“This is My Life. It Always Will Be. There’s Nothing Else.”
“The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical.
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity”, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.” — John Berger, Ways of Seeing
This essay contains spoilers for The Substance
So I have seen The Substance, and I do have thoughts. First, the praise: it is a gorgeously rendered movie, excessive in its design and its gore. Demi Moore transcends the story with a real viscerality to her anger and pain, reminding us of the power she can bring to a performance. Margaret Qualley can convincingly bring a man to his knees with a pout, and the score is still thumping in my head hours later. But I do have thoughts, even as I enjoyed the experience, so let me bear them out.
I am not here, as is current fashion, to point out logical inconsistencies for the sake of it. I am not here to say, for example, how could Sue get a job without ID, why is there a moment of snow in Los Angeles, or that Demi Moore wears a thick, beautiful yellow coat constantly in not-coat-friendly Los Angeles, et cetera. This is, after all, a highly fictionalized universe: the role of an aerobics instructor on a network morning show is highly competitive (yet advertised in a newspaper), the similarly vague New Year’s Eve Show features topless dancers, again on network television, and so on.
This story seems to be more of a fable than anything else: Once upon a time, an old woman wanted to be young, and split her body in two. Her younger self became successful and the old woman became jealous, but when she tried to kill her younger self, the young woman overcame her. When the young woman realized she too would become ugly, she tried to split her body in two, but instead became a monster.
Within the boundaries of this fable, director Coralie Fargeat’s camera lingers: upon Dennis Quaid’s sweaty, gluttonous buffoon of a network executive, upon the asses of women, upon the wounds festering in Elizabeth Sparkle’s constantly brutalized body. And yes, it is brutal in every way it can be: first with Elizabeth’s body being destroyed like a living Portrait of Dorian Gray, then with any appearance of food, and finally with the degradation of Sue, and the birth of the monster herself: a lumpy mass of misplaced arms and a seeming half-dozen breasts and faces across her splattering torso.
Look, says the film, what society does to women. What women do to themselves for society! Look at this brutality, and for what?
The what, though, is the rub: my main issue with The Substance as a presumably feminist story, as a means of critiquing the gaze of patriarchy. It is fair to say that the thesis of The Substance is that society turns women into empty bodies, into vessels to be consumed, no matter how much they are destroyed. This is evidenced from the jump, in Quaid’s ogling and speeches about what “people want,” about how aging will destroy a woman’s life at 50. It is evidenced in Sue herself, the success she is able to find with her beauty, who hypnotizes everyone around her. But then: these are women who seem to want nothing but to be consumed. When Elizabeth learns her job is ending, she has no life to go back to — no friends or family, no sympathetic colleagues. Even when she prepares for a date, it is only because the man she has called — who is clearly not in her league, who is “in shock” when she asks him out — is someone who thinks she is pretty.
This is a woman who, according to the text, has won an Academy Award, who has a star on the Walk of Fame. She has wealth, a history, an apartment full of stuff. True, you could argue that her isolation and narcissism is part of the story and the tragedy, but I find that approach a bit lazy and tried; the beautiful woman is a victim of the patriarchy and that is why she is beautiful, ad infinitum. Elizabeth chooses the Substance because she seems to have no other choice; her lack of interiority makes it easier for the plot to move forward to the weird shit, but it also makes the weird shit easier to watch. I did not pity Elizabeth Sparkle, despite how great Demi Moore’s performance was. There was no other choice she could have made, no life that would be hers; all she has to survive, apparently, is her own beauty and the vanity that requires. Sue is even more shallow, without even a surname, so easily getting Elizabeth’s old job without breaking a sweat, becoming America’s Sweetheart. She is gorgeous, and horny, and cruel. We live in a society.
Despite the Substance (the liquid, not the film) coming off as a miracle drug and the Los Angeles around it being even more obsessed with youth and beauty than it is now, there is only one other person who appears to use it: the nurse that Elizabeth meets at the hospital is the younger self, and she meets the older man later. The younger self wears makeup, in this world a feminine feature — his sexuality is not explored, of course, but it would be in poor taste if the only other person who uses this procedure being a gay man, right?
(Also, not to nitpick again, but how can Elizabeth meet both the younger man at the hospital and his older self, if they are also taking the week on/week off schedule? Is the young man also cheating, like Sue does? How is the young man, who needed so desperately to be beautiful, a nurse in a hospital and not also in the entertainment business?)
