As far as movies about female aging go, Death Becomes Her has long been the gold standard (as Sabrina Carpenter recently wanted to remind in her video for “Taste”). With the arrival of Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore film, The Substance, however, Robert Zemeckis’ 1992 classic has a bit of competition. But that’s not the only movie Fargeat seemingly pays homage to/draws from. Being someone who has cited David Cronenberg, David Lynch and John Carpenter as key influences, it’s easy to see these auteurs’ mark on her work as well. Regardless, Fargeat clearly delivers her own unique take on the subject of female aging in general and female aging in Hollywood in particular as no man possibly could.
Focusing on a formerly adored starlet named Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), who, yes, has lost her sparkle, Fargeat opens the movie on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (well, after a shot of an egg yolk “generating” another egg yolk out of itself—foreshadowing). Specifically, during the creation of Elisabeth’s star. Its freshness, of course, is ripe with the metaphor that Elisabeth herself is still fresh. And as she stands on her own star to “inaugurate” it, the crowd that surrounds her is reverent, laudatory. In short, lapping her up because she’s still young and beautiful (indeed, it was a missed opportunity not to sardonically include Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” at some point during the movie). To show the usual trajectory of a beloved star—particularly an actress—Fargeat then lapses the time to show decreased foot traffic approaching Elisabeth’s star or bothering to take a picture of it. The scene finally culminates with snow falling on it (an obvious metaphor for Elisabeth’s youth having turned to the “winter” associated with being old) before another passerby drops his burger, fries and ketchup all over it. He then smears the ketchup into the star as though trying to clean up, but the lingering effect is one that looks like somebody’s blood (strategically covering up her last name, to boot).
To be sure, Elisabeth has put a lot of blood (sweat and tears) into her career, only to end up as an aerobics instructor for a decreasingly popular workout program called Sparkle Your Life with Elisabeth (which has nothing on Sheila Rubin’s [Rose Byrne] aerobics show on Physical). Being that aerobics is automatically associated with the 1980s, viewers might, upon initial glance, assume this is a “period” piece. Instead, however, Fargeat’s aim seems to be creating a world that exists unto itself while still being contemporary (previously noting the abilities of certain films to do this—namely, Mad Max and Kill Bill). Hence, the presence of modern devices like smartphones.
As it happens, Elisabeth is turning fifty the day we’re first introduced to her (and yes, Demi Moore, despite approaching her sixty-second birthday, really doesn’t look a day over forty-something—plastic surgery aids or not). Perfect timing for her to be summarily “dismissed,” as far as the producer of the show, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), is concerned (side note: the name Harvey—now synonymous with Hollywood ignominy—doesn’t seem like a coincidence). However, before the viewer bears witness to her cruel firing, they’re given a glimpse of yet another overt influence on Fargeat’s filmic style: Stanley Kubrick. This occurs after Elisabeth wraps up filming what will turn out to be her last show, walking out the door of the studio and into a hallway that’s outfitted with a nearly identical carpet to the one in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel. On either side of her is a wall featuring posters of her younger self (Moore’s actual 80s self dressed in aerobics attire) during the heyday of the show. Making her way to the bathroom, she sees the women’s is out of order and, thus, goes into the men’s. The audience is then given another nod to The Shining with the stark red and white color palette that mirrors the bathroom setting in which “Mr. Grady” (Philip Stone) tells Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) that he’s always been the caretaker.
Elisabeth is faced with some similarly grim news while in the bathroom, overhearing Harvey tell someone on the phone that she’s finished, screaming, “This is network TV, not a fucking charity. Find me somebody new. Now!” He then very undiplomatically and indirectly tells her that she’s finished over a lunch during which he grossly eats the heads of his shrimp (a scene Moore described as “by far the most violent scene in the whole movie”—which is definitely not true). Driving back home afterward, Elisabeth notices a billboard for toothpaste that she’s the spokeswoman for is being taken down, distracting her long enough to get into a car accident. Finding herself in the hospital for a check-up afterward, the doctor notices it’s her birthday on her chart and brings it up, prompting her to start crying. Luckily for the doctor, he gets called to another patient so as to avoid the awkwardness, while the younger nurse (Robin Greer) stays behind to observe her.
Like Mr. Chagall (Ian Ogilvy) in Death Becomes Her, this nurse is the conduit—the “connect,” if you will—between the woman willing to do anything to look younger and the youth that can be given via some Faustian pact. In Elisabeth’s case, that pact comes in the form of “the substance.” Something she’s tipped off about when the nurse slips a hard drive wrapped inside a piece of paper that reads, “It changed my life.” It’s tantamount to the staid white business card that Chagall slips Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep), featuring the cursive script that reads only: 1091 Rue La Fleur. A.k.a. Lisle Von Rhuman’s (Isabella Rossellini) address. The woman who holds the supernatural key to youth and beauty. For it does take nothing short of magic to make Madeline (and Helen Sharp [Goldie Hawn]) look as young as she wants to.
