Anthony McIntyre 🎥 My daughter recommended we watch this blend of sci-fi and psychological thriller.
She had previously viewed it in the cinema and explained that it was essentially a body horror movie - not a concept I was familiar with until I watched it - that satirically eviscerates the American entertainment industry.
The elixir of youth, much like the Philosopher's Stone of Indiana Jones fame, has for aeons found itself being pursued by a posse of age averse death evaders. The elixir unlike the stone has remained beyond reach although it has not dampened the enthusiasm for the search parties eager to hold back death anxiety.
Demi Moore is Elizabeth Sparkle and puts in a sparkling performance. Acting non-sexual nude scenes at 60 showed a robust character, not in the slightest deterred by her equally naked, and equally brilliant, co-actress Margaret Qually, thirty years her junior. A long time star, age became a hindrance to Elizabeth because of the demands of her boss, Harvey (a telling choice of name). His interest in Elizabeth began to wane as her marketability began to wither. She was replaced as the face of a popular television morning aerobics show. Having lived with fame and face recognition for so much of her life, she was alarmed at the void opening up in front of her, a fame-free future, once Harvey told her that her presence on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was superfluous to requirement.
Anxious and anguished, not quite ready to walk off the stage, with the termination notice to the fore of her mind, her drive through city streets leads to her finding herself distracted by her image being erased from a billboard. In the second it took her to glance away she lost control of her vehicle. The camera work from inside the car was done with aplomb, causing more than one wince and a gasp in the living room, as Ms Sparkle was thrown around like a rag doll. Suddenly it seemed the light might be going out in her life.
No more Ms Sparkle was avoided by good luck, which was explained to her by the hospital doctor who fortunately gave her the all-clear before telling her that his wife loved her TV show. Not so fortunately, the male nurse examining her gave her information about The Substance that could change her life. With the sparkle having gone out of her career thanks to the avarice of Harvey, the chance to reignite the flame of fame was too much of an allure. Seemingly on the up . . . so began her descent into Hell.
The Substance is a green liquid that restores youthful vitality but it can only work via the emergence of a new person. A secular version of the biblical myth where a woman is created from a rib, the only concession to feminism lies in the figurative rib from which Sue was created belonging to Elizabeth. The profiteering suppliers of The Substance explain that there are not two people but one. If the viewer can grasp the Catholic theological Blessed Trinity idea they can get their head around Elizabeth and Sue being the same person existing in two bodies.
Success in a cutthroat world inevitably sees someone's throat cut. Failure for somebody is invariably the price of success for someone else. The younger Sue soars while the older Elizabeth sinks. Feast of fame for one, famine of fading for the other, the inevitable internal conflict is set in motion.
The script could have been written by Stephen King, not just because of the horror dimension - while the supernatural is not at work in the film, The Dark Half invites comparisons - but because of the cut throat rat race that defines US capitalism into which King sketched a window with The Running Man, under the pseudonym Richard Bachmann. Parallels may also be found in the sporting world where performance enhancing drugs have at times caused a very corrosive effect on authentic competition. The final part of the two and half hour movie has echoes of Marry Shelley's Frankenstein. A movie, not of the horror genre but which serves up horror nonetheless.
Written and directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, The Substance is a film of the Me Too era, a pushback against the Harvey ilk of this world who denigrate and destroy in their own rapacious race to the top that sends so many others spiralling to the bottom. Those who are singularly committed to the objectification of women and reduce them to mere chattel are not the heroes of this film. No heroines emerge either, just women crushed by the relentless lust of the male gaze. A sad denouement where Fargeat plants a thought in the minds of her viewers as to how such an ugly industry ever became known as the beauty industry.
The Substance is a green liquid that restores youthful vitality but it can only work via the emergence of a new person. A secular version of the biblical myth where a woman is created from a rib, the only concession to feminism lies in the figurative rib from which Sue was created belonging to Elizabeth. The profiteering suppliers of The Substance explain that there are not two people but one. If the viewer can grasp the Catholic theological Blessed Trinity idea they can get their head around Elizabeth and Sue being the same person existing in two bodies.
Success in a cutthroat world inevitably sees someone's throat cut. Failure for somebody is invariably the price of success for someone else. The younger Sue soars while the older Elizabeth sinks. Feast of fame for one, famine of fading for the other, the inevitable internal conflict is set in motion.
