“Internalized misogyny” is not a phrase you’ll hear me say very often, but I think it’s weirdly appropriate when it comes to Coralie Fargeat’s critically acclaimed body horror film, The Substance, which has become—rather bizarrely—a massive hit since its release last year. Demi Moore won a Golden Globe for her performance as washed-out celebrity, Elizabeth Sparkle, a name that’s about as subtle as the rest of the film.
The Substance is an on-the-nose parody of celebrity beauty standards especially as they apply to aging female stars. The entire movie—which is a grueling 142 minutes long, about half an hour longer than it needed to be, yet so poorly paced that the slog felt paradoxically rushed—reminded me of the 1992 Robert Zemeckis film Death Becomes Her, and it suffers from many of the same problems. Chief among these is the very peculiar tendency toward punishing the film’s female protagonists as frequently and horrifically as possible.
Both films deal with the absurd criteria of good looks imposed on women in our fashion culture, but both films seem determined to make those same women suffer, while depicting men as commonly clumsy jesters whose biggest offenses are wandering eyes. The men in The Substance objectify women to a caricatured extent, however, it is the women who fall apart, who turn violently against others, who pay the highest price, all for our entertainment.
The Substance needs to have its cake and eat it too, at least as far as objectification is concerned. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie that lingers so long on the seductive bodies of beautiful naked women. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are in a full demo here and of course you can say it’s all a satire component, but it’s also obviously designed to be arousing (before things go wrong). Moore and Qualley’s past glances hang in front of us and then eroded relentlessly, grotesquely, in a series of small vignettes that do nothing to elicit sympathy for those women, who are also the ultimate culprits of the abuse. By the end of the film, he despised everyone, male or female. That’s a feeling I also had when I saw Death Becomes Her, although perhaps to a lesser extent. Both films tell us, “These criteria of past appearance are absurd!Then joy completely destroys women who suffer from these norms. Is it parody or pornographic torture?
Last night I checked the reviews of Death Becomes Her and found this review by David Denby from New York Magazine. “The butt of the film’s jokes is female vanity,” Denby writes, “but since Zemeckis shows no hint of affection for the actresses (or any of the men), one feels humiliated just by seeing their raw wit. “This can also be applied, in a way, to Fargeat’s film. There is no hint of affection for the female protagonists of The Substance, and the men are just caricatures. We are here to watch the former suffer and blame the latter. None of this turns out to be genuine.
Let me be frank: the premise of the film is absurd. This makes no sense. Basically, Elisabeth Sparkle de Moore is a concentrated celebrity who still makes, among other things, “Buns of Steel”-style workout videos, which I guess is still something other people do. She hears her rude and sexist boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), in the genderless bathroom, talk about how he needs to get rid of her and track down someone younger. This is meant to motivate sympathy for Sparkle’s plight, but I have to ask: Harvey’s disgusting verbiage and lack of empathy aside, is he wrong?Is it moderate to hire a 62-year-old who hosts a morning aerobics show?This would have worked better if the role in some sort of drama or even soap opera where ageism was a little less practical.
Anyway, Sparkle gets into a twist of fate, and while she’s at the doctor, someone slips a flash drive and a note into her pocket. “This replaced my life,” the note says, and in the player is a brief video about a mysterious substance that necessarily allows you to clone yourself, only your clone will be a younger, older, more charming edition of YOU. There is a number to call and Sparkle calls it. The catch? You will have to swap each and every week with your double. One week in your old, unhappy frame and the next, further away. This is a ridiculously gruesome cloning procedure in which the new you is “born” from a split in the back, followed by nutrition that really deserves to require medical assistance to implement well.
The Bottom
Basically, the “new” will have to sew up the “old” who has returned. Then there’s a daily booster that must be injected and the comatose frame that sits there in his completely non-sterile bathroom for a week, plus a food package that must be prepared, all intravenously, for the other edition to survive. What a test! Sparkle and her new person, Sue, have to do all of this without any instruction or help, which is the first time I’ve rolled my eyes at the movie. It’s not actually DIY. If you’ve never had an IV before, it’s not a sure thing. If you haven’t stitched a primary wound, you probably won’t get it right the first time. And what about antibiotics, wound disinfection and blood loss? Even a sutured wound of this size, left in a bathroom for a week, would almost in fact become horribly infected.
