version of herself. Looksmaxxed replica Sue (Margaret Qualley) who crawls out of Elisabeth’s spine all guns blazing for life but has to rely on her matrix’s spinal fluid to avoid bodily malfunction. One indisputable rule: the bodies must be switched religiously every seven days, or Elisabeth’s begins to rot away at a quickening rate.
The mortifying torment that is Beauty throbs at the heart of The Substance. Needless, here, to ascribe to beauty a particular lens through which it should be perceived, or color its phrasing with words such as “lusting after” or “losing” (meaning it, beauty) as to target an angle. By its mere conception, beauty contains within it the entire spectrum of gift-to-peril; wherein the shallowly positive connotations of its presence are doomed to conceal the dark underside of its absence. Beauty, as the meritorious cliche goes, is a blessing and a curse, and in the anachronistic, nebulous universe of The Substance, where our main character is a mystery to us beyond her dependence on it and the quest she goes on for its sake, it is also pretty much all there is to life.
Nonetheless, its influence as an intoxicant is what is emphasized the most. Juxtaposed against the film’s persistent reminder that Elisabeth and Sue are one and the same, Sue’s growing desperation to prolong her time under the sun starts to flesh out her hypostasis as Elisabeth’s antagonist. Similarly, Elisabeth oscillates between letting Sue abuse her degenerating body and simultaneously developing contemptuous feelings towards her beautiful counterpart. For every unlawful second Sue decides to spend in a world where she is worshiped, her older self grays, wrinkles, and suffers.
Let me take this opportunity to marvel at the fact I happen to be listening to a recording of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray at this time. Could it even be considered fanciful to claim that Fargeat’s film resembles an offbeat, generously liberal adaptation of Wilde’s story’s narrative core?
In the literary classic, Dorian Gray, a young man who becomes an object of intense infatuation by painter Basil Hallward for his outstanding, art-inspiring beauty, is awakened to the realization that said beauty, philosophically the only thing worth pursuing in life, will once fade. After recklessly expressing a desire to “sell his soul” to ensure that a painted portrait of him, rather than his own appearance, will age, he gets his wish granted. As Dorian relishes a hedonistic life of sustained beauty and youth, his picture visually records each one of his sins through its gradual disfiguration. Of course the following quote felt compelled to come up during my post-Substance, nightly audiobook session:
He grew more and more enamored of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy, sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age. He would place his white hands beside the coarse, bloated hands of the picture, and smile. He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs.
The conflation of beauty and youth is by no means novel. Neither is that of beauty and morality. Whenever a “sin” is committed by their perfect selves (in Sue’s case, the transgressions caused by her vanity-driven greed), Dorian’s portrait and Elisabeth’s body stray further and further from traditional beauty standards, assuming the conspicuous signs of old age. For many, that’s where problems arise in The Substance. A quick browse through the movie’s mixed reviews in an array of industry publications will bring forth criticisms about it succumbing to the “hagsploitation” horror subgenre’s misogynistic tropes; the sourcing of terror from the aging female body, which is implicitly (through Sue, explicitly) mocked and viewed as the (pen)ultimate punishment for vanity, greed, and other types of womanly mutiny, including overzealous conformity to standards women didn’t invent.
Approaching this write-up as a response to critiques I personally don’t identify with, most of which pertain to the idea that the film falls victim to the very thing it aims to satirize, might come across as revelatory of my own superficial outlook regarding beauty and its function as capital. There is, admittedly, a truth to that — one that, for me, ushers The Substance out of a fantastical, parabolic metaphor space and into the realm of plain relatability.
Listen, I did some homework for this. A day prior to my Substance screening, I sat down to watch Fargeat’s 2017 debut, Revenge, a textually mild yet optically entertaining take on a rape revenge plot wherein gore and style abound. With the mental image of Revenge in place, The Substance is unmistakably a Fargeat film. From intentionally stomach-stirring sound design, to disgusting closeups of food and insects which seem to testify to the somewhat primal nature of her premises, to the in-your-face montages that recall testosterone-fueled, pulpy action movie editing, her signature indulgences are all there to knowingly point out.
So is her type in characters: Fargeat’s women — the desirable ones — have a Lolita-esque allure to them, perpetually clad in colorful panties and juvenile, chest-skimming T-shirts with matching jewelry. Their skin is glowing, lips glossy, voice soft and sensual, mannerisms sexy and innocent at the same time. They are the center of the universe to which the male gaze bows and prays, and their femininity holds power. Her men, on the other hand, fit well into the “just some guy” archetype. Unremarkable physiognomies that could remind you of your uncle, your lawyer, the supermarket cashier, or at best, some male model from an underwear catalog. They are strikingly ordinary besides the one common factor of their symbolic-leaning existence: the anxiety they trigger in her women.