The script could have been written by Stephen King, not just because of the horror dimension - while the supernatural is not at work in the film, The Dark Half invites comparisons - but because of the cut throat rat race that defines US capitalism into which King sketched a window with The Running Man, under the pseudonym Richard Bachmann. Parallels may also be found in the sporting world where performance enhancing drugs have at times caused a very corrosive effect on authentic competition. The final part of the two and half hour movie has echoes of Marry Shelley's Frankenstein. A movie, not of the horror genre but which serves up horror nonetheless.
Written and directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, The Substance is a film of the Me Too era, a pushback against the Harvey ilk of this world who denigrate and destroy in their own rapacious race to the top that sends so many others spiralling to the bottom. Those who are singularly committed to the objectification of women and reduce them to mere chattel are not the heroes of this film. No heroines emerge either, just women crushed by the relentless lust of the male gaze. A sad denouement where Fargeat plants a thought in the minds of her viewers as to how such an ugly industry ever became known as the beauty industry.
It is a great if rather blood dimmed watch.
ReplyDeleteThere is lots of gore in it. A well made science fiction production.
Delete"...just women crushed by the relentless lust of the male gaze."
ReplyDeleteSigh.
"I’ve been very vocal about my opposition to the simplistic theory of ‘the male gaze’ that is associated with Laura Mulvey (and that she herself has moved somewhat away from) and that has taken over feminist film studies to a vampiric degree in the last 25 years. The idea that a man looking at or a director filming a beautiful woman makes her an object, makes her passive beneath the male gaze which seeks control over woman by turning her into mere matter, into “meat” – I think this was utter nonsense from the start. It was formulated by people who knew nothing about the history of painting or sculpture, the history of the fine arts..."
Camille Paglia
We need only look at the movie and the role the male gaze plays in it to see how ill fitting the Pagila view is in this case. The entire film was about the male gaze and male power within the industry. Which is probably why a Harvey had to play such a central role.
DeletePaglia is often criticised by feminists which she can withstand. But her pro-paedophilia stance is probably going to create a much more formidable barrier to getting her ideas across. A bit like Scott Ritter critiques of US foreign policy.
Great film, nonetheless.
AM,
ReplyDeleteI don't buy that at all.
Such arguments imply that women have no agency over their actions and that they are eternal puppets for men. What it conveniently ignores is the simple fact that men and women process beauty differently and academia has pathologisied the male version as as unhealthy.
Of course it can be unhealthy and can seriously affect your relationships but the Substance tries to ignore the fact that Elizabeth (Demi Moore) is addicted to fame and adoration. Hence why she embarks on taking the drug instead of getting revenge on Harvey.
Re. Paglia, she certainly did espouse such views but she had disowned them:
"In terms of the present day, I think it's absolutely impossible to think we could reproduce the Athenian code of pedophilia, of boy-love, that was central to culture at that time...We must protect children, and I feel that very very strongly. The age of consent for sexual interactions between a boy and an older man is obviously disputed, at what point that should be. I used to think that fourteen (the way it is in some places in the world) was adequate. I no longer think that. I think young people need greater protection than that...This is one of those areas that we must confine to the realm of imagination and the history of the arts."
Previous to 1999 the age of sexual consent in Spain was 12 years. It then changed to 13 years and remained so until 2013 and then raised to the current legal age of consent of 16 years.
ReplyDeleteThe age of consent is fluid and not just in relation to the sexual sphere - voting, alcohol consumption, driving licence.
DeleteThe caveat emptor clause that comes with TPQ should lead to people not buying into anything that is said here - it is not that sort of blog.
ReplyDeleteNothing about a lack of agency is implied either in the film or the review. Far from The Substance ignoring the addiction to fame on the part of Elizabeth it emphasised that addiction from the start and carried it right through the movie to the final scenes.
Whatever about academia, the film does not pathologise a male admiration of female beauty as unhealthy. It depicts an abnormal pathological male control of the beauty industry that disadvantages women who were older or no longer considered pretty because they were not good for profit.
Her support of paedophilia is not a genie that can be put back into the bottle. She stood accused of making common cause with child abusers at a time when it was well known what the harmful effects on children were. While it is important that issues like the age of consent be debated and discussed, once she said that child abuse was justified in the case of Sinead O'Connor (and I think she was trying to be caustically witty) she trivialised the whole matter. My point in relation to her is that there is a need for a discussion free from cancel culture about the male gaze and such like but her ability to do so has diminished as a result of the positions she took. Lost ground here is not easily recoverable here because of the sensitivity around the issue. Like the former paedophile the former supporter of paedophile is not going to get a free pass.
