Fashion Women's Fashion

The Substance’s Message About Ageism and Sexism Isn’t Subtle, But Men Are Still Missing The Point

Views: 23

It’s a Tuesday evening and the 6:10 screening of The Substance is packed. I’ve been warned not to eat – a colleague tells me she’s heard from TikTok that people are vomiting in cinemas. But it’s illegal to go to the movies and not get popcorn, so here I am, squished into a seat, surrounded by people who haven’t heeded the no-food warning, nervous I’m going to be sick. I know The Substance is about the literal horror of ageing, and I’m thinking about the Botox appointment I have tomorrow. Am I going to want to up my dose or cancel it altogether? I think about getting the bus home in two and a half hours: I’ve heard of women my age (thirties) having complete existential meltdowns after seeing The Substance. Will I panic in public? Still, here I am. How bad can it be?

When the trailers for The Substance first appeared, all people could talk about was the body horror of it all. French writer and director Coralie Fargeat is known for her gore: she likes to balance out the violence with dark satirical humour to make it more palatable, and that’s absolutely what she’s done here. The Substance is not for the squeamish, but the film’s message is far more horrifying than the grotesque visuals (and audio, oh god the audio), and it stays with you long after the skin-splitting, bloody flashbacks stop.

That is, if you’re a woman.

For a lot of the men who’ve seen The Substance, the film’s brilliance starts and ends at the special effects. To many of them, it’s a story about the ageing Hollywood starlet Elisabeth Sparkle being cast out of her job on morning television who will do and sacrifice anything to be young again. By taking a black market substance that promises to bring about a better and younger version of herself, she gets her just desserts when vanity meets reality.

In a review for Dateline, Damon Wise writes that “Elisabeth allows the male gaze to objectify and belittle her” (italics my own, enough said). 

To some critics, it’s another ‘hagsploitation’ flick, a genre that The Guardian describes as “a heartbreaking echo of Hollywood’s real-life attitude to its ageing female talent: [older women are] playing washed-up actors driven mad by their own obsolescence, bound together by self-loathing, agonisingly aware of their vanished sex appeal.”

This is true. Demi Moore, who is 61, is playing Elisabeth Sparkle, who has just turned 50. The women in the cinema are watching one of the most famous faces of their time play a woman who has had all the nips, tucks, facials, hair treatments and personal training sessions a woman is told she must have to remain attractive (and hire-able), and who’s done it all so successfully that she could easily be mistaken for someone in their late thirties or early forties. The women in the room can see that Demi and Elisabeth have done everything the patriarchy has demanded of them, and they’ve done it masterfully. And they can see that it’s not enough, not for Elisabeth’s boss, and not for Elisabeth herself.

The women in the room can see that Demi and Elisabeth have done everything the patriarchy has demanded of them, and they’ve done it masterfully. And they can see that it’s not enough. Image: Mubi

The women in the room know this is about the violence with which we treat our ageing selves, and the violence of the procedures we’ll undergo to prevent the ageing from becoming noticeable in the first place.

It’s not about the special effects, it’s about the horror of being a woman. “The female body is a horror movie waiting to happen,” Wendy Ide, who gets it, writes for The Guardian. “The Substance not only offers a female perspective on women’s bodies, but also argues that things only start to get properly messy once fertility is a dim memory.”

When Elisabeth overhears her boss on the phone to his assistant vying for her replacement on a Jane Fonda-esque aerobics fitness show (“I want her young, I want her hot, and I want her now!” he bellows — while urinating), it kicks off a reaction to everything Elisabeth has been trying to control: her anger about ageing. 

She discovers that black market substance, which she takes without seeming to do any research or pay any money. She hardly winces when she opens the box and sees how many needles, tubes and liquids are involved. (Relatable: how many of us know what’s in our injectables?)

When the substance kicks in, Elisabeth drops to the bathroom floor in agony and the younger, better version of herself hatches out of her back. It’s gruesome, even through the gap between your fingers. Out comes a fresh twenty-something woman (played by Margaret Qualley) who, for some reason, chooses the name Sue. The first thing she does is go out and take over the exercise show, sexing it up and becoming the most famous woman in the world in the process.

