The Substance (2024) Is A Superficial Movie That Makes Me Think About Alienated Bodies

22 9月 2024

This post features unmarked spoilers for The Substance including its ending and discusses its body horror elements.

I was skeptical at first.

The trailer was one of many that didn't look good, but the rave reviews from critics and friends with good taste in movies made my partner and I decide to see this as a movie date that afternoon.

The first few minutes offended my developing slow cinema sensibilities: the theater acoustics amplified the already disgusting slurping of Harvey, a TV producer, eating cocktail shrimp. He lectures the main character, Elizabeth Sparkle, on the expiration date of women, specifically in reference to menopause. Closeups of his fingernails, shrimp shells, and teeth chewing the shrimp meat flood the screen. Everything in the scene is excessive: so much raw color, squishy sounds, facial pores -- I'm being held hostage by the movie.

But at the end of the movie, we came out of the theater calling it a masterpiece of body horror cinema. We are still reeling from the glorious audiovisual violence inflicted on the screen; it is as if the movie vomited on us and we were happy to receive it.

I didn't expect to love this movie, and I want to know why I did.

For one thing, I don't find hyper-stylized work very interesting. While I enjoy strong art direction as much as any Criterion Collection bro, a movie needs to use those elements to tell a memorable story.

And the plot is a well-trodden one. Elizabeth is a washed-up celebrity barely surviving on her Jane Fonda-like exercise show, but she has turned 50 and the TV people want her out. The movie really begins when she discovers The Substance, a miraculous drug that can separate a "better version" of her from her body.

And by separate, I mean that a new and younger body grows out of her older body. Enter Sue, a younger, sexier version of herself. Sue gets the chance to replace Elizabeth on her own exercise TV show.

This sounds like a miracle, but Faustian tales like this and The Picture of Dorian Gray always have a catch: both Elizabeth and Sue are still connected, like the common motif of an egg yolk splitting into two. If Sue doesn't feed Elizabeth or switch to her in time, part of Elizabeth will rot and degenerate.

It's very obvious what the movie is satirizing: how beauty standards alienate women. Hollywood and other industries extract value from past and successful women until they are obsolete and then abandoned; these vampires then go after younger women who conform to the ever-restrictive and higher standards of feminine beauty. While substances like Ozempic may allow these "older" women to go back into business, the commodification dynamic is still the same: Elizabeth becomes alienated from her Sue self as Sue takes more and more of her existing beauty for herself.

In fact, Elizabeth and Sue are so alienated that they see each other as different people locked in a struggle for their own survival. At one point, Elizabeth trashes the apartment to make a point to Sue: this "old hag" who gave birth to her has autonomy too, and she deserves a say in what Sue is up to. Sue, on the other hand, has a nightmare where the chicken drumsticks Elizabeth has been munching on might protrude out of her body while she's filming an episode.

The only closure offered by the unnamed organization that stocks The Substance is a willful termination of the Sue self. The movie offers no easy resolution: the damage in the treatment (or what the organization calls "The Experience") stays with the body. Elizabeth, already an old body, has to kill the ambitious, youthful side of herself that the organization exploited. It is a fitting tragic fate for a woman who pursued the glories of youth only to cut her life short.

But the movie doesn't go the girlboss Hegelian route: she couldn't kill Sue and reach a higher path of enlightenment. No, Sue retaliates and the movie goes on.

And that's what makes the movie great: it continues to devour itself.

If the movie had ended earlier, it would have been a shallow piece of entertainment. A pretty movie that says nothing we haven't heard before: male gaze, self-destructive beauty ideals, etc. Indeed, you could walk out of the theater thinking this movie has nothing original to say. Writes Dana Stevens for Slate,

What made it so tedious and grating, for me, was not the concept but the execution. Fargeat approaches her material with a hatchet, hacking methodically away but rarely sculpting with any nuance. Fans of The Substance may object that her bluntness is a deliberate style choice, and the filmmaker would no doubt agree. But setting style aside (to the extent that that is ever possible), what exactly are the ideas at play in The Substance? If the film is meant as a social satire, it’s hard to discern its target, other than an abstract notion of oppressive “beauty standards” in which neither the beauty industry nor social media plays any significant role.

I agree with Stevens here, especially when she later says "that the message and the vehicle used to convey it are too much in sync. Fargeat’s clobbering approach leaves no space for the audience to speculate, to make our own connections and discoveries." There is a reason Miriam Balanescu writing for the BBC calls it "2024's most divisive film". I totally understand why people might be critical of its politics; a good portion of the movie is devoted to butt shots, and it reminds me of the impossibility of making an anti-war movie without glorifying some aspect of war violence.

But while I concede that the movie lacks anything original to say, I cannot help but find the way the movie replaces subtext with body horror quite compelling. The movie likes to scream lines that foreshadow Elizabeth's demise into the audience's senses. There is comedy in how much Elizabeth and Sue want to show and hide Elizabeth's portrait, respectively. And the way the same guys would act differently between the two characters is also quite funny.

