Housekeeping:
Pre-order Intermezzo to join our book club! It starts on October 1 if everything goes to plan and I receive my book in time!
This post is far more severe than I would prefer, but sometimes you see The Substance and go loco. It doesn’t really contain spoilers, but if that’s something you are worried about then you need to grow up. If you would like to read about when I saw Barbie and went loco about the same things, feel free.
Early in The Substance, Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle gets in a terrible car crash. She has just learned her own TV show will be replacing her with anyone younger, and driving home is distracted by a billboard of her face being defiled. As her car is crushed into a deafening, motion-sick-inducing spin, the audience goes with her; we’ve hardly met Elisabeth Sparkle, and already we are tumbling with her in a kinetic, ugly, ball, being asked to anticipate her bloody unraveling. But she’s fine. A doctor recognizes her from TV, a since defunct film career, delivering the news with a smile. All we can see of Elisabeth then is her naked back, its aged looseness and dark unevenness emphasized with a clinical light from above. She’s crying.
I assumed Elisabeth would have preferred to have died, quickly and violently, than to leave the hospital without a TV show nor solution to the problem: she is old. Watching Demi Moore, herself a forgotten starlet, heave—with a 61-year-old back and a face that defies both time and beauty—I completely understood why Elisabeth Sparkle or Demi Moore might rather be dead than old, fat, or ugly. The film suggests a quiet misery of Demi Moore’s real flesh is as loudly frightening and ugly as a car crash. I thought I might cry, too.
The Substance does not take place in time or space. An aesthetic amalgamation of the 1980s and 2010s, its world renders Los Angeles a panopticon of celebrity à la Ally Maine or, more aptly, Baby Annette; a woman named Elisabeth Sparkle went from winning an Oscar to manning at-home fitness videos, which are broadcast on television and widely beloved. The film’s title is referring to magic, Brat-colored goo that makes you birth a younger version of yourself from your spine, a process that doesn’t seem to hurt or cause any real biological trouble, if used correctly. Much of the film is pornographic close-ups of prosthetic boobs and butt cheeks strapped to Margaret Qualley, Elisabeth Sparkle’s spine baby named “Sue.” It is funny, on purpose and not, and it is knowingly, cloyingly obvious. There is no way to talk about The Substance without sounding reductive; the process by which women strive to be beautiful to men is depressing and unfair. But the film declares that platitude in plain language, seemingly asking why it feels overwrought to simply describe a condition in which we live. So, before you write off that question, say The Substance is mean or ugly (it is both), do you know the answer? If we, cinema-goers, women, socialist feminists, have moved beyond the question of capitalist beauty, why should it be such a discursive fixture?
The plot of Death Becomes Her is that Bruce Willis leaves dowdy Goldie Hawn for hot Meryl Streep. Goldie Hawn gets even fatter and dowdier, before rejoining society years later, skinny and beautiful. Now Meryl is the aging loser, until she discovers the same panacea Goldie did, being given a magic potion by Isabella Rossellini. Both the women are young and beautiful, but they also want to kill each other. Antics ensue until they realize they really just want to kill Bruce Willis, and the film less so concludes than skips through (kind, harmless) jokes about how the beauty women chase can never satisfy, and that two women being friends can be so crazy.
The Substance is not far off, with Elisabeth Sparkle being slipped a phone number for “The Substance” at the doctor, just like Meryl’s “Madeline Ashton” (lol). But The Substance is far more interested in the bureaucracy of Isabella Rossellini’s potion: much like staying skinny, gua sha-ing, applying retinoids and niacinamide in the right order, tweezing, dyeing, topping off Botox, or getting a prescription for and taking Ozempic every month for the rest of your life, what if taking the potion required some sort of boring, exhausting routine?
