Post-viewing thoughts on a film

Disrespecting The Balance = Body Horror

[Contains Spoilers] Although this is not really a review.

Hollywood is the land of spectacle.

Many of us are fascinated by Hollywood’s inner workings, its legendary opportunities and success stories, but also the opposite—what happens in Hollywood when someone is disgraced and cast out. Scandals, like palace gossip, have spawned their own publications where people read about train-wreck stars and starlets. People seem to love this because every country has them. But even when stars don’t supernova, people still watch them with morbid fascination as they age, especially the woman, to see who declares for or against getting a little “work” done. There are plenty of before-and-after articles, websites and YouTube channels, some of them created by plastic surgeons. There are very loud partisans, like Cher or Madonna, and there are casualties like Meg Ryan or Tori Amos. Always women.

For better or worse, we, as consumers of Hollywood’s products, are subjected to the film industry’s cultural values: the desire for beauty, fame, wealth, fast cars, the mansions, and most of all, the glamour. All these are grafted onto contemporary American society in a way that has transmogrified it, as Hollywood’s influence has grown. This is the basic thesis of The Substance (2024).

The premise is a sales pitch, also the movie’s blurb, which goes like this:

Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?
You. Only better in every way.
Seriously.
You’ve got to try this new product. It’s called The Substance.
IT CHANGED MY LIFE.

It generates another you.
A new, younger, more beautiful, more perfect, you.
And there’s only one rule: You share time.
One week for you. One week for the new you.
Seven days each. A perfect balance.
Easy. Right?
If you respect the balance… what could possibly go wrong?

It turns out, a lot could go wrong. And no refund is available because it’s not the product that errs, but the user.

The Substance is a film that takes this idea of career-saving beauty enhancement to extremes, with an experimental, black market drug that promises to restore actual youth. With the injectable ‘Substance’, which looks like anti-freeze, Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is given a very strict set of instructions, with which she enters into a relationship with another iteration of herself. In true David Cronenberg fashion, this other literally and gorily emerges from her body via a long, excruciating tear along the spine. The two are to share her life, but as the younger version is the far more successful one in the paradigm, there is an obvious power struggle. The younger one, who renames herself Sue, begins to snatch more than the allotted week, thereby altering the symbiotic balance between them, which causes the older version of herself, the older body, irreparable and profound aging.

Can I get it back?

The protagonist asks this very middle-age question, and the answer is a firm No. What’s gone never comes back. It hits the nail on the head, and perhaps this is part of why the movie has resonated with audiences.¹

What’s gone never comes back. Every person who ever looked in a mirror and noticed the effects of age is saddened by this to some extent. We don’t want it to impact much less threaten our lives in any real way, or else we demand a cure, and we want our comeback. The Substance capitalizes on all this unsayable baggage to create a parody, as vicious as Saltburn (2023), while raising disturbing question about how society and technology team up to prey on women’s weaknesses—all our weaknesses really—fooling us into a game we can’t win. The long con of impossible beauty standards that imply nothing less than stopping time. Making the impermanence of youth permanent. How crazy is that? This is how a culture transmogrifies.

It’s clever writing. Nothing could be more pertinent.

Trophy wife. Arm candy. Hottie. Milf. These are tropes, and they are more or less embedded in mainstream culture as woman’s attractiveness as seen through the prism of the male gaze. Sexism is still pouring forth in a kaleidoscope of frustrating and degrading terms and attitudes.

Women, whether in the name of good health, beauty and good health, or just beauty, seem to do a better job of taking care of themselves. They will go to a doctor when they feel something is amiss far sooner than men generally speaking.² Eating well and get exercise, etc. are priorities they value even when time constraints are brutal. As they age, a lot of women might not go as far as getting plastic surgery, but they may consider dyeing their hair or having their teeth whitened. Women with more disposable income will be tempted to do more. It’s no coincidence that in the US, there are substantial shortages for all kinds of medical medical practitioners and surgeons, except in cosmetic medicine. We’ve got plenty of plastic surgeons.