There is an undeniable air of objectification in the way women’s bodies are shot in both films. Vulgar zooms and voyeuristic slo-mos on perky boobs, smooth asses, flat stomachs, taut necks — parts commonly sexualized and commodified alike. In Revenge, to serve the plot, the camera positions Matilda Lutz’s Jen as a shiny bait, bespoke to lure masculine libido — a piece of meat thrown at wailing hyenas, to be devoured. As for The Substance, Sue’s young, perky and pink leotard-clad body with just the “right” amount of curves in all the “right” places is shamelessly fetishized, too. Yet not only by the male executives whom she dashes during her TV shootings as Elisabeth’s replacement; but by Elisabeth herself. By women at large.
It was startling to read reviewers’ grievances about the supposedly counterproductive focus on Qualley’s body as Sue. No thirsty pan hints at Fargeat’s lack of self-awareness — if anything, they exemplify its presence. When around Sue, the camera is in limerence, its obsession with her body’s perfection excessive, yes; but not unnecessary. The more Sue achieves throughout her time at Elisabeth’s former job, the more Elisabeth seethes with envy; the more obsession escalates, the more bitterness does; the more perfection, the more hatred. And lest we forget that these women are one (which the film will absolutely not let us), it is self-hatred we are talking about. Deranged, pathological, fatally destructive. Whereas in Revenge, Jen emerges triumphant against her abusers, Elisasue is unable to break her cycle of despair. But she was never going to win. She has been rendered her own abuser.
Through taking its premise off its hinges, The Substance manages to illustrate something true about the relentless chase of beauty and simultaneously cushion the comedic elements of its hair-raising body horror. If its editing style fetishizes Sue’s body, it increasingly humiliates Elisabeth’s, manifesting Sue’s inflating resentment towards her ugly self and crystallizing her need to cling onto her own existence at any cost. There is no doubt that Elisabeth’s rapidly aging and decaying body is depicted as the horror tale’s monster — in one of the most impactful scenes of the movie, when Elisabeth awakens after having been severely abused by Sue for a while over the allotted limit, the shots of her shockingly altered body parts are dramatically rhythmic and tense, indicative of dread that asks to be deemed important. Yet the rest of the scene’s comedic streak, as a debilitated Elisabeth tries to hide from Sue’s unaware lover, is impeccably orchestrated.
The Substance’s images of disfigurement, despite corresponding to age, toe the line between realistic and exaggerated to an almost campy degree. A saggy boob isn’t just a saggy boob but a loosely hanging blob, hair doesn’t simply turn gray but inexplicably fully disappears — by the time Elisabeth has reached the peak of her deterioration, before the film’s wild third act, she has contorted in ways not only physically disabling but hyperreal, her personhood almost buried behind her overpoweringly grotesque exterior. That is (every) Sue’s great terror, which takes into account who Sue is: a product of her environment, wrapped up in capitalistic and patriarchal ideations about the significance of physical beauty, conditioned into insecurity and vanity whose torturous, recklessness-prone forces never cease.
Contrary to critiques that accuse the film of sourcing its fear factor from the universal, inevitable fate real life has in store for all women (as opposed to something like David Cronenberg’s 1986 body horror classic The Fly which presents terror in the more cleancut form of the paranormal), I would like to argue that The Substance’s, well, substance is tethered, instead, to all the externally established projections onto the concept of the ugly, elderly body: societal, cultural and, therefore, personal. It’s a fear that hits close to home for all inner Sue’s — all shadow selves socially manufactured to live and breathe beauty. One so intense that, perhaps, even reaches beyond the typical associations of aging with plain old death. More than tangible ugliness, the fear of aging is a fear of incapacitation, undesirability, alienation, loneliness. Fake things. Things, to the inner Sue, worse than death.
From this standpoint, in its devastating acknowledgement that this is not a world built for the ugly and/or disabled, The Substance’s audacity to lean into the raw, brutal and nihilistic aspects of Beauty — no longer having it, striving for it, appeasing it — reads rather refreshing. To extract a definite fable out of the film is to attach liberal, didactic meaning to a final act whose outrageous liberties don’t seem interested in aiming that low, to ask for solutions undermines its masterful skill at reflection, and to demand a different course is to deny its tragedy. Elisasue is doomed to her ludicrous demise not because of her initiative to make herself viable in society again, but because she is a perfect victim of Beauty, the mortifying torment from which there is no escape.
When circumstances are such that translate the elderly body into a monstrosity and attribute transcendental perfection to youth, as Oscar Wilde succinctly writes, “Who, that knew anything about life, would surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught?”
Thank you always for reading. Comments are welcome and infinitely appreciated. What should I watch next?
For me where The Substance falls short is not its lack of fable, it’s that the film doesn’t appear to have anything fresh or interesting to say about beauty standards. Mining the violence of self-harm for shock value without contributing anything new feels disingenuous. There were really strong aspects of the film, and it was *almost* great, but ultimately it was a disappointment.