“The Substance” is a slickly marketed but eerily circumspect company that makes clients call a phone number to get an address, wait for a key card to come in the mail, go to the address and use the key card to open a weird building, and walk too far into the building to a locker, where their substance is waiting. The Substance (product and company have the same name, I guess) is actually a 3-part medical procedure that is in a box that looks like a Sephora package. When you take 1) the activator, you fall into stasis to birth a spine baby. The younger you must then sew you back up and use 2) the food to sustain you while they live for the next 7 days. After 7 days, the food runs out, so they have to 3) plug themselves back into you, so that your body can recharge the food. After you live for 7 days, you have to go back to the lockers to pick up more The Substance. This is the funniest premise of anything I have encountered in quite some time.
As Elisabeth Sparkle and Sue are first navigating this procedure, they spend a lot of time looking at all the supplies—plastic wrapping, needles, labeled vials, differently colored liquid—making faces like, “huh?”. When things start to go south, Sue zapping Elisabeth’s life by borrowing “food” from her limp body, not following the 7-day-switch-off rule, they both call The Substance to complain. The Substance responds by asking them if they would like to stop taking The Substance, to which they groan in frustration and say “no, nevermind.” How could they stop? How could the torture of a weekly, involved 3-step medical procedure that is making you insane and killing you be any more torturous than being old or ugly?
Years ago, I went on spironolactone for acne. I have had a prescription for spironolactone 2 or 3 times, from 2 or 3 different doctors. It never really worked and I eventually went on Accutane. Now, my skin is pretty good, but requires constant upkeep. Slathering my face in tretinoin (which my insurance won’t pay for) and having to take antibiotics for flair ups every so often is expensive and tiring, so I want to try spironolactone again. 30 days ago, I paid $64.60 (what would have been $323 without insurance) to see my dermatologist for 20 minutes in an appointment I had to make a year in advance. Because the appointment was about checking for skin cancer and not acne, I forgot to ask her in person for a prescription for spironolactone. I remembered the other day and messaged her office. The response I got was that she would have to see me again in person, and that the soonest appointment is in 4 months.
My next best option is a service like Nurx, which charges you $65 to request medicine from a doctor. I could then get it sent to my normal pharmacy and end up paying the same amount that I would to my dermatologist. But every month I want to renew it on Nurx, I have to pay another $65, while my dermatologist would renew it for free for one year after my initial visit. I also have to fill out a laborious questionnaire on Nurx, take pictures of my face, and engage in a likely 4-day online chat with a “medical professional” who will ask me questions about my history, vitamins, and blood levels that I don’t know the answers to.1 I don’t want to do any of this: I want to watch Addison Rae’s Guide to Face-Cupping and Day-to-Night Glam. But if I don’t, I will either have acne or spend hours every day acquiring, paying for, applying, and monitoring skincare products. All of these options overwhelm me.
In the film’s most harrowing scene, Elisabeth Sparkle is overwhelmed while getting ready for a date. A fellow The Substance user warns her that “it’s hard” to remember that you, and not just the younger version of you, “deserve to exist.” So she perks herself up, tearing apart the apartment to assemble a nice outfit. She’s happy, but as she’s leaving she catches a glimpse of a Sue billboard that has since been erected outside her window. Rushing back to the bathroom to add more concealer, finesse her bangs, now she’s running late. At the door, she is halted again by Sue’s young, supple neck. Elisabeth returns to the bathroom, frantically covering her neck with a scarf and adding too much blush and lipstick. At the beginning of this sequence, Demi Moore looks unbelievably beautiful, maybe 40 or 45. At the end, Elisabeth Sparkle looks scary: gaudy, crazy, and 61-years old.
