“You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” - Margaret Atwood
WORDS by BRIDGETT MAGYAR
The Substance, a neo body-horror film by writer-director Coralie Fargeat, is a high octane experience. No mercy for the faint of heart from beginning to end. A cinematic universe that’s saccharine to the point of tooth rot—vibrant jazzercise leotards stretch and snap against Margaret Qualley’s “perfect” ass, and a glamorous Hollywood art deco penthouse apartment reeks of loneliness and then eventually of death and decay. The Shining-like infinite hallways lined with psychedelic carpets leading nowhere incite an optical illusion-induced nausea. The movie is sprinkled with nods to horror films of yore (The Fly, Black Swan, Videodrome). Food oozes and curdles. Bodies tear wide open and get sewn back up. Needles, blood, insatiability, and despair, despair, despair.
What is The Substance about? Is it about Hollywood’s prevailing impossible beauty standard? Is it about the cult of femininity? Is it Hagsploitation? Is it a comedy? Tragedy? Horror? Camp?
I’ve been mulling over my thoughts on The Substance for over a month now. Since the moment I walked out of the theater I considered the conversations it would inevitably start, but how would they finish? Who would be included? What new points would we arrive at in the eternal debate of good feminist/bad feminist? With a film so magnanimous in topic, visuals, and grotesqueness - how can one quantify its parts? The topic of women’s bodies, more specifically women’s aging bodies, is one we’ve danced around, poked and prodded at, ridiculed before we’ve remedied, and continue to flip over and examine under new light—ring light, surgical light, etc…
In The Substance, Demi Moore plays aging fitness instructor Elizabeth Sparkle, a long-time host of an aerobics show who’s suddenly fired on her 50th birthday because she’s exactly that: aging. Sparkle takes a chance on a mysterious drug that promises a “better version of yourself.” After retrieving her package with said mysterious drug from a literal hole in a wall, she injects herself with a neon slime-like substance and the shiny, naked, and young Margaret Qualley (Sue) emerges from Elizabeth’s spine. The instructions of the substance are few but firm, only one version can be conscious at a time, whomever is conscious must stabilize every day, and they will alternate every 7 days. No exceptions. You Are One is written on the instruction cards, a Chekhov’s gun for the final form that is Monstro Elizasue - the literal fleshy fusion of Elizabeth and Sue.
When I considered this film through my sex worker lens, an inevitable lens I will always see the world through, I thought about how I was mostly unfazed by the amount of visceral gore on screen. Though I was disgusted, I was mostly unfazed. I wondered why I wasn’t alarmed or moved by the gore, given it so brazenly uses the female body as a literal sack of meat to display violence and dismemberment. Like a lightbulb cartoonishly appearing above my head, I remembered the way the media often portrays stories of sex workers on screen: violently and merely a device to project moral complexes and whorephobic principles onto. Monstro Elizasue’s final form, a puddle of unrecognizable human flesh, felt reminiscent of the images used as cautionary tales of the dead whore. This is what happens to a woman who sells her body. But the abjection of ElizaSue’s final form felt like relief—finally she’s free. Free of these earthly pressures and the body that they penetrate. By the end, I actually felt happy for her.
Plastic surgery and body modification are unspoken themes of the film, though they are not once suggested as an option for Elizabeth. It’s as if the results of a superficial procedure could never be enough. A literal new body needs to emerge in order to attain satisfaction. An idea we’ve been conditioned to believe, once your Hag Clock strikes, you are to be discarded and an immediate replacement will follow. Cosmetic procedures have no doubt become more common in the last decade: things like lip filler, lip flips, baby botox, eyebrow lifts, buccal fat removal… small aesthetic procedures incrementally slowing the visible aging process. These procedures, viewed typically as acts of vanity for the everyday person, are more complicated for someone whose job may rely entirely on their image and body. Something sex workers are all too familiar with.
The participation in the male gaze through body modification for sex work is as much as a business investment as it is a big fuck you, pay me to the hetero cishet male gaze that created it. Body modification and hyper-feminization are a part of the drag of sex work. It is sometimes a device of survival, which is similar to the beliefs Elizabeth embodies. In an industry where her image is her money-maker, her invisibility might be what kills her.
Upon speaking with others about what The Substance stirred up in them, primarily women-identifying folks and femmes, I kept running into ideas of our own self hatred and femmephobia (a product of the patriarchy, of course). I was speaking with a friend who mentioned the scene that most resonated with her was of Elizabeth maniacally undoing and redoing her makeup before nearly ripping her face off in a rage fueled by her inability to achieve an unachievable idea of beauty. Another friend told me watching that scene felt cathartic. I read a handful of reviews (written by cis white women) that were critical of the film, and deemed it as shallow as the thing it’s critiquing. I read reviews of praise, claiming it to be an accurate representation of the uncanny valley of Hollywood and those cast as representation for women, femmes, and beauty.
How often do we get to critique the thing we willingly participate in even as we despise it? Can’t we play in our own shit from time to time? Can’t we enjoy entertaining the extremes, hyperbolizing our image while remaining self aware and contradictory, even? I think as subjects under patriarchy who both resonate and inspired ElizaSue, we (as viewers and artists) should be able to make the work, criticize the work and enjoy the work all the same.
I had to culturally zoom out to further inspect the context in which this film exists. Women’s health, like access to abortion, is a paramount topic of debate for the 2024 American presidential election. In the bubble of celebritydom, (white) pop-stars like Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX overlapped in their North American tour, and seemingly endless think-pieces spawned from their taking the stage, mostly examining their sexuality and bodies as tools in performance. Films like Anora, an action-packed Save-A-Hoe Cinderella story about a Staten Island stripper, debuted just weeks after the release of The Substance, prompting pedestrian dialogue about sex work and perceived bodily autonomy within the work.
It is to no one’s surprise that women’s bodies have and continue to be a vehicle used to explore the best and worst of the human condition. These are the stories we’ve been exploring and telling forever: recontextualized, repackaged, and redistributed again and again. I think we place an unfair amount of pressure on the work created in response to the impossible beauty standard imposed on us. To quote Ava Duvrney, “The media cannot give us the answers to the problems it ultimately created. But by God, let us have some fun with it.