The Substance 🧪

🎵 The song for this post is I Could Fall In Love, by Selena (it still hurts). 🎵

I treated myself to a movie on Sunday, The Substance. All I had going in was the trailer, which I'm embedding here. If you want to experience it fresh, read no further! Maybe see the trailer like I did. But I'm going to write about its later elements, which surprised me, and that surprise was definitely part of my experience. If you want to preserve that, stop reading!

I'm going to do this a bit differently than my normal art crit posts. When I'm watching a movie or play that I want to chew on, I tend to leave little bullet notes. Something like¹

"It's Raining Men," but for enbys
Variations of The Shire
lord, not another Ghostbusters
horny fanfic stay undefeated

Later, when chatting with friends, I look back on those phrases, and share what they refer to in the piece, and the broader point they represent. For this post, instead of making a few bigger "islands" and writing a mini-essay about them, I'll just share the cleaned-up bullet points with a paragraph or two 🙂

Really puts the "b" back in "subtle."

Okay! You're choosing spoilers!

The movie does two switcheroos from its trailer: the first is minor and stylistic, the second more major. The stylistic one: I feel the trailer suggests this movie is a kind of "altered-reality suspense," with semi-realistic performances. It becomes immediately apparent that this is not true: this is the least subtle movie I've seen in decades. My head hurts for how hard it got hit, over and over again, with the MESSAGES.

I wrote about "worlds more honest than our own," an artistic technique where an artist eschews realism for emotional fidelity, and how I really like it:

I use this phrase to describe representations of the world that are exaggerrated to be unrealistic, but feel more emotionally honest as a result. If the people of Disco Elysium were painted or voiced realistically, had realistic dialogue, and reacted realistically to your protagonist, let's be real: the game would be boring as shit. It's because they make Evrart "a walrus of a man," with that voice, that you feel something more true, powerful, and sincere about the game's questions of labor, power, tradeoffs, and likeability. Playing to extremes also makes the game's sincere moments come through more effectively: without the bitter, the sweet doesn't taste so sweet.

It's a bit related to the concept of kayfabe, the thing where professional wrestlers pretend the schtick is real, to which the audience pretends to believe it too.

Well, here's a case where I didn't like it! All those flashes of text, just in case you didn't get what the movie was about. I use Sorry to Bother You as a positive example of this technique; well, in that movie, Armie Hammer never looks at LaKeith Stanfield and says "I will use you like property, because you are a dirty [n-slur], and I'm a superior White man."

But we're not far off from that here! The examples in this feel like the actors are looking into a camera and saying "it's terrible, right?!" Dennis Quaid saying "all pretty women should smile!" when he did, then having it repeat, when it does, over and over, just felt like pressing the wand against the clit for a full hour. You gotta ease off sometimes.

Actors as aging versions of themselves, "putting it all out there"

One of the quotes from the trailer is "Demi Moore gives the performance of her career!," and, like, yes she's great in this, but is this really the performance of her career? The movie isn't showing anyone's nuanced acting chops, it's a style-machine, with wild "special FX creature horror" coming in the second half.

I think what's being sold with that quote is a promise similar to Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler, or Brendan Fraiser for The Whale: "wow, this actor is playing a version of themselves that says "I recognize I'm not the bookable hotness I used to be, please feel an appropriate amount of catharsis and horror at me looking "ugly."""

If you missed it or don't remember: Mickey Rourke was one Hollywood's most handsome leading men, he quit Hollywood to do boxing full-time, and came back with a face that was post reconstructive surgery. So in The Wrestler, he plays a juiced-up, washed-out guy who's forced to confront his washed-out-ness. Critics talked about how powerful it was for him to do that, and when he didn't get the Oscar, there was a sense of betrayal.²

Brendan Frasier: "he looked like this! Now, he looks like this! He plays a fat guy, we gave him a fat suit to make him even fatter; isn't fatness disgusting?!"

So I think there's a narrative the marketing of this movie is trying to push where Demi Moore is "really putting it out there" and allowing herself to be seen, warts and all, as an older woman. But: she's still smokin' hot! At 62 years old! I know 35 year-olds who'd kill to look like her. The secret sauce is the very same world-class beauty industry in LA that I think this movie is pretending to be against. Hell, Dennis Quaid's got that line that "at 50, it ends." But your actress is 62!! And looks maybe 40!!