I know, it’s a sci-fi horror movie, and I suppose if I can settle for the beginning of this magical substance, I’ll be able to look past all the main points, but that’s not how it works. I want the main points to make sense so I don’t have to think about them. When things like this don’t sit well with me, I just get bored and distracted.
It’s even worse. Once Sue is “born” and has done everything necessary to stay alive, she heads to the studio where Sparkle worked to audition for (you guessed it!) some other aerobics education program, which in this universe is the most important thing that makes you famous. Imagine! Of course, she gets the assignment because she’s stunning (we know this because we just spent five minutes watching her pose naked in the mirror over the limp form of a naked Demi Moore) and Harvey is tacky and shallow and just needs sexy young women. He stars in his aerobic dance elegance shows. What a monster.
She gets the assignment and things go well until she makes the decision that instead of coming back after seven days, she will enlarge her for a few hours so she can have a drink and fuck. What she doesn’t know is that this will have terrible consequences because no detailed orders are included in The Substance. She sucks some extra fluid from Elisabeth’s back and takes care of a handsome guy, then comes back (at this point she also built a secret door in the bathroom that leads to a secret closet because I guess it somehow has a pretty amazing structure). , and just employing a guest room or something like that wouldn’t be that cool and would consume a lot of run time.
When Elisabeth wakes up, her index finger is necrotic. Now it is an old woman’s crumpled greenhouse. She is angry. His other self doesn’t follow the rules!
the background
From there, there’s a back and forth between the two selves as young Sue steals her older sister’s life force, and older Elisabeth Sparkle remains furious, falling into a kind of overlooked madness until Sue makes a decision she’ll never make. time. And I’m sorry, but none of this makes sense.
Look, if I have a miracle drug that makes me look 20 again, great. I can spend a week as an edition of my 20 years, then come back and be 43 for a week. Having the brain of a 43-year-old man and the structure of a 20-year-old would be like having the most productive superpowers of all time. If I can live the two weeks, why not? And if I know that I have to step back every week or face terrible consequences for my younger and older self, I will do it without a doubt.
But this movie makes it pretty clear that Elisabeth and Sue are experiencing totally different lives. Elisabeth has no memories of what Sue does while she’s in her young, hot body. Sue has no memories of Elisabeth cooking up a storm and leaving the house trashed, the windows stuck all over with newspaper, food everywhere. Both are shocked and dismayed when they “wake up” at the start of their week.
It is evident that they know others, but they do not live the everyday lives of others, so they do not hesitate to fuck others and the resentment grows rapidly. They don’t even think about seeking to talk to others. Maybe leave a note, make a truce, find out how everything works so that they don’t die. No, you see, the point of this movie is that women don’t get along, not even with themselves. They only seek to destroy others. What a fun and inspiring message!
Okay, so I have to ask: what’s the point of taking this drug?Let’s say you’re Elisabeth Sparkle and taking this drug only makes you pass out for a week and then wake up with various deformations thanks to your adjusted ego. Sue, whose time you can’t even live without. Why take the Substance to begin with?Elisabeth doesn’t get affection and adoration like Sue, nor does she sleep with sexy young men, she wakes up just when it’s all over, graying and sickly. At least in Death Becomes Her, the miracle drug worked for them in genuine ways. time. In The Substance, it doesn’t make sense to do all that. Why deserve to take a drug that gives me a younger, more beautiful, and fit body for a week if I didn’t feel the benefits myself, and only felt the negative effects?After? It’s a stupid concept, and yet this film wins the award for Best Screenplay.
Oh, you see, it’s an allegory! It’s about younger generations taking priority over older generations, about the inordinate price we put on young people and looking smart, on mothers and daughters, on fame and fortune. Blah blah blah. I don’t mind. Allegory only works if the story makes sense. This story doesn’t make sense. And the message is banal, superficial. This has already been done and better. I read The Giving Tree through Shel Silverstein. And honestly, who among us doesn’t know that looking smart and young are overrated, especially in Hollywood, and yet, no matter what we say, we still long for the structure we had? Tell me anything I don’t know. Yes, some gritty horror stuff is very disturbing, but that’s not enough to make it a smart movie.
