All Hail the New Flesh
For all its decorative asides about predatory male sexuality, ‘The Substance’ is most coherently understood as a morality tale about the folly of feminist illusions.
Watching writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s new film The Substance, I couldn’t decide whether it was supposed to be a body-horror movie or a deliciously funny All About Eve catfight about an ageing star (Demi Moore) who is outraged to discover that she is being replaced by a younger and lovelier version of herself named Sue (Margaret Qualley). What makes the film such fun is that it manages to be both.
In one scene, Sparkle shoves a turkey drumstick into her nubile rival’s flesh to create an unsightly bulge that could get her new show cancelled. Throughout the film, I was either shrieking with laughter during moments like these or cringing as large hypodermic needles with silo-like syringes forced massive quantities of brat-green liquid into the festering wounds of our two protagonists. I can’t even look at a medical needle (I once made the mistake of watching my blood being drawn and nearly passed out), and I’m glad I’m not overweight so I don’t have to contemplate pricking my thigh to inject Wegovy into the subcutaneous fat.
The film opens by introducing us to physically fading but still fabulously fit former movie star Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore). During a lunch meeting with her sexist Hollywood producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) on her 50th birthday, Elisabeth discovers that she is being booted from her long-running midlife gig fronting a Jane Fonda-style aerobics show. “After 50, it stops,” Harvey explains with a wink as he pushes mountains of greasy shrimp cocktail into his mouth with his fingers. Elisabeth is then shoved out the door with a French cookbook, a bouquet of roses, and a card from her former coworkers that reads, “You were amazing.” Were.
Dazed and traumatised after she sees a billboard for her show already being demolished, strip by ripped paper strip, she crashes her car and ends up in the hospital. There, a handsome young resident (Robin Greer) alert to her panic passes her a thumb-drive, the contents of which tell her how to acquire the “Substance,” a black-market elixir that will generate a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect version” of herself. Tormented by anxiety over every new age-line on her thinning face and every sag-line on her flattening buttocks, she can’t resist.
Elisabeth obtains her starter-pack from a dropbox in a seedy back-alley and takes it back to her sumptuous high-rise apartment, where she injects the “activator” fluid into her body, violently convulses, and then delivers a younger and more dewily beautiful version of herself from a vulva-like gash that opens up along her spine. This new creation is named Sue and boasts a perfectly ripe twenty-something body (Qualley’s natural breasts have been augmented by prosthetics) and an oestrogenic mass of tumbling dark curls. These are not discrete personalities. “Remember you are one,” a card in the Substance’s delivery box warns.
The process is harrowingly complex and messy. The opening along the entire length of Elisabeth’s back has to be laboriously stitched back together by Sue amid the bloody discharge that mimics childbirth. It also requires the daily administration of various life-sustaining fluids extracted from Elisabeth’s unconscious body and injected into Sue’s to keep her alive. Every day, Sue must administer intravenous nutrients to keep Elisabeth alive as she lies in a coma. After seven days—and this is the inviolable rule of the Substance’s tech-company manufacturer—the two must switch places. Elisabeth regains consciousness to lead a week of her usual middle-aged life, while Sue lies comatose, regenerating the fluids that will sustain her for the next week.
But because this is a horror movie, every seductive bargain is a Faustian pact, the price of which proves to be steeper and nastier than expected. Which means that soon enough, like the Bavarian clock in the classic Sid Caesar/Imogene Coca skit of the 1950s, the creaky, overly fussy mechanics of the week-on/week-off body-switch arrangement will go awry. Sue goes to Elisabeth’s studio, enchants her sleazeball producer with her youthful pizzazz, and takes over Elisabeth’s job. She rechristens the show “Pump It Up with Sue,” techno-pops the music, soups up Elisabeth’s tired 1980s vibe with hunky male backup dancers, and replaces Elisabeth’s VCR-era belted leotards with a scanty neon-hued workout costume.
Then, as we all knew she would, Sue starts to cheat. On the seventh evening, even though her time’s up, Sue steals more of the life-sustaining fluid from Elisabeth’s inert body so she can enjoy a night with the boy-toy she’s picked up at a bar. When Elisabeth awakens the next morning to begin her own week of life, she discovers that her right index finger has become a gnarly and arthritic claw. As the anonymous male voice from Substance headquarters explains over the phone, for every bit of life fluid extracted from the host’s body over the prescribed “balance” limit, the host’s body will irreversibly age. There is no going back.
