There are few experiences as disorienting as disliking a movie you believed you would love. No, not just love—a movie you thought might have been cooked up in a lab specifically for you. Seeing a movie like this, with such high expectations, all but guarantees disappointment. You need to walk in maintaining a balance of excitement and humility. Excitement, of course, because you’re sure you’re about to see a movie that delivers on its promise; humility because you undoubtedly won’t.
I learned about The Substance from a trailer on Instagram and immediately sent the clip to friends, building a network of people who might see it with me the week it came out. I’m drawn to art that explores the damning impact of the beauty industry on our bodies. My first novel, The Atmospherians, follows a failed skincare influencer in a world where men have taken to inexplicably spending their free time together in hordes; my second, People Collide, is about a husband and wife who swap bodies. The Substance bridges my interests in goopy sci-fi and mutating bodies. I believed the film would expand on my own obsessions, exposing me to ideas I hadn’t yet considered. Here was a visually arresting, stylized film criticizing the relentless exploitation of women. Here was Margaret Qualley, an actress I love, trying something strange and combative. Here was the perfect movie for me.
The lesson of The Substance, though, is a lesson I should have internalized for myself before seeing it: be careful what you wish for. With fiction students, I often suggest they give their characters exactly what they want. It only seems counterintuitive on the surface. In reality, this strategy tends to reveal far more about a character than creating a series of manufactured impediments does. It’s a familiar story: Paris absconds with the most beautiful woman in the world, and it kicks off a war; Dorian Gray gets to stay young and attractive, but it eats away at his soul.
In The Substance, Elisabeth Sparkle’s (Demi Moore) pursuit of beauty and youth is a little more complicated than personal choice. She longs to be young again because her employer, the shrimp-slurping Harvey (Dennis Quaid), has deemed her too old to continue hosting her daytime workout show. Once an Oscar-winner, with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she is now irrelevant.
Beyond this, it is difficult to write about character in The Substance, because just about everyone in the film is a type. This is not a bug but a feature. Elisabeth is an aging star. The most the viewer learns about her early life is that she went to high school with a man named Fred. She is—was—famous, and that fame is being taken away from her. Harvey is a stand-in as well: he represents the all-consuming id of an entertainment industry that privileges sex appeal and ratings over human connection.
Elisabeth can’t even get drunk at a bar without being reminded of women younger and more pick-up-able. But thankfully, she meets a porcelain-looking hospital nurse who has a solution: he slips her a USB stick featuring an ad for “the substance,” a revolutionary treatment that promises to make her better. After seeing her former job advertised in the newspaper, Elisabeth has little choice but to pursue treatment. She injects green gunk in her arm, the result of which is Sue (Margaret Qualley), who climbs out of Elisabeth’s spine already voguing for the mirror. Qualley plays this scene perfectly, with a mix of arousal and admiration as she gazes at herself, a fitting contrast to Moore’s skillful expression of hurt pride as she studies her body, demoralized, seconds before injecting the substance.
What follows is a somewhat predictable Jekyll and Hyde arc. Sue gets the job that once belonged to Elisabeth and becomes a sensation. Elisabeth grows to resent her, as Sue refuses to respect the balance, causing Elisabeth’s body to grow moldy and gray. The most compelling part of Elisabeth’s character is her willingness to continue the treatment, even after she understands that she cannot control Sue. In fact, Sue ignores the balance almost as soon as she’s given the chance.
The movie seems undecided on the connection between these competing selves. According to a disembodied voice on the phone the two women are really one, yet Elisabeth seems to have no recollection of what she does when Sue is awake. Sue, for her part, only discovers that Elisabeth has been binge eating upon seeing the apartment covered in food. But, even after her leg has atrophied into something like driftwood, Elisabeth refuses to stop the treatment. This is a rare window into her motivations and internal conflict, a moment quieter than the infamous scene of Elisabeth before her mirror, desperately wiping off lipstick in the lead up to a date.
Why, I wonder, does she refuse to stop the treatment? Is it because she still believes there is value in living as Sue? Is it because she hopes to recover her physical form as it was prior to taking the substance? One possibility is that the two women, as the voice on the phone reminds them both, are one, and Elisabeth, even though she cannot remember being Sue, is on some level capable of enjoying her time as the younger woman. That’s possible! However, the film refuses to complicate Elisabeth’s relationship with Sue beyond a dynamic of competition. When Sue appears on a nightime talk show, Elisabeth reacts with predictable envy and distress, preparing a mountain of food in preparation to binge. But does any part of Elisabeth admire Sue? We never find out.
The movie turns Elisabeth’s character into an intellectual problem that can be solved. Her motivations are dictated almost entirely by outside forces compelling her to pursue the beauty and youth required to make it in Hollywood. There is nothing that feels untrue about this, nor is there anything surprising or revelatory about it. At least, that’s how I felt watching the movie the first time. Watching it a second time, a few weeks ago, at home on my couch, I couldn’t even muster the effort to solve Elisabeth and her conundrum. This is the risk a film takes when it falls into the trappings of fable. And The Substance is, at its core, a fable. It outlines the perils of being a woman exploited by men and the film industry, with the primary aim of teaching us a lesson. That lesson, however, is muddy. Don’t get old? Americans hate ugly women? Sure. The Substance is what the trailer promised: a stylized, idiosyncratic film, lush with color and bombastic displays of misogyny. But its failure to give the viewer any intimate access to Elisabeth, beyond repeated feelings of physical worthlessness, pushed me out of the movie. Still, it is not a failure, per se. It accomplishes exactly what it wants to say. Unfortunately, that is the problem.
contributor