After all, if there’s one thing to critique about the way beauty is performed in American society, it is the ubiquity of it: trends capture more and more people over social media, the shapes of bodies and faces altered with surgery, fillers, extensions, contouring. You only need watch the recent discourse around the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives to see jokes about how hard it is to tell those women apart. And yet — nobody else takes the Substance, at least not that we know, although the building Elizabeth visits for her refills has dozens of lockers in it. Are Sue’s backup dancers and the men she fucks also children of the Substance? Are there other celebrities like Elizabeth who have aged out of desirability and taken the shot, or possibly refused it, or stopped after learning about the effects of it?
That is not the movie Fargeat made, which is fine. What she made is still beautiful, terrifying, and deeply visceral. And yet the absence of humanity in its protagonist, in her lack of desire for anything but her own eventual downfall, created an emptiness that allows the film to be, for lack of a better term, very silly.
The final half hour of the film, which begins with Sue waking up and beating Elizabeth (now in the shape of a wretched, hunchbacked, saggy-breasted hag) to a bloody death across her apartment, tumbles into something so truly bizarre that one feels encouraged to laugh at the absurdity of it. Sue’s body falls apart — including her ear plopping off into her outstreched hand — and when she tries to re-inject the Substance she begs it to “please make me a better version of myself,” before dropping dead. The monster that splits out of her body, a cross between the Elephant Man and the Toxic Avenger but made of the bodies of women — carries herself with a pitying score of music in the background, getting into the studio with a poorly assembled dress and a picture of Elizabeth plastered to her face, before the Grand Guignol really begins on the aforementioned New Year’s Eve show. At the end the body has fully, literally disintegrated into a pile of gore, before its final living mass of flesh, Elizabeth’s face, crawls onto her own star on the walk of fame, and dissolves.
In thinking on this film, I am reminded of another recent bit of entertainment that ends with, arguably, too much blood: Jamie Lloyd’s staging of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Blvd.
Norma Desmond, like Elizabeth Sparkle, is a star that’s moved past her prime, secluded in a fine estate in Los Angeles. Billy Wilder did not give her an injection of eternal youth, but her own madness does not need it: she preens and begs to be seen, she latches onto a young lover, Joe, and swears she will die without him. When Joe finally leaves, she watches, crazed, and vows to keep him. “Nobody ever leaves a star. That’s what makes one a star.”
This after Joe has given her plain advice that seems to speak directly to The Substance, to the Elizabeth Sparkle longing to be Sue: “There’s nothing tragic about being 50, not unless you try to be 25.”
In Jamie Lloyd’s production, Norma’s subsequent murder of Joe is a bloody mess, covering her from jaw to ankle in gore. Norma Desmond is a larger than life monster, but in every performance I’ve seen of her, from Nicole Scherzinger (who is now on Broadway, though I saw her in London) to Glenn Close to the original Gloria Swanson, her childlike desperation always comes through. She is a star who has only understood love as a transaction between herself and fans, and is empty without it. When her psychosis breaks and she thinks she is back on set — really a ploy from her faithful butler and the police to take her into custody — she can’t act. In what might be the only vulnerable moment for Norma in the film, she stops herself: “I can’t go on with the scene.” she says, “I’m too happy.”
In Sunset Blvd, the industry is clearly to blame for Norma’s situation, as is the audience, the miniature society of entertainment that has become all she knows. “There’s nothing else — just us and the cameras and those wonderful people out there in the dark…” she says, before she is ready for her closeup.
Perhaps Elizabeth Sparkle is not meant to be the greatest star of them all; perhaps we are meant to look at her job as an aerobics television instructor as far too small to be worth the destruction brought on by The Substance. Her world is even more insular than Norma Desmond’s; she has her apartment, Dennis Quaid (his character is named “Harvey,” subtle), and, perhaps, a high school acquaintance who thinks she is still beautiful. This narrowness makes her fate inevitable, but not as compelling. The Substance remains a fable, with a moral we already agree with, it is comforting in its grotesquerie. Yes, it is well made, at times beautiful, performances firing on all cylinders. But it only holds a mirror up to itself, the glass distorted and a little clear, yet reflecting little else.