Elisabeth and Sue are one, all right—united in their worship of youth and their contempt for the old, the weak, and the superannuated. But Elisabeth’s contempt takes the form of feverish revulsion about her own fading looks. As she anxiously prepares for a dinner date with Freddy (Edward Hamilton Clark), a beta admirer from her high-school days, Elisabeth smears her face with makeup and tries to hide her wrinkling neck beneath a scarf. Sue’s contempt, on the other hand, is the callous condescension of youth toward age, coupled with a 20-year-old’s inability to forgo instant gratification. It’s hard not to laugh as she unceremoniously drags Elisabeth’s unconscious body along the floor like an unwanted rug and then shoves it into a closet.
As time passes, Sue illicitly siphons ever-larger quantities of fluid out of Elisabeth to bend the time-sharing schedule in her favour, while Elisabeth rapidly deteriorates into a crone—her back hunches, her legs bulge edematously, her feet curl in on themselves like hooves, her thinning hair turns snow-white and then falls out completely. Furious, Elisabeth retaliates with a spiteful vengeance that reminded me of Robert Aldrich’s cult shocker What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, cooking up high-calorie recipes from her new French cookbook.
And as Elisabeth gorges on brains, grease, black boudin, and other organ meats that the French love and Americans find revolting (Fargeat, a Parisian by birth, seems to be having fun with her native cuisine), she creates a growing body mass for Sue to heave into the closet. When Sue awakens, she finds the once-pristine apartment strewn with booze bottles, food-encrusted plates, greasy carcasses, and other detritus. The drumstick that Sue discovers bulging in her lower back comes from the cookbook’s Christmas turkey stuffed with foie gras that Elisabeth has devoured in nearly its entirety. (This is an actual French dish for which recipes exist on the internet.)
All comes to a head when Sue discovers that she has exhausted her stockpile of life-serum from Elisabeth the day before she is supposed to cement her fame by fronting a televised New Year’s Eve gala arranged by Harvey. As Sue’s own body begins to disintegrate, she self-administers a final dose of the Substance in a desperate attempt to reverse the accelerating ageing process. The result is a chemical catastrophe that creates “Monstro Elisasue,” a grotesquely obese and deformed hybrid of her two selves festooned with rotting flesh and grimacing faces (including Elisabeth’s) like the suicides embedded in the trees in Gustave Doré’s illustration for Dante’s Inferno. With grim determination, she drags herself off to the TV studio for the film’s extravagantly disgusting climax.
Jamie Palmer
Fargeat is a somewhat unorthodox feminist (her 2017 debut feature was a hyper-violent rape-revenge film—the kind of exploitation fare that feminists once denounced), but she knows how to talk the talk. In a recent interview with Variety, she described The Substance as a “little stone in a huge wall” of “revolution” (although she never managed to define what the revolution was supposed to be against). “A FEARLESS TAKEDOWN OF ABSURD BEAUTY STANDARDS,” screams a Screen Rant review quoted in The Substance’s trailer. Other critics have identified “ageism” and “misogyny” as the film’s salient preoccupations.
The idea behind this reading seems to be that men—or “society” or perhaps a collective “we”—unfairly valorise young women as beautiful and desirable, but refuse for some arbitrary reason to find older women just as beautiful and desirable. Instead, we discard them, driving them into self-loathing, self-destruction, and despair. America Ferarra’s “You have to never get old” speech in Barbie was duly gushed over by feminists, and it seems to be the operating principle here, too. The sight of Elisabeth—a perfectly attractive woman for age 50 (Demi Moore is actually 61)—frantically plastering on makeup for her date with Freddy, and then standing him up because she is disgusted by her own reflection, is supposed to be tragic. She is Society’s victim.
What saves the film from tiresome sermonising is the fun Fargeat has prodding our disgust reflex. She may sloganeer like a feminist during promotional chats with the press, but her filmmaking suggests she’s more obviously a genre fan, and she plays the unfolding spectacle for shocks and laughs first and social criticism a distant second. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, another of Sue’s hunkster boyfriends, Troy (Oscar Lesage), tiptoes into the apartment hallway naked for an expected bedroom rendezvous with his date. When he finds the balding and toothless Elisabeth instead, he flees into the night clutching his pants.