In fact, I'm pretty sure I would hate the movie if it tried to play smart once. The movie seems to acknowledge it is derivative and never becomes some artsy-fartsy budget horror movie -- it is a high budget movie with b-horror movie sensibilities. Because the movie is lecturing the audience on how to think about the beauty industry, it doesn't try to tap the audience with their elbow and chuckle at how smart that metaphor is. It elbows the audience and makes them submit to its metaphoric violence.

I don't see it as a provocative feminist film, but as a slaughterhouse of the senses. Like the flashing images that may trigger epilepsy and repetitive drones in SOPHIE's "Faceshopping" music video, the film wants to terrorize the audience into awareness of the dynamics of commodification. This maximalist ethos could become another example of collusion with the enemy -- one audience member wrote on a review card that they got an erection watching Demi Moore's performance as Elizabeth at the theater my partner and I went to see -- and I can see the real concerns surrounding it. But the bloodbath in the final arc, the dismantling of any pretense that this is a serious horror movie about beauty and alienation, and the excessive self-awareness that it is also a self-aggrandizing spectacle make it one of the most honest movies I've ever seen.

The Substance knows it can't critique society, so why bother? It lacks the ironic distance necessary to make it an effective satire because it doesn't want to pretend to be something else. In this sense, it is truly a movie that refuses to alienate itself.

And it is this honesty that is deeply infuriating, enchanting, and unforgettable when you take a step back. The movie slides and bounces between "good" and "bad" filmmaking because it simply stays true to the principles it has created for itself. No one, not even the director who sees the film as a critique of the male gaze, can twist it into something stable without losing the frenetic dynamism that makes the film what it is.

The movie is an honest deformity that I happen to love.

In a Vogue interview, director Coralie Fargeat says of the ending where Elizabeth/Sue becomes "Monster ElizaSue":

When the final transformation arrives, it felt quite intuitive to bring the character ultimate relief. Ironically, it’s when she’s totally deformed and monstrous that she doesn’t care what she looks like. In fact, it’s the only time she looks in the mirror and kind of likes what she sees. That’s the moment when she finally feels like she deserves to go out in public, no matter what she looks like. We hide behind our polished smiles, and I wanted the character to unleash those hidden anxieties. The audience [in the film], which stands in for all of us as a society, screams and hates her for this, and I wanted to portray how violent that reaction can be. That the only real moment of relief that she has is when she doesn’t have a body anymore, I think, says it all.

While the movie is clearly making a statement about how much people fucking hate the literalization of convoluted beauty standards, I think the "monster" is also a stand-in for the movie itself. Like the "monster", the movie is a hodgepodge of ideas that are never fully developed but are still in your face.

And that's because the movie is comfortable with its own identity. We can see this in the resolution: The only self Elizabeth/Sue really likes is this "monstrous" self because it is the first time she doesn't feel alienated -- in a sense, she has achieved the beauty she has always sought.

While I cannot ignore the fact that the movie ends with Hollywood moving on, I think Elizabeth has finally reached a resolution with her alienated self. When she drags her remains onto the plaque on the Hollywood Steps that bears her name and begins to imagine the glory of her heyday once again, I don't see her as a loser character anymore but as someone who found the self she's been looking for. Her melting into a blood pool feels like she's melding with the celebrity essence she's thought she had lost. It may be a tragedy for the audience, but I think she has found an inner peace that is impossible to explain to the outside world.

And that is kind of how I feel about the movie in the end: it feels whole, even solid. While I think the critics are ultimately right that its innards are of little value, perhaps even poisonous, The Substance is a very honest body of work. Its sincerity is contagious, and if everything in it is simply surface level, that's fine -- there's no shame in saying something derivative.

What I take away from this movie isn't just the fabulous final sequence, the beautiful scenes of body horror, and the stellar performances by the lead actors. It's also that movies can simply say what they want to say and take their leave. Nothing in the film attempts to speak something grander than what it already has: the immediacy of the metaphors and symbols leaves little room for interpretation, nor does the script attempt to step into quotable lines territory. This makes the movie vulnerable to criticism of its superficiality, but I think it also means that it can never condescend to its audience and preach something that doesn't exist in its running time.

This "what you see is what you get" style of filmmaking certainly doesn't create the conditions for cinematic contemplation that make movies unique and thought-provoking works for many cinephiles, but I think it makes me more conscious of how I watch movies. I have to think about what structures the way I perceive the screen, the performances, and the visuals. I was self-conscious about the way I take in the audiovisual diarrhea of how the beauty industry disgusts me and invites me to revel in it.

The lack of depth makes me gaze into myself, into what makes certain scenes so ideologically beautiful or/and repulsive.

So I don't think The Substance is a profound movie, but I don't think it's deficient either. Rather, it lands on a messy balance that allows me to grapple with my ways of seeing. It is a gorgeously contradictory Experience that refuses to settle into something likeable or unlikeable. To me, the film is like a human body: even if we modify it, it's never going to be completely satisfactory for our own purposes, and we have to think about it and how we use it every day.

But the movie is happy with itself. It experiences euphoria with its own body, and I envy it. That's why I think it's a modern body horror masterpiece: it makes me aware of how alienated we are from our bodies for alienation from ourselves is a deeply terrifying experience, and that's what I think makes body horror films so wonderful. The Substance may not reach the technical heights of a Cronenberg classic for me, but my viewing experience was just as contemplative.

What an incredible experience.