The Log: Going Grotesque For Beauty In "The Substance"
Coralie Fargeat playfully Frankensteins allusions to great horror films to recreate the feminine body horror genre.
Have you ever ridden a monster of a roller coaster, and at some point, because you’re upside down or moving at unhuman speed, you regain consciousness and think, “There’s no way that was sleep,” because you experienced a forcible fainting?
That was me in the movie theater seated between two strangers on a Friday night.
Cold sweats. Tingling palms.
I closed my eyes, and the amplified soundscape prolonged this verge-of-passing-out feeling.
No matter how hard you close your eyes against it, The Substance will deliver the grotesque means women will go to be considered beautiful. With career-high performances by Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley who bare all—literally—to show the madness of impossible beauty standards, expect this film to join the early Oscar nomination conversation.
the facts & players
Logline: A fading celebrity decides to use a black-market drug, a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself.
Writer/Director: Coralie Fargeat (Revenge)
Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Genre: satire + body horror
Production companies & studios:
Working Title Films (Emma., Bridget Jones, Polite Society)
Blacksmith
MUBI (an independent streaming app that distributes smaller, overlooked premieres from international film festivals; Universal backed out as primary distributor)
Notable awards / recognition:
At Cannes, it competed for the Palme d’Or and won the award for Best Screenplay
Won the Midnight Madness Award at TIFF
the take
Elizabeth Sparkles (Demi Moore) is a household name, but one of those household names that fades with time. Though she won an Oscar early in her career, her metaphorical bread-and-butter is her exercise show, complete with leotards and leg warmers. At the end of each broadcast, she blows a kiss to the camera and tells her audience to take care of themselves.
Many people (me) would kill to look like Elisabeth Sparkles, but Sparkles exists in an industry where there’s always something fresher or newer. On her 50th birthday, she overhears a conversation with a network executive named, of course, Harvey (Dennis Quaid). It’s as cartoonishly chauvinist as you’d imagine. Shortly after, she receives roses saying “you were great!” Casting notices come up in the newspaper.
Sparkles will do whatever to hold onto what she’s worked to have. Is her philosophy a radioactivity that rotted her as a woman aging in a misogynist industry, or is this a pathology that brought her to Hollywood, for the affirmation, the roses, the promise that they’re going to LOVE you?
Doesn’t matter. Either way, she’s vulnerable.
Enter: The Substance.
This black-market drug allows Sparkles to create a second self, one that’s the absolute pinnacle of hot. Unlike a clone, the second self is connected to the original user. “Remember, the two are one,” the company repeats in its marketing messaging. The two selves are one person. Every seven days, they switch. They rely on each other to survive. When Elisabeth activates The Substance, she “births” Sue (Margaret Qualley), the smooth-skinned, high-cleavage version beyond the benefits of youth.
But they are one. What do they have in common? They depend on what other people think to determine their beauty.
the background acts
Though Sparkles is sympathetic, she’s her own villain. She’s a victim and personal perpetrator in the quiet agism that leads her to think she’s spoiled milk. A workaholic with nothing but her apartment, her framed show posters, and her Hollywood star to represent her life, Sparkles is hungry. To glean the dopamine hit of affirmation, she will Jekyl & Hyde her life to know she’s found an approval she can’t personally experience.
Filmmaker Coralie Fargeat uses close-up shots and heightened volume to induce suspense and corporeal horror. You will feel every stitch and injection.
CUT TO: my white-faced and sweating corpse working on breathing exercises to CPR my will power in the Times Square AMC.
Outside of the immediate grotesque moments, the colors, extras, and settings in the background pointed to the predecessors of the genre, to the cult of Hollywood films that have spent decades depicting the physical changes of a woman as a horror.
Timing: It could be the 80s, it could be tomorrow, who knows
Harvey wears shiny, garish suits, smokes cigarettes in his office, and renames his assistant. He gives 1960s power luncher.
Sparkles’s apartment has garish décor—silk sheets, orange kitchen walls, a blue living room with wall-to-wall carpet and a single framed photo of a young Sparkles. I’m not good enough with decor to pinpoint the era, but it feels deliberately outdated.
Sparkles and Sue don leg warmers for nationally broadcast exercise classes, and the crowned jewel of entertainment is the televised New Year’s Eve broadcast. The television in her living room is always set to late night shows or infomercials. Is this…the 80s?
Before you expect this to be a vague period piece, there’s elements of higher technology to bring it to contemporary standards, like cell phones and touch cards. And of course, the experimental technology of The Substance as an at-home medical procedure feels contemporary in an era of Ozempic.