In the final act, Sue has been draining Elisabeth for months, but now she has run out of magical fluid (she sucked Elisabeth’s shell) and is forced to turn back or die. Elisabeth is now a hunchbacked old woman, absolutely devoid of her past appearance and all that remains of her youth, and she has the opportunity to stop, to put an end to all this.
But as he prepares to do so, he has doubts. ” I hate myself,” she said. “You’re the only kind thing in me. ” It’s stupid to say under the circumstances, because Elisabeth rarely lives Sue’s life, even though the guy on the phone helps them tell them that “you’re one. “Obviously, they are not one. Elisabeth has been absolutely destroyed through Sue and the Substance, but she still makes the decision to let Sue live, avoiding termination midway. Besides, this sentence is so ambitious that I laughed when he said it.
Sue wakes up and . . . I guess she’s very angry that Elisabeth was going to terminate her, though really this is just an excuse for a big fight scene where Sue savagely beats her elderly counterpart to death, smashing her face into the mirror, kicking her across the room, kicking her over and over until only a bloody, broken heap remains. You see, this movie is a satire of unreasonable beauty standards, so we must punish and destroy the women who participate in this culture as horrifically as possible.
It’s gross and excessive even for a horror movie, though I think what bothered me most is just how illogical the whole thing was. Sue knows she needs her counterpart to survive. Killing Elisabeth means she won’t be able to rejuvenate. And sure enough, she starts to lose teeth at the big New Year’s Eve show she’s starring in. It’s a cabaret show being broadcast to 50 million households on network TV . . . and I guess in this universe, that involves a couple dozen topless cabaret dancers. (This movie pretends to be a critique of the male gaze but takes every opportunity to throw hot naked women in front of the screen, and then use them either sexually or in the most violent and bloody manner possible, or both).
Sue runs back to her apartment and uses the rest of the activating substance despicably, despite the “one use only” warning, and from her back is born a monster, a grotesque pile of flesh that swings with portions of structure horribly sewn together like some. The monster taps a photo of Sparkle on his face and returns to the screen, where he passes through a safe place (you might think it could be tricky, but it is). Not a problem!) and disturbs the New York display in an impressive and bloody way.
The Substance
Are we meant to sympathize with this creature when other people scream in terror and call it a monster and attack it and scream for it to be annihilated? Has this movie done anything to make us sympathize with any of those characters, even that hideous thing that literally spits (through one of its mouth-like orifices) a disembodied breast onto the stage? Are we meant to feel bad when we realize that we, too, would probably be shocked and terrified by the appearance of this monster?
Because I don’t feel bad. The creators of the film went to great lengths to make the creature as monstrous and disgusting as possible. “I’m still me!” He cries out desperately, “My call is Elizabeth, my call is Sue! But no, not really. Sue wasn’t even Elizabeth, and Elisabeth wasn’t even Sue, so why do we think that this Frankenstein monster that just emerged moments before? Do you have memories or consciences? If that were the case, you would never have left the apartment (Elisabeth couldn’t even leave the apartment to meet an old classmate, in one of the most suggestive and evocative moments of the film) . scenes).
At one point the monster sprays a fire hydrant worth of blood on the entire studio audience. But the satire has run dry by now. The creature is too far removed from anything even remotely human to be real. This is not an Elephant Man scenario, or poor hunchbacked Quasimodo. The movie takes things so far that any message about “inner beauty” is lost in the stampede.
Ultimately, while The Substance had an intriguing start, most of the film and especially its cringe-worthy ending were reasonable surprise values and amateur satire built on the flimsiest premise imaginable. Even the camera paintings are reasonable. Lots of zoomed-in shots and a wide-angle lens to make us dizzy. Very bright colors (a long bright orange hall) and extravagant costumes, such as Harvey’s floral suits, give the film a garish, distinctive look.
Lots of style, sure, but ultimately, and perhaps ironically, very little substance.
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