So, the second switcheroo about this movie: it becomes a Cronenbergian "body horror" film, pretty extremely. This isn't "suspense," and this isn't just "horror" (with jump scares, or a stabbing or something): it's body horror, where every squish and squelch is disgusting, and [big spoiler alert] the misuse of the Substance has her becoming a multi-limbed, "teeth in the wrong place" blob of flesh that can barely move because it's so disfigured.

So, when the movie runs off the tracks with the creature FX, well, it doesn't feel so much like Demi is confronting any actual loss of beauty, since it's so played up to be grotesque. It's not "look at how pig-headed society is for not letting a woman age like women do," it's more "this woman's self-hate turned her into a literal monster, who you should hate too!!"

Prior art, what it made me think of

If you want a more tasteful version of this with a dash of "wow, the arts are brutal [bit of Whiplash] and have problems with image and youth and exploitation of women," see Black Swan instead.

If you want more obvious "transformation creature horror," see the Cronenberg The Fly.

If you want a more tasteful treatment that's also more convenient to watch (you can stream it at home! it's shorter!), see The Outside from Netflix's Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities. In my opinion, it's the best of the lot on how it treats, horrifies, and explores these themes. It's got a few core differences (my original idea was to blog a deep comparison of these two) but it's my favorite of this lot, and one of my favorites from the collection it's a part of.

Beauty has no universal winners

During the "Margaret Qualley gets sexualized" scenes, I thought of this joke from SNL's Black Jeopardy:

Zero disrespect to Ms. Qualley: she's obviously stunningly beautiful, and by taking this role, she's also being very brave and inviting a crazy level of critique over her body. But for all the gratuitous butt shots: there are so many, mutually-incompatible standards of beauty! A bunch of folks are looking at scenes where that's the ass twerking at them and thinking "I'm glad that's hot for you, but it's doing little for me."

Opposite of de-aging, literally a different character

One of my least favorite Hollywood trends is digital "de-aging." In olden times, when you had a younger version of a character, you hired a younger actor to play their "young scenes." But recent movies have digitally de-aged actors, like Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury in Captain Marvel, or Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones.

This sucks! You use non-unionized, underpaid VFX artists, it often looks weird, like Henry Cavill's not-mustache in that Superman movie, you deny an up-and-coming actor a gig, but worst of all, creatively: you lose that beautiful canvas of creative expression, of when a casting director, a director, and the two actors come together to create that single character across multiple artists. You're replacing an alley oop with a mechanical arm that places the ball in the basket. You took something with beautiful human gaps and you caulked it together with technology.³

So The Substance does something neat, where it's two actresses, playing the same character, but not quite ("REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE"). It's not "young Elisabeth Sparkle" and "older Elisabeth Sparkle," the young counterpart is a different character, who's even got a different name ("Sue").

This feels different! It's not doing the Thing I Like, because of the story they're telling. But it's a spin on "two actors, same person at different ages" and I loved how fresh it felt.

Nudity, bodies in the age of porn and online

I mentioned it in The Sympathizer post, but media really changed after online porn. I spent a lot of this movie wondering how its body shots would be received if it'd been released in 2002: the nonsexual nakedness of the bathroom shots, the sexualization of Sue, and the disfigurement/body horror in the last 20%.

Additionally, I think the story might have been more believable in 2002? I saw someone write online: "you know, back in the day, you could acquire a hobby and not be compelled, or able to, instantly compare yourself to someone in the top 1% of that hobby." The same for goes hotness: much ink has been spilled on Instagram and the effect on people's self-esteem, that + the proliferation of porn: you can see hot women everywhere, all the time. But the idea that someone could show up to an audition and be so, so hot!! and just walk in and get billboards and a meteoric rise like that from a TV exercise program... idk. There are lots of hot people out there! TV aerobics isn't really a big mover either? There's a scene where Elisabeth is looking at newspaper classifieds (while almost no shots of social media) and I was like "what year is this!?!"

Per the point above on subtlety, I get we're not aiming for realism here. But it mostly comes off as confused, parts feel very dated while others seem meant to be contemporary.

Slowly losing your life to drugs

A close friend split with their partner of 10 years because that partner had become an alcoholic. He was passing out in his work Zoom meetings; he'd wake up in the morning and reach for his bottle of vodka. I live in San Francisco, and while it's not the hellish Mad Max wasteland that Fox News and asshole VCs portray, it's not uncommon to see people shooting up, or the paraphernalia on the street. Nobody starts using with the idea that they'll end up in that state, but when you are there, it's very, very hard to get yourself out.

