Men and The Substance

Hi. Welcome to A Manly Podcast. I’m your host, Matthew. I talk about issues related to men and masculinity in American culture and society.

Today’s episode, it’s all about the horror film, The Substance and men. Men are hardly in The Substance at all, but their traditional patriarchal values in American society and culture dominate the film. The Substance comments on the very narrow definition of beauty standards for women in society, dictated by patriarchal values. This is especially true for celebrities and actors whose looks are intensely scrutinized. It echoes a similar commentary from other films about how our society constantly filters and sees each other through screens, how this can make us more self-conscious, judgmental of ourselves and others. And thinking big picture, it asks, can we accept ourselves for who we are, even the parts that get judged or we may not like.

You know a film is good when people have strong opinions about it. And most people who’ve seen The Substance either love it or hate it. It’s an in-your-face horror film that honestly builds pretty slow, but after it gets past the halfway point, it really turns up the dial and just goes full throttle till you hit the credits. The movie tells the tragic tale of Elizabeth Sparkle, played by Demi Moore, who ends up, I guess you could call it dying at the end of the film, her body becomes a monstrous blob that ends up walking the streets of LA and melts in the hot LA afternoon sun.

Then her face on a slime-like viscera of guts ends up crawling itself to her Hollywood Walk of Fame star where she basks in the limelight one last time before becoming a puddle of blood and evaporating into the air. Then a street cleaner ends up coming by the next day and cleans it up and the film ends. Roll credits.

The ending makes a powerful statement on how the media industry’s patriarchal status quo will “keep on keeping on” because producers and decision makers, mainly men, affirm their misogyny through the confirmation bias of viewer ratings. What’s good for business is what the audience wants and what they want is hot women.

Elizabeth in the fantastical world of The Substance is a big nationally syndicated talk show host who is let go at the beginning of the movie by misogynist TV producer Harvey (no coincidence to Harvey Weinstein, of course) played by Dennis Quaid. As he discards her, we see closeup shots of him eating shrimp with a mayo-like sauce, globs dribbling on his lip as he spits out the shells. Elizabeth is forced to confront an ancient double standard in Hollywood and the media industry. Men as they grow older are often lauded as old lions, wise sages like George Clooney and Robert De Niro. Ageism won’t affect how people see their appearance or whether they’ll get work or not. For women celebrities and those in the movie industry, there are ridiculously high, unachievable beauty standards. Who defines beauty and attractiveness? The men who control production and hiring decisions see the world through these status quo, patriarchal standards of beauty for women.

According to Harvey, she’s not sparkling anymore and they need young blood, a fresh face to replace the aging Elizabeth. So desperate times call for desperate measures. Enter the substance, a drug she hears about at her doctor’s office. Never mind that the company distributing it is real shady and the guy who always answers the phones when she calls for refills sounds super ominous. The Substance has elements of reality, but it’s more fiction than anything else. The vibrant colors of the film, the talk show sets, the workout vibes, even her apartment, they all have some 80s vibes to them. The scenes out in LA are dark and oppressive. The shadows from the tall charcoal buildings reflecting the sunlight highlight Moore’s wrinkles and her expressions of anxiety and paranoia walking past people on the street. When she gets back to her apartment, the transformation begins as she injects herself with the substance and starts growing a new younger body from her own self. Her new self, Sue, played by Margaret Qualley, admires her new naked body in the mirror after the transformation. She looks on with power and pride at her taut skin and her well-defined features that will fit Harvey’s definition of what it means to be a beautiful woman.

She goes to an audition, ends up getting her own talk show, the ratings go through the roof, and she’s doing her own fitness videos now too. Life is good for Sue, except it requires you to switch bodies every week. One week on, one week off. “You are one,” the ominous voice says. Elizabeth comes back to life feeling dejected, feeling like her life is uninteresting and empty compared to Sue’s. At one point, she reaches out to an old friend from high school who is completely blown away that a celebrity like her would call him. She makes a date with him, but never goes because her self-esteem is in the gutter. She perceives herself as unworthy and retreats into loneliness. The apartment she lives in is a top floor of a high rise, with a spacious, beautiful living room that overlooks the city of LA. There is a long hallway though that leads to the bedroom and bathroom where the transformation takes place. The camera work and tracking shots that lead us down the hallway are so effective, especially when she first injects herself and transforms into Sue, and as their relationship progresses into hatred for each other. The billboard overlooking her apartment that starts the movie as Elizabeth and then becomes Sue’s oppressively looks over the older woman as she changes back, almost trolling her appearance. There is no escape for Elizabeth from not feeling beautiful or enough, even though men like Harvey can wear hideous, lurid, bright orange suits and eat like slobs.