I just think you have read the film wrong.
AM,
ReplyDeleteI don't think I have. I just think that the point that it's trying to make is too complex to simply reduce to "it's da fault of da male gaze".
Re. Paglia, yes people are free to dismiss her because of the pro-pedophilic stance although the same people would positively cite Derek Jarman, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Paul Satre and Simone de Beauvoir as well despite them making similar claims (also disavowed). Nowadays, because of pedogeddon, we are far more aware as a society of such dangers and we should act accordingly to ensure children are protected and perpetrators are punished.
The film is more complex than that. While leaving the viewer in no doubt of the role of the male gaze it very much does what you think it doesn't - show explicitly the addiction to fame. Which explains the reason why there were no heroines. Elizabeth had agency and used it to try to outmanoeuvre the very real structure of male power she was confronted with. Ideologically, the gaze was always working to position her in the Althusserian sense of interpellation. I found it a fascinating film.
DeleteAll those French intellectuals signed a letter about the age of consent in the 70s and Foucault might even have gone further in his arguments.
They made a target for their own backs much as Pagila has done. And even if the 70s and the 90s were two different eras and they were protected by the strange nature of French intellectual culture which was more resilient to US influence (and resented for it) in a way that Pagila was not I think many would be uncomfortable citing them in discussions around the matter.
It was easier I think for the French to make the arguments they did and not be subject to the same intense scrutiny as she was. By her time it has become a very contentious issue and she was commenting in a different cultural milieu.
Did you watch the movie? Well worth the two and a half hours it runs.
AM,
ReplyDeleteI did watch the movie. As a Cronenbergian style horror (Videodrome, The Brood, Rabid) it works well and is held together by two great performances from Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. As previously stated, I just think that the point that it's trying to make is too complex to simply reduce to "it's da fault of da male gaze".
Take the 2017 film Raw, which is ostensibly a horror film but tackles conformity, sister bonds, establishing one's identity and hierarchy in a way that was both intelligent and visceral. Yet it never (to me anyway) takes sides and allows you to wonder if what you're seeing is "correct" or not.
Raw is not one that I have watched
DeleteDo make a point of watching Raw. One of the best films of the 2010's.
DeleteI'll say to my daughter and we can watch it together. She loves horror
Deletehttps://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/demi-moore/the-substance-review
ReplyDelete"Fargeat leads us to believe that the entertainment business is exploiting Elisabeth, but she has no interest in questioning Elisabeth’s complicity in her own “exploitation,” because that would mean questioning what Elisabeth gets out of this arrangement and her entire raison d’être (adoration), and therefore the collapse of the film’s logic...In the absence of character nuance or development, Elisabeth and Sue become representative of all women, old and young. The idea that only women are subjected to fearing age is as antiquated as the concept of aerobics television, and to further insinuate that our insecurities are fully our fault by making Elisabeth the ultimate punchline is insulting. It’s difficult to go into too much detail about this punchline without spoiling the whole film, but imagine if Carrie White were humiliated at the prom and then didn’t have the ability to exact any meaningful revenge. That’s how I felt leaving The Substance."
I don't have time to read the review but the reviewer seems to have been on some substance when writing it!!
DeleteTook my 13 year old daughter to watch the latest "Scream" installment and we ended up pissing ourselves laughing at how utterly bad it was. She loves horror but that movie was just plain stupid lol Avoid it if you can.
ReplyDeleteDunno if this appeals to me tbh. First off I fell asleep during “Oppenheimer” so 2 and 1/2 hours hmmm. Secondly I’m a simple man I like horror where I can get lost in it without having to think too deeply. That’s why the new “Anaconda” rung my bell. It’s easy no subplot no message no take away just 90 mins (or thereabouts) of pure entertainment. Also waiting on the unfortunately named “UVF - Underground Video Films” coming out @MrOwens. Will let you know. Ps if you’re all seeking something truly awful try “Frogman” .
ReplyDeleteYeah but Anaconda was just daft fun not horror!
DeleteI tend to be a lazy viewer too but there are some films that just grip you. I watched The Secret Agent recently in the cinema and while a slow start it soon had me absorbed. My daughter highly recommends that one suggested by Christopher - Raw. So we are gonna give that a run soon enough.
DeleteComedy/Horror Steve R. We all need something to get us through these difficult times.
ReplyDelete