For news.com.au, Joshua Haigh wrote that The Substance “features graphic nudity throughout from both of its main stars”. How the naked female body could be seen as “graphic” at all, let alone graphic enough in this film to be pointed out above all else is a question only that article’s author can answer. The nudity isn’t for the male gaze. The camera fixates on Sue’s boobs and butt because that’s what we focus on as we age.

In a review for Variety, Owen Gleiberman called The Substance “weirdly fun”. Every woman I’ve spoken to left the cinema feeling deeply sad.

The Substance’s message about ageism and sexism isn’t subtle. Every time a man is on screen, he’s talking. He’s chewing with his mouth open, he’s smoking, his teeth are brown, he’s sexually harassing a woman. He’s important. Elisabeth and Sue have minimal dialogue, they’re pristine, quiet, polite, perfectly presented, smiling. 

Part of the deal with the substance is that Elisabeth and Sue must trade places every seven days, with one of them being left unconscious for a week. When it’s Sue’s turn, she must drain Elisabeth’s spinal fluid and inject herself with it every day to remain “stable”. If she gets greedy and takes more than seven days, Elisabeth’s body ages faster in a thinly veiled commentary on how the choices we make when we’re young affect our future selves.

Elisabeth and Sue are constantly reminded that they are not two entities: they are one. The balance must be preserved. But as Sue gets more famous, Elisabeth gets more depressed and lonely, and the anger so many women feel about their past and future selves is taken to the extreme. Elisabeth wants to “terminate” Sue after the latter has drained her body for three months, leaving her stooped, balding, wrinkled and covered in liver spots. But she bails at the last second, telling the unconscious Sue that she is the most loveable part of herself and she desperately wants her back. When Sue does come back, she’s disgusted to see how much Elisabeth has aged and tries to kill her.

margaret Qualley stares ahead in the substance
Sue, played by Margaret Qualley. Image: Mubi

In the end, Sue is unable to keep stabilising herself with the spinal fluid and starts to literally fall apart: first her teeth, her finger nails, an ear. She finds the leftover injection and begs for a newer, better version of herself.

She’s flown too close to the sun. Out of her back hatches a monster that looks like a Patricia Piccinini sculpture but not as cute. She’s all ears and breasts and skin. But still, she glams up: she punctures her skin with diamond earrings, tries to curl her single clump of hair, puts on her gown and appears on stage for her scheduled New Year’s Eve performance. 

Dateline’s Wise concludes his review by comparing the scene that follows to a 1983 Monty Python skit in that takes place in a restaurant. At the end of the skit, Mr Creosote, who’s been continuously vomiting into bucket after bucket during dinner service, eats one last after-dinner mint before his body balloons and explodes over the other diners, exposing his organs. It’s disgusting and it’s disturbing, but given its context in the Monty Python realm of surrealist comedy, it’s funny. In that skit, unlike in The Substance’s penultimate scene, there’s no haunting message behind the projectile bodily fluids that will turn out to be more disturbing than the gore of it all. The climactic scene of The Substance is funny in its overt ridiculousness, and some critics have deemed it an indulgent 20 minutes that the film could have done without. On a surface level, sure. Seeing the Monstro Elisasue trying to appease her audience is a lot to take in. We see her vomit up a single breast, get decapitated and spray blood with a firehose-like pressure across the auditorium while people shove her and scream that she’s a monster. 

To the women in the room, what Monstro Elisasue really is, is a creature of these men’s own creation. She’s a woman who has become a victim of perception drift, the phenomenon when someone has had so much cosmetic work done that they go “too far” because they cannot see themselves anymore. She’s gone through hell to make herself younger, to give us what we asked for, she says, and we turn around and call her a monster. We try to kill her. She already tried to kill herself. Anything you say to a woman about her appearance, she’s already said to herself in infinitely worse ways.

In a review for Variety, Owen Gleiberman called The Substance “weirdly fun”. Every woman I’ve spoken to left the cinema feeling deeply sad. The man next to me was absolutely delighted by the gore and the special effects but viscerally (and loudly) repulsed at the sight of Elisabeth’s old-lady hand. The very real signs of ageing were more disgusting to him than when a hot boy unzipped Sue’s bodysuit and her intestines tumbled out. Every woman I’ve spoken to knows you can’t anti-age your hands.

The post The Substance’s Message About Ageism and Sexism Isn’t Subtle, But Men Are Still Missing The Point appeared first on ELLE.

Continue Reading

You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

16 + twenty =