There is a certain feminist rhetoric that posits a woman’s plastic surgery as an expression of her autonomy. In fact, there is a cosmetic surgery clinic on the corner of my street, whose marketing message printed across the darkened windows says, Do it for yourself. This conveniently ignores the fact that face lifts and fillers fail after a while. Older women who started their treatments earlier on look dreadful later on, necessitating more and more corrections, and the returns diminish with each new procedure. That is not autonomy, and it will not fix the fear and self-loathing that may have engendered the urge to do this in the first place. From everything I’ve seen and read, once you start down this road, it’s hard to get off.

So the film throws all this in our faces rather violently, by making the protagonist not an ordinary woman, but a famous Hollywood celebrity in decline, past ‘cougar’ age and well into the realm of the crone.³ It’s a sad spectacle to see her sitting at her one-seat kitchen table living out her strange life alone, and one of the most poignantly real moments or comments about what happens to a lot of women as they age. This is not the self-actualized woman she should be, perhaps in a post-divorce phase of her life, feeling free and contented with her life. That woman is living by her own rules, or at least, has figured out how to work things in her favor, let’s say. Elizabeth Sparkle has been using a very different playbook, and one that rendered her disposable. As such, she has a crisis of identity that nothing seems to have prepared her for.

If I were to critique the film, I’d say here you need a little more suspension of belief. I mean, it may chip away at the fourth star of a possible four-star rating because most successful actresses past the ingenue stage go for producer gigs. One might argue that the real tragedy is the character’s failure to do so, but even crazier things happen in the third act.

The Substance has a serious message, and it’s also a solid body horror genre film, with a touch of hyperbolic satire. This either works for you or not. It changes tone halfway through, going from a tension-filled allegory, like Severance, for example, to a much broader B movie vibe. The transition is gradual but relentless and ends abruptly in fake blood by the gallon and exploding brains everywhere. On that score, it’s a bit like Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Til Dawn (1996), minus the vampires. People are calling it “Totally Insane”, maybe because it starts out presenting an edgy yet sober form of the genre, and then gets progressively sillier and campier. This is allegory kicking ass if you remember that real plastic surgery gets very weird in its later iterations.

At its heart though, The Substance is about the pain of loss of self, something felt keenly when its late in the game and one is finally reaping the jackpot of whatever they’ve sown. We do live in a culture where a certain amount of robbing from our future selves is normalized. I use the word rob and not borrow because, as I’ve been saying, some damage is permanent. We are always swinging on a pendulum that goes back and forth between the nurture and preservation of life and the thrill of challenging death in as many ways as we can invent.

It’s nothing new.

“Acrobats Leaping over a Bull” Palace of Knossos, Crete, circa 1450-1300 BC  (Watercolor on paper by Emile Gillieron or son, Swiss, after a wall painting, 19th–20th century.)

This dual impulse to preserve ourselves and to indulge in behaviors that are self-destructive reminds me of the fearsome qualities of Kali, the powerful Hindu goddess of death, destruction, and time, who is also the goddess of Nature, and whose name, etymologically, is the feminine form of kala, or time, the ‘relentless devourer’.

Kali is an interesting symbol in the context of this meditation on time, death, and the women who rage, who demand back what is lost. Elective plastic surgery is an attempt at self-conservation but it is ultimately destructive. The first thing it destroys is the person’s natural aspect. It’s replaced by something new, effacing pieces of one’s identity. Have your teeth straightened, and you will feel a small measure of this loss of identity. (Whose smile is that?) How much more forceful is the experience of the loss of one’s face. Yet, even young women, in Hollywood and then everywhere else, are willing to undergo these profound changes in order to conform to ridiculous standards of beauty they are encouraged in every mainstream source on the subject to embrace more than to reject. Always at their own expense.

La señora Kylie Jenner

Directed by : Coralie FARGEAT
Year of production: 2024
Country: United Kingdom, United States, France
Duration: 140

1. The film received acclaim from critics, and has grossed $53.6 million worldwide so far, on a $17.5 million budget. (source: https://collider.com/the-substance-global-box-office-38-million/ )

2. The crude consultation rate was 32% lower in men than women. The magnitude of gender difference varied across the life course, and there was no 'excess' female consulting in early and later life. The greatest gender gap in primary care consultations was seen among those aged between 16 and 60 years.

3. (I wonder how the film would have been if the main character were a Ms. Anyone.)