Director: Coralie Fargeat
Writer: Coralie Fargeat
The Substance fuses together science fiction and horror, feminist critique and the male gaze, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. With a barrage of intertextual touchstones (lots of Kubrick and Cronenberg) and links to a long science fiction media history of splicing and cloning narratives, does The Substance have anything new to add?
In Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is a fading star. The film begins and ends with the construction and desecration of her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She has been sufficiently famous actress to warrant a star but is now best known for her workout show. I found myself replaying the line from Pretty Woman: “Tate, it’s me Elizabeth from Workout World” in my head. But Pretty Woman is also inferred by opening the movie on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame (“Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream?”) drawing upon the clash of Hollywood hope and the harsh reality that framed that movie. The lure of LA gobbles up young hopefuls and spits them out as folks willing to sell their souls and bodies for a taste of success.
From the opening scenes onwards Elisabeth Sparkle is already the monster of this movie, which for the media industry at least, is the 50-year-old woman. Fired from her own show on her 50th birthday, Elisabeth is deemed too old by the unnamed network’s male executives. She is unfuckable. As Amia Srinivasan explains “fuckability” is not about the sexual availability of the (often) woman’s body but instead how they “confer status to those who [believe they could] have sex with them”. For these pale stale males, Elisabeth is a reflection upon them and their perceived notions of audience desires. The double standard of ageing (that Susan Sontag articulated in the 1970s…) is in full force here as the collective of ageing men decide Elisabeth’s fate; men are allowed/encouraged to age publically in a way that women are often denied. Women are valued for their fuckability and fertility (maiden and mother) and discarded and made invisible once they become unfuckable (crone).
Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society’s double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier… Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.
Susan Sontag (The Double Standard Of Ageing , 1972)
The Substance parodies the eighties workout queen: the performance and the pressure to retain a certain body and face, and the continuing threat of the new ideal coming over the horizon. These are the women (and men) who made careers or second careers out of selling aerobics home videos. Elisabeth Sparkle draws on the star journey of Jane Fonda with more subtle (for this film) references to her more iconic workout wear looks, including an electric blue leotard with silver belt, and the sparkly pink suit worn by her (literal) replacement Sue. Fonda regularly reinvented and replaced herself as the new ideal body and style across her aerobics era. The lithe white body is still presented as the ideal, a reward for hard work. Elisabeth is aligned to the style and tone of the workout DVD/video whereas her replacement is a styled as fitness influencer shown in closely framed shots ready for regurgitation on social media.
Workout revolutionary Jane Fonda was a self-declared, activist feminist who fought for equality but spent decades selling this ideal to the women as part of narratives about women being able to have it all. Hilary Radner (Shopping Around, 1994) situated Fonda with in the new traditionalism of the 1980s and the conflicting discourses of feminine culture of the era. More women were working 9-5 outside the home but the backlash to the second-wave and the politics of the Me Decade (remake and remodel the self) were channelled inwards. Aerobics presented a “specific formulation of public discipline in which both the panoptical model of ‘docile bodies’ and a new ‘culture of the self converge to produce a feminine body” (Radner, 145). The 1980s workout video is marketed to women, but the formal style and choreography—from parted lips to arched backs—seems to be borne out of the active heterosexual male gaze of pornography proselytising a form of feminity that constructs women as a controlled/controllable “object of the male gaze”. A good body is a controlled body.
The video revolution underpinned the explosion of two industries focused on women’s bodies: aerobics and pornography. Fragmented bodies to be observed, analysed, and re/watched alone at home. But unlike man-made porn, the women in these videos (that were also directed/controlled by men) were authority figures commanding the predominantly female viewer into self-empowerment through apparent self-improvement.The Substance invites the audience to look at different eras of womanhood and take pleasure in details of their fresh flesh, elderly folds, and grotesque unruly mostrosity.
The Triple Goddess archetype – maiden-mother-crone – is explored in the character of Elisabeth/Sue visualising the cyclical female experience and the tension between societal expectations and the reality of living in a body that is so explicitly defined and controlled by the patriarchy. The mythical triad here merges into a single entity, but rather than being a sign of empowerment, it is monstrous. The older child-free woman in this world – and often ours – is culturally seen as a waste, a literal excess of flesh taking up space that could be occupied by a more youthful, fertile, ‘hot’ version. The literal monster she becomes is both a symbol of internalised patriarchy but perhaps also, the empowerment that comes from being unable and unwilling (in body/ability) to conform to beauty standards.
Undeniably Demi Moore is a phenomenal woman, an icon, but one who has been criminally overlooked. Her value (fuckability) or lack thereof is, as for many Hollywood stars, situational. The ‘Hollywood ugly’ woman trope is in full force, and Elisabeth has internalised it. In one of the most striking scenes from the movie, Elisabeth prepares for a date with Fred (Edward Hamilton-Clark) an old classmate who sees her as the complex woman and beyond Hollywood beauty she is. But her insecurity prevents her from going, viewed through the uncompromising mirror view. As she smears her make up across her face there is foreshadowing of later scenes of the mutant she will become. Her internalised hatred will be manifested.
Early in The Substance, Elisabeth is injured in a car collision distracted by the sight of her own billboards being dismantled. She feels her age. At the hospital an alarmingly smooth-faced male nurse offers her a business card and a promise of a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of herself. Desperate and alone, she rings the number, then retrieves and takes The Substance. After injecting the Activator her body generates a new woman who is ‘born’ from a slit down her back (we’re just sidestepping the reality of this level of regenerative medicine). Every seven days Elisabeth must swap places with ‘Sue’ (Margaret Qualley). With no exceptions.