Meanwhile — ketamine therapy has changed my life. I've done a fair number of recreational drugs since going to festivals in my 30's.⁴ I'm very aware of how people get lost to this, especially when times are tough. When people who've never done drugs turn their noses up at users and addicts, I really want to slap them. They're proud assholes about multiple subjects they're ignorant of, while kicking people who are down. "If I were Icarus, I simply would not fly so close to the Sun." Shut up, losers.

There are scenes where Elisabeth has opportunities to stop the train and make better choices. As much as there are sincere or poignant scenes in the movie, that didn't feel like tryhard edgelord gestures, I felt it there. While I've never had a problem with drugs, there are many kinds of vice, and many ways to hurt yourself. I can so relate to having a hard path forward, and deciding, not without reason, that the pain of destroying yourself would be more tolerable than the pain of not.

"Hag with a beauty curse" in reverse

A lot of myths include "a gorgeous women is dangerous, and when you get close, she's actually a hideous monster who'll kill you"; I'm thinking of sirens, or hags. I think it's a weird choice to market this movie as "feminist body-horror in the style of Cronenberg" when it's pretty much giving us the "beautiful women are dangerous / hideous women are monsters!" just as much as the supposedly non-feminist tales of old do.

I feel it's hard to say "wow, beauty standards are terrible!" when the final creatures of the movie are such caricatures. Society is saying "she's so hideous they consider her a subhuman monster!", except... she is a disgusting monster! She showers everyone in the auditorium in blood, which is generously a nod to Carrie but doesn't make them any more wrong to be horrified by her.

The need for validation; being craved

At Burning Man this year, I had a converstion with a campmate who was grappling with feelings for someone they had a crush on, and their crush was even reciprocating! But it still felt one-directional. I described a BM crush I had the year before where yes, my Burn wasn't about romantic narrative, so I'd have a great time even if it didn't happen with her. But. I was hyper-attuned, and she wasn't. When we were in groups, I always knew where she was. When we were in conversation, I felt myself be sensitive to her every reaction. And this hyper-attunement didn't feel like it was in my control (which was the thrill of it, as with most things in life). I described my 2023 crush to my campmate this year and they were like "Yes!! That!! It's maddening!!!"

I bring it up because I find that love and desire, for one's self and others, is a bit of a knife's edge between this dream that you can be a person who "doesn't need any validation" vs. the reality of, well, being a human with other humans. The truth, I feel: we all love validation, and while we should all learn to stand on our own two feet, it's a lot easier to convince yourself that you're able to do this than actually do it in practice. I said in my ancient Engineer Showboating post: a lot of people optimize for feeling like they're good engineers, without a whole lot of criteria for what that looks like, so in practice, they end up just being loud and annoying about their personal taste. Similarly, I know a ton of people who insist they don't need validation, but with the tiniest amount of poking, I see they're being dishonest with themselves. I wouldn't trust a Buddhist who says they've reached the Buddha's level of enlightenment; it sounds similar when someone tells me "they don't need anyone else to like them."

Per the drugs point above, there are points in the movie where Elisabeth has the chance to turn back, to stop. But she needs the validation too much, and this was where it almost felt relatable (the lack of subtlety or joy in the craft snapped me right back out).

Other prior work: Celeste

The magic of Celeste, on top of being a brilliant platformer, was teaching me in a way I could internalize (idk maybe spoilers? if you haven't played it by now...): "hating a part of yourself" is just lipstick-on-a-pig of "hating yourself." You'll never be who you want to be, or live the life you want to live, while you hate yourself. So if you hate (and try to disown, or destroy) "part of yourself," you should figure out what that part is trying to tell you, because you can't outrun your own shadow.

The movie tries to communicate this too, and is about as subtle on this point as they are on every other point ("REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE," the fact that Demi Moore at one point says towards the camera "it's because I've always hated myself."). But The Substance also feels a bit like the Torment Nexus version of Celeste. Because again: to what end? To be proven right? In Celeste, you learn that the part of you you hate is actually you, and lovable. In The Substance, it kills you and becomes a monster!

Other prior work: The Outfit!

One of my favorite parts about theatre is how ephemeral it is. Once the show closes, it's gone forever: this set of people will never put on that show with those costumes and set and lights and sounds, and even if you could reassemble the components, it will never be considered at this point in history or culture ever again. Every week, thousands of shows close, gone forever but still leaving an impact, making a mark on the culture while becoming invisible, like every dead plant or dinosaur that became a fossil fuels that would power the modern world.