Sue quickly starts abusing the substance, taking more of the stabilizer fluid she needs to survive from what I believe is Elizabeth’s spinal cord to extend out her shelf life. After staying as Sue for three months, she runs out of fluid and has to switch back. Elizabeth awakes and can barely walk. Like when we first see Sue, she is naked, but Elizabeth is now decrepit, deformed, and much, much older with a hunchback. She calls and gets the termination serum to kill Sue. Just as she is about to kill her though, she has a change of heart and decides to resuscitate her. Living life as Sue is too good. Sue, realizing what her other half was about to do, kills her. But now she has a big, big problem. She has no stabilizer fluid to keep herself alive. So instead, she injects herself with the leftover activation serum and ends up turning into the monstrous blob called Monstro Elisasue. The experiment gone wrong leads to a gore fest at what I believe is the New Year’s Eve party or New Year’s Eve broadcast. And it’s a gross and disturbing scene, viewer beware. The film would have been better off without it, but Coralie Fargeat wants us to be uncomfortable. The film runs with this idea of “If body dysmorphia caused by institutional patriarchal misogyny drove a national celebrity mad and they started taking a Dorian Gray-like drug that had a cost, what would happen?” And in the substance, Fargeat confronts us with that end product, the uncanny Monstro Elisasue, with Sue and Elizabeth along for the ride. Their faces, by the way, are attached to the monster’s body in random places like here and here.

The Substance is sure to become a cult classic because it has such a bonkers plot. Horror films have a good track record for sticking around in our culture because they get its subversive undercurrents about uncomfortable topics or issues. They dig under the skin. In the scene where she decides not to go on a date with the guy from high school, she’s looking in the mirror applying lipstick before she goes out, but then she can’t get the lipstick perfect. She sees her imperfections and grows angry. She starts to smudge the lipstick, and there’s a growing, a silent sense of fury at her fading beauty. The actress Demi Moore’s attractiveness, her looks, have been scrutinized since she became a star in the 80s, and she’s been making movies since the late 70s. The planets align for this horror role because if there’s any woman who can speak to the thoughts and feelings behind being judged for their appearance and looks, it’s a celebrity like Demi Moore. The part of Elizabeth is a perfect vehicle for this. Even though she is already beautiful, Harvey’s opinion of her looks destroys her career and leads to her tragic death. She ends up absorbing the patriarchy’s narrow definition of beauty, believing she’s not beautiful, she doesn’t look good enough. It’s easy to say that Elizabeth should just shrug off Harvey’s opinion, have more self-belief, conviction in who she is. We would hope if we were in a similar situation, we would have the power to pick ourselves up and not feel thrown away. The Substance does a nice job though in the early scenes of showing how the network just erases her, abruptly canceling her show, taking down the billboard outside her apartment, and sending her a pity box of chocolates as a parting gift. She has a great chance of getting the Oscar on Sunday, and people love seeing older Hollywood stars get recognized for their work. I remember when I saw Misery with Kathy Bates when I was too young to see that film, ooh, oh boy, that gave me nightmares. Kathy Bates was terrifying in that film, and she definitely deserved the Oscar. Demi Moore is just as good in this film. There’s been so many great performances by women in horror films. Some of my favorites are Jodie Foster in Panic Room, Nicole Kidman in The Others, and Michelle Pfeiffer in What Lies Beneath. For me, the two best horror films from last year were this one, The Substance, and I Saw the TV Glow, which is kind of a borderline horror film, and I also love The Heretic. Hugh Grant is fabulous in that film. Her performance as Elizabeth will sparkle on for the ages in a horror movie that, through cringe moments, gore, and at times full-throttle violence, confronts institutional values of patriarchy that impose impossible standards of beauty onto women. Hate or love it, I think the director would say the film is doing its job. It only has a 2.8 out of five stars from 5,371 Google reviews. One reviewer wrote, “This isn’t a film. It’s a misunderstanding of what cinema should be.”

It’s making us uncomfortable. It’s getting us to think about issues related to societal standards of beauty for women and the men that impose them. It’s doing what every great horror film does, provoking a reaction and creating commentary that makes people conscious of an issue they would rather not talk about.

Thanks so much for taking the time to listen to A Manly Podcast. Please like and subscribe here on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. I talk about an issue related to men and masculinity each week. On my next episode, I’ll be talking about Watching My Wife’s Reality Shows.

Till next time, bye!