Almost in spite of herself, Fargeat seems to understand that old age is in fact ugly and in many cases—wrinkles, moles, drooping breasts, thinning hair, disease—downright repulsive. It isn’t social conditioning that makes this so, it is cruel and indifferent biology. Ageing is flesh in the process of its inevitable decay and a harbinger of its owner’s inevitable death. As I watched Elisabeth hobble along the sidewalk on her crippled legs, I found myself thinking: “That’s me in about two months.” There isn’t much that women—or men, for that matter—can do about any of this except to avoid destructive habits, dress and act gracefully and age-appropriately, and enjoy the love and good things that other people might have brought into our lives.
The same is true of male desire. The biological purpose of sexual attraction is the reproduction of the species. Men do not instinctively find young women more alluring than middle-aged women because they've been brainwashed to respond that way by a misogynistic patriarchy. Youthful femininity is sexually appealing because its seductive allure—glowing skin, symmetrical features, firm muscles, clear eyes, thick hair—signal the health and fertility that will propel the partners’ genes into the future. Feminists may seethe as Fargeat’s camera rolls lovingly over Sue’s melon-shaped bottom when she rises like Venus from Elisabeth's inert husk, but they’re wilfully ignoring evolutionary reality. The Substance confronts us with the tension of generational resentment: the daughter flowering into the ripeness of her beauty just as the mother’s is starting to wane.
Fargeat’s film slyly reveals a second truth that seems to have escaped most critics’ notice—the gap between women’s stated desires and what they really want. Ever since the 1790s, when Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women should receive the same education as men and to be regarded as men’s equals in the public sphere, feminists have insisted that women be recognised and honoured for their achievements, not simply admired for their physical appearances and charm. Nearly 250 years later, women are free to achieve exactly that platform of respect without male opposition. In America, they can become philosophers like Martha Nussbaum, successful politicians like Gretchen Whitmer, or Supreme Court justices like Elena Kagan. And Elisabeth Sparkle, with her hit show, her wealth, and her enormous fan base, is an avatar of professional achievement.
One might expect Elisabeth to have followed Jane Fonda’s lead and quit the aerobics business before she hit the half-century mark. She could have monetised her celebrity via books, a YouTube channel, a podcast, exercise chains, branded products, and all the rest of it. But what Elisabeth actually longs for—to obsessive excess—is to be craved by men for her looks. And every time you read an op-ed—or a review of The Substance, for that matter—in which a successful and well-remunerated female writer complains about “absurd” or “ageist” or “misogynist” standards for judging women, you should know that what is actually making her miserable is that we don't live in a “society” that regards women of her own age and measure of pulchritude as pinnacles of fleshly desirability. It is as though women, for all their claims to seriousness of purpose, really are just as superficial as the men who used to rail against them said they were.
For all its decorative asides about predatory male sexuality, The Substance is most coherently understood as a morality tale about the folly of feminist illusions. It is filled with warning signs. On one of her trips to the dropbox to replenish her stocks of the Substance, Elisabeth encounters an ancient codger (Christian Erickson) in a diner who is even more decrepit than she. Spotting the birthmark on his hand, she realises that he is the host of the young doctor who introduced her to the Substance in the first place. “Has she started eating away at you?” the frail old man asks mournfully. He’s like the Old Man in Chaucer’s Pardoner's Tale warning of a path that leads to death.
Just as telling are the movie’s sets, costumes, and ambience, which, unlike the lead characters’ fixation upon beauty, are uniformly unappealing. Elisabeth’s palatial high-rise apartment with its stylish floor-to-ceiling windows may resemble a Billionaires’ Row fantasy, but it is also sterile and ugly. The white-tile bathroom resembles an operating theatre. Sue may be lovely, but her show is vulgar and garish. Elisabeth wraps herself in a ghastly oversized mustard-yellow overcoat that is probably The Substance’s single most hideous garment (but already a cult object: W magazine ran an article telling female fans where they could order knockoffs). The action takes place in a version of Los Angeles where even the landscape looks jaundiced, artificial, and alien—the city’s signature palm trees are discoloured and bleached pale (I discovered later that the movie was actually shot in France). It is a world in which everything is seriously awry because Elisabeth and Sue are seriously awry.
The Substance seems to be a huge hit, and it’s likely that a lot of women, young and old, are going to see it. It’s too bad that, amid the fashionable eagerness to glom onto #MeToo social messaging, many of them will miss the film’s most obvious and, in fact, cheeriest message: Life is short, and youth is shorter. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, and there will be no Monstro Elisasue.
The Substance is now streaming on MUBI and available as VOD.