As much as we want to believe agism and sexism have evaporated into the ether after the MeToo movement, The Substance shows the desires to improve an appearance are timeless.
Extras: A lot of ugly, old men and hot women
Early in the film, Harvey crunches prawn heads as he tells Elisabeth Sparkles that at 50, it stops. When she asks what he means by that, given it’s her 50th birthday, he diverts the conversation to congratulate a white-haired man on ratings.
Irony, received.
In the background, the men are just plain old. Uniformly old. A squadron of identical white-haired men beg Sue to smile for them before the New Year’s Eve broadcast. Younger men are equally anonymous as the black-shirted crew on the TV set of the workout show, but they still call the shots on the show.
These men treat Elizabeth Sparkles and Sue with predictably opposite reactions. An older woman invokes their disgust, impatience, and condescension. A younger one forces them to prepare their own façade of chivalry and charm.
Contrastingly, most women appear as the set’s background dancers, dressed in lamé leotards, gyrating their hips back and forth. At the end, the background dancers for the New Year’s Eve broadcast are topless (like Bill Murray says about the Solid Gold Dancers in Scrooged, nipple works for broadcast). They are silent scenery, their costumes and bodies shown through those costumes the loudest statement they could make, and presumably, Harvey made the call on that, too.
Spotlight on the male greats who do female misery so well
Some shots feel almost tit-for-tat aligned with some of the most iconic films of feminine horror. When I came to in my AMC seat (“that definitely was not sleep”), I couldn’t stop connecting dots to other films in this cinematic genre.
The red coloring of the studio hallway and bathroom of the TV studio smack of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. (By the end, this hallway has another similarity to Kubrick.)
The worn-in couch seat of Sparkles’s apartment set in front of a television set constantly playing infomercials summons Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem of a Dream, where Ellen Burstyn imagines herself as a television star and vacuums in a quick time lapse. (Don’t get me started on the needle stuff, I’ll go down—again.)
The New Year’s Eve broadcast set, with a microphone in front of a large crowd and the imagination of a hallway of people singing Sue and Elisabeth’s praises, is a dead ringer for Brian DePalma’s Carrie. (Watch and get back to me. You won’t miss it.)
This isn’t an exercise in imitation. It’s a recapturing of a narrative of a female descent into madness, often around their desire to improve their appearance, to feel beautiful, to be seen.
These classic films helmed by men show that women’s bodies and their ability to change—with age, periods, or desire—are dangerous. Though Sparkles joins this hall of fame of feminine madness around appearances, she pushes it further than the male directors could. Moore and Qualley expose their naked bodies to show the ugliness of being this beautiful. Their relationship projects the ugly ways the world sees Sparkles: disgust, pity, horror.
No matter how beautiful they appear, their hatred with imperfection turns them into monsters.
looking for more substance? check out:
The You Must Remember This: Indecent Proposal episode on Demi Moore
Whether or not you like erotic thrillers, this series sets a gold standard for historical cultural writing. I wasn’t alive to be watching them, so to get the cultural context of why these films took over a decade and the misogyny at play in the 90s is really thoughtful
Demi Moore reflects on being a young woman and the lack of agency she had in depicting how sexy she would be or how her body would be depicted
The Guardian review
Excerpt: “The female body is a horror movie waiting to happen. From puberty and the grisly onset of menstruation, in pictures such as Brian De Palma’s Carrie and John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps, to pregnancy and childbirth – Rosemary’s Baby is the obvious example – women have provided a rich seam of inspiration for genre film-makers over the past half century. But look a little closer and two trends become apparent: the vast majority of female body-based horror deals with various aspects of the reproductive system, and it has largely been made by men (Titane and The First Omen, two recent examples of movies that harness pregnancy for horror, are notable exceptions).”
The New York Times interview with Demi Moore on her history with disordered eating and body image in regards to The Substance
Excerpt:
NYT: This is the Vanity Fair cover shot of you naked and pregnant by Annie Leibovitz that broke the internet before there was the internet. There are these moments throughout your life and your career where your physical self has been really pushing the boundaries, but you were feeling terrible about yourself?
MOORE: I think that’s one of the misconceptions, this idea of, “Oh, I love my body so much,” versus what the truth was: that these things were coming along, obviously I was choosing them, but I think it was all in service of helping me try to overcome my issues, like my self-loathing, my feeling of not being enough. To help build my confidence, not because I was confident.
Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Grey
Julia Ducournau’s Titane