Sue becomes an overnight sensation after she successfully auditions to replace Elisabeth as the new face/body of the network’s aerobics show (Pump It Up). But seven days are not enough, and soon Sue begins to steal time from Elisabeth by ickily extracting more and more stabiliser, which is cerebrospinal fluid. As Sue becomes more popular and in demand, she steals three months leading up to the prestigious job of hosting the network’s NYE show. But Sue can’t sustain herself and is forced to let Elisabeth awaken so that her spinal fluid can be replenished.
A now witch-like Elisabeth re-emerges and requests termination of the clone, but halfway through the procedure she stops, drawn to the gleam of Sue’s success, and resuscitates Sue. Now both awake, Sue kills Elisabeth and tries to use the single-use Activator to make her own clone but instead mutates into a grotesque creature: Monstro Elisasue. She attends her big night anyway bulging out of her princess gown and disguising her face with a haphazard mask of Elisabeth’s face. A disgusted audience charges the stage and Elisasue is decapitated, but she, in a a full-on-Cronenberg moment, regenerates and escapes the studio. She heads to her Hollywood star and explodes into a viscera that is swept up by a street cleaner the following morning.
Led by the unsubtly named Harvey (Dennis Quaid) the majority of the men in The Substance objectify women. They should smile more, be nipped, tucked, and plucked. Women are there to be looked at, their value is inextricably tied to the viewing pleasure and prestige of these men. But the camera under the control of Coralie Fargeat – a woman director – does little to disrupt that oh-so-cis-hetero-male gaze. Over top scenes of Sue ‘working out’ linger and close ups of parts of Qualley lose their potential power. The line between satire and sexualisation is not always successfully navigated and the women in the film lack the opportunity to be more agentic and, well, substantive.
The ‘female gaze’, as claimed by fellow French director Céline Sciamma, is not simply about reversing the male gaze but disrupting the patriarchal ideals and expectations that underpin it. The male gaze as theorised by Laura Mulvey (1975), positions male characters as active and women as passive objects of desire to be looked at and enjoyed by ‘the three male gazes’ (Ann E. Kaplan, 1983) the men on screen, the presumed male spectator, and (more often than not) the man behind the camera. Hollywood cinema (and other global cinemas) tend to privilege the male gaze and perspective with images of women and their bodies that are actively constructed for male pleasure and the confirmation (and normalisation) of male power/privilege.
The female gaze, as understood by scholars and practicioners like Iris Brey and Zoe Dirse, does not mirror the male gaze and target presumed (man-made concepts of) female pleasure. Instead, it deracinates it. The female gaze should uproot oppressive stories, style, and social structures and centre women’s experiences for the characters, the audience and the more diverse filmmakers making these films. For example, in Portrait of a Lady on Fire Sciamma makes a political choice to refuse to objectify women and tells the often-hidden histories of women’s lives and desires. Men are purposely secondary. The desire and pleasure on screen belongs to women, although not necessarily sapphic in nature, and they have agency over their experiences.
There are moments in The Substance that make some sharp critiques of the beauty and media industries. In possibly my favourite moment from the movie, Monstro Elisasue’s body ejects a viscous breast from one of its orifices. A body part often a focus of the gaze, isolated in close-ups and posters. It is a body part to be enjoyed beyond or in spite of the complexity, intangibility, inaccessbility of the embodied woman it is part of. In this grotesque ejection, the once perky breasts of Sue lie disembodied on the floor highlighting the way women’s bodies are often cut-up on screens for pleasure but that once literally amputated become bio-objects to be thrown away. But this moment was not sufficient to eclipse my discomfort at how Qualley’s body is spectacularised. So. Many. Crotch. Shots. That might be intended as parody but still serve the male gaze that makes women into consumables.
In The Substance there are three named women (or two if we accept that Sue and Elisabeth ARE ONE) and they don’t speak directly to each other. Their whole experience is filtered through the men they encounter: Harvey, the board members, an exclusively male medical gaze, the voice of The Substance hotline (Yann Bean), Diego (Sue’s lover, Hugo Diego Garcia)… Only Fred offers an alternative voice, but Elizabeth is unable to accept it. The Substance is a warning. But I’m not sure it is as feminist as the filmmakers and heralds of the film suggest. Women are punished and there is not hope for redemption. They are the vapid architects of their own demise.
More from this director:
Reality+ (2014, 22 mins) – you can see the influence that this had on the style and themes of The Substance
Revenge (2017) – Fargeat’s first feature film is a revenge fantasy where lead goes from Lolita to lethal
Further reading:
The original videostar Jane Fonda is now in her new era with a collaboration with Meta Quest (Supernatural X Jane Fonda) to revolutionise the VR fitness landscape.
The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan is an absolute must-read. It offers an innovative feminist philosophy take on issues ranging from #MeToo to pornography to student-professor relationships. Srinivasan argues that discussions about sex need to address the influence of the patriarchy and capitalism if we are to ever achieve sexual equality and justice.
Recommended double-bill
The Substance makes a great late night double-bill with Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman (1959). A double-feature science fiction (originally released with Beast From Haunted Cave) of the Golden Age with a warning about playing God with science. Here we also have a story about a woman who is punished for aging in the public eye and she takes extreme measures to attempt to recapture her youth. Janice (Susan Cabot) is the owner of a large cosmetics brand, but her visible aging has a direct impact on sales. To attempt to reverse this (both aging and financial ruin) she funds the research of “mad” scientist Dr. Eric Zinthrop (Michael Mark) who has successfully extracted the enzymes from royal jelly that allows the queen bees to slow aging and offers herself as an experimental subject. The results are positive but slow, so Janice breaks into the scientists’ lab and self-administers the serum. This leads to her looking 20 years younger over a single weekend but begins to transform into a murderous, wasp-like creature.
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