Increasingly resentful and depressed, she indulges in plates of wings and chocolate, and in a hysterical frenzy cooks a French meal. Ribboning batter onto the counter, tearing raw chicken flesh, beating eggs into her face, the scene is grotesque. It follows earlier sequences, wherein Dennis Quaid’s (inspired) chauvinist-in-entertainment smushes prawns between his fingers, stuffs them in his mouth, and wipes the residue on the table cloth. Amidst the guts and shells, a fly squirms and dies in a glass of wine. Shown and heard in loud, bright, angular close-ups, food becomes so acutely disgusting it gives Sue nightmares of a chicken leg emerging from her flesh, intact, like the baby Xenomorph.2
The film’s representation of food, and of Demi Moore’s aging face, is cruel. A movie about bodies bloodily birthed from spines, and, in its final act, imploding outward in a shower of guts, it couldn’t be clearer in saying that food and age are gross and scary. Margaret Qualley’s prosthetic enhancements are likewise contrasted with Demi Moore’s (prosthetic) decrepit spine, breasts, and vagina as she is aged into oblivion, leaving no room for the actresses’ real bodies. When they find their way in, though—Qualley pulling at her flesh in a nightmare or Demi’s face as jump scare—it is frightening. Not only because the movie sets it up that way, with effects and editing, but because it takes at face value that being a real woman with flesh and wrinkles is abjectly horrifying.
Once I took my shirt off in front of my mom and she gasped like people in my screening of The Substance. Every day for a year I had been vomiting into my mouth and couldn’t walk short distances because I was so underweight. My mom was now telling me I looked “scary like a ghoul” (this is kind of always true), and yet I had never been more satisfied with my body. Not because I liked the way it looked, but because it felt good to not have to worry about food; I’ve had an eating disorder since I can remember, and an abusive relationship was making me so upset and busy that I couldn’t eat. I was so emotionally and physically distracted from my own body that a new misery overtook it, letting me off the hook of being scared or over-controlling of food. Seeing someone react to my body as if it were a monster, always feeling that food is scary, much of The Substance felt less mean than blunt, less silly than aware.
The film is cheap and shrill and it goes on for too long, giving itself too much slack to over-explain things it already said quite clearly. There are interesting ideas about selfhood, motherhood, and medicine that are not fully realized. But its thesis is that women are being made crazy by a reality: if you don’t do this stuff to your body, you might not lose your job or end up alone (though you might), but you will be more invisible than you would be if you did. That is not a myth, and no amount of therapizing, no (radically, correctly, necessarily) reading the analytic of “fatness” or “ugliness” or “oldness” as mean—colonial, racist, heteronormative—makes its bearing on our visibility untrue.3 Especially in the milieu of Elisabeth Sparkle, if you want to be rewarded on the level of celebrity, you must be young and skinny. If you want to feel in control, the affective metric with which colonial capitalism operates, as a woman, your body will always be your enemy.
Sorry if this is reductive, too, but in “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Donna Haraway writes:
“The acid tools of post-modernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves in the interests of survival. We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body. But with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the naïveté of innocence. But what would another political myth for socialist feminism look like? What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective — and, ironically, socialist feminist?”
I cite this passage from 1987 to say that we are not “post-” anything: caring about how we look to men in the same way we did 100 years ago, or acknowledging it in severity or jest. It seems painfully dumb to react to a movie with a story about myself, but every day now a new celebrity—ranging in generation and normalcy from Mindy Kaling to Lana Del Rey—is much skinnier than the last time I saw them. We are still looking for magical substances to make us likable, and then nervously denying it so that we don’t accidentally bounce the psychic harms done to us onto others. My affliction of corporeal obsession is not only mine and I wish we could all admit that and laugh: the irony, in Haraway’s words, of being “excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body.” Perhaps I was so moved by The Substance because of its shrill cheapness, the plain language with which it says what I know is true. My life, and at some juncture now or later, yours, is a relentless grotesquery of real body, which doesn’t exist in its misery without the possibility of fake bodies. Don’t overthink it: Demi Moore is Elisabeth Sparkle, and Margaret Qualley is Sue.
Ask me how I know this.
This is one of what felt like one million citations of “classic” horror (blood shower in Shining-esque hallway; Demi’s back constantly in the Possession pose). Depending on my mood, these could be annoying or clarifying to the film’s knowingly cheap transformation of Death Becomes Her into a horror movie.
I, of course, acknowledge that there are unsaid complications to these frameworks. The film itself is somewhat “about” how, when you get too much work done, you become a monster.
really liked this -- need to give Substance more thought though it's our pact in life to disagree on movies 85% of the time
relatedly: I have extra tretinoin if you want it...
You can’t spell The Substance without Sue.