My least favorite thing about theatre is how ephemeral it is. So much of my life is shaped by experiences I can never share with people, except in a game-of-Telephone way. Last year, my grandmother lost her husband of ~60 years and her sister; these were the last two links to an entire world that she grew up in (Guatemala in the 40's). Obviously it's not the same, but when I try to imagine what that "private world" isolation is like, I imagine the ghosts of shows, the line deliveries, the design elements, the actor timings that I can't easily share with people.

One of the most meaningful shows in my life was The Outfit, by Laura Schellhardt. She's got a bunch of scripts over at Dramatic Publishing, her play The K of D got staged in my hometown at Woolly Mammoth, and the "world premiere" of The Outfit was done in Chicago, a show I saw and enjoyed. But the actual world premiere was non-professional: she directed a 1-hour version of it for the National High School Institute's summer theatre program at Northwestern University in 2004. I was in it, and I was the romantic lead.

It's based on Nicolai Gogol's The Overcoat, and has similarities: a nerdy, sweet-though-meek woman named Nora is beaten down by life and bullied by her colleagues and landlord, until Marco, a skilled and visionary tailor who's never been allowed to let his creative visions loose, makes her an outfit that changes how the world treats her. This "world reacts to external beauty, heroine gets drunk off the newfound confidence; character arcs happen as a result of this transformation" is shared.

Anyway, compared to The Substance, my personal feelings are that The Outfit does way more with way less? More craft, more whimsy, with still plenty of horror?

But: you can't verify this. The only vestiges online I could find are the local paper review from 2004 of the professional premiere (three cheers for websites keeping their archives alive!) and the last line item on the resume of my co-classmate, the female romantic lead, who ended up pursuing acting in and after college.

If you have hints on how to acquire this script, please let me know. I'm tempted to say this is my "Rosebud," but that'd be a lie: I don't base my life around trauma its loss represents. It's more "I really loved it."

"Taking it from me" — the need for an underclass

There's a point where Demi Moore is watching Margaret Qualley give an interview, she's asked about her "beauty secrets," and Demi is like "you took it from me!!"

I thought this was provocative! Wherever power lives, there are people at the top, and people at the bottom, and I think a lot folks don't recognize that you need an exploitable underclass to have an upper class. To "win" at something, you need a loser. In Palo Alto, Malcolm Harris uses a metaphor I loved for ethnic groups that would be allowed in to do agriculture work in California (paraphrasing): "they operated like pedals of a bicycle: one would get pushed down to bring the next one up, the process moving the whole contraption forward."

I hang out with a lot of hippie friends, and Saurya and I just had a great conversation about "hopepunk" and "cozy" novels which is a bit contrarian from my hippie friends (maybe another blog post). But it reminded me of the axe I keep grinding on, and probably will for my entire life: can you build a system with more winners than losers? How do you build a world where we raise the floor and raise the ceiling, when so often it feels like you're just expanding and contracting the space between them? In this case, can we create a world with beauty, where people feel valuable, without creating a class of people made to feel ugly, or undeserving?

1. ^ This isn't a real example, but real examples are often this incoherent. You can see this technique too when I'm brainstorming in this post, trying to come up with a D&D dungeon idea.

2. ^ Mickey not getting an Oscar for The Wretler felt a bit like "Bill Murray not getting it for Lost in Translation," one of the very best "surprise disappointment expressions" ever caught on camera. Also suggesting Bill was also bringing out some bloody demons for that performance and felt betrayed when he didn't get rewarded for it. One gets the sense he "gave up" after that, only doing cash cows like Garfield, arthouse movies that weren't going to make money like Broken Flowers, or Wes Anderson movies because they're friends and they're fun.

3. ^ Please don't read this as "there's no artistry or creativity in VFX," quite the opposite, they're some of the hardest-working, most exploited individuals in industry, who do truly amazing work to make memories that last a lifetime. I'm still of the opinion that you removed a very human thing with digital de-aging, especially since I suspect it's now mostly done with AI filters instead of a VFX artist digitally brushing, frame-by-frame.

4. ^ Hi mom, and other concerned folks. It's mostly psychedelics, some molly. Nothing with a strong addiction profile. Happy to talk at length about this, but alcohol is probably still the most dangerous drug I "do."