As Chagall puts it, “Unfortunately, we are mere mortals here. We are restricted by the laws of nature.” In The Substance, Fargeat doesn’t treat the idea of a loophole to staying “forever young” as necessitating anything supernatural, so much as scientific. This being, perhaps, a sign o’ the times in terms of how much further advancements in anti-aging treatments have come since 1992, when Death Becomes Her was released in theaters. It’s just a matter of having the massive amounts of money required to obtain that youth. Funnily enough, though, there is no mention of money being paid for this service in The Substance, whereas Madeline is upfront in declaring that money is no object. She’ll pay whatever it takes to get her youth back. With Elisabeth, though, it seems as though she’s part of some elaborate “pay it forward” ring. Albeit one with a much sicker notion of what it means to “give back.” For while it might initially appear to be a “gift” to share a consciousness with a younger, “better” version of herself named Sue (Margaret Qualley), it doesn’t take long for Elisabeth to realize that Sue’s existence has made her become even more self-loathing when it comes to her age.
In fact, it’s almost like “the substance” should be free since it comes across like a sadistic experiment designed to prove that no aging person, least of all an aging woman, can resist the urge to erase herself the way society has effectively done so. Alas, as the disembodied voice on the hard drive forewarns, “You can’t escape from yourself.” Something Elisabeth can’t ignore even after she initially throws away the “business card,” writing it off as some bullshit scam. But in the wake of a lonely night out and staring at her haggard appearance in the mirror back at home, she’s compelled to finally call the number.
Of course, the process for “duplication” is much more than Elisabeth bargained for as Fargeat brings the Cronenbergian body horror to the extreme for the moment when Sue “hatches” out of her back. And, like any “baby” birthed by “Mother,” Sue proves to be an immediate physical drain. Because it is while she inhabits the consciousness of Sue that she can’t resist the temptation to stay younger, violating one of the only rules of the system: each self is allowed only seven days to be that self before needing to switch back (in some regards, it reminds one of the Severance premise). If the amount of days is surpassed, an irrevocable mutation occurs on the “matrix” self (because, of course, the matrix self isn’t trying to surpass her seven days, wanting to immediately toss the baton to Sue, fiending for that time as her younger self like a crackhead).
After understanding how addictive it is to feel young—ergo, how cruel it is to make her return to her old body after a week—Elisabeth finds herself being stalked into a diner by the older version of the nurse who informed her of “the substance” in the first place. Goading her under the guise of “commiserating,” his old self remarks, “It gets harder each time to remember that you still deserve to exist. That this part of yourself is still worth something, that you still matter.” It’s a scene that is decidedly Lynchian in tone, with Elisabeth running off as she gets increasingly creeped out, but not before the nurse shouts, “Has she started yet? Eating away at you?” This further horrifies Elisabeth as she runs of in her Hitchockian-coded yellow coat (because, needless to say, Hitchcock was a fan of leading ladies wearing a signature article of clothing in a signature color). Horrifies her not as a suggestion, but because it cuts to the core of what’s been happening, with her youthful self becoming greedier and greedier for more time as her older self starts to become more and more resentful, acting out in her own destructive ways…like overeating (resulting in another body horror sequence involving a chicken leg that Sue has to pull out through her belly button).
Fargeat, however, saves her ultimate pièce de résistance body horror for last in a denouement that reeks of a similar kind of denouement in Brian Yuzna’s Society. Let’s just say that, yes, there’s a grotesque mash-up of body parts and flesh. And yet, Seth Meyers said to Demi Moore (when she sat down to be his guest as part of her promotion of the film), “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” But the fact of the matter is that The Substance is an amalgam of many things that have been seen before (including The Picture of Dorian Gray or even Norma Desmond [Gloria Swanson] in Sunset Boulevard going through the marathon ordeal of various “miracle” beauty/anti-aging “remedies”). This even extends to the South Korean film styles that Fargeat mentioned during her promotion of Revenge, telling Jezebel, “I was more sensitive to South Korean extreme movies like Oldboy or I Saw the Devil. I think also what I like is to escape from reality in a way, and I think South Korean movies have had such a strong impact on me, or directors like Cronenberg for instance. They escape from reality, they build a totally different universe, and it’s not realistic horror.”
But through the “unrealistic,” Fargeat shows us the reality of just how distorted our own thinking has become with regard to staying young at any cost. Even at the expense of our own mental and physical health. Something that Death Becomes Her also acknowledged “back in the day,” but with far more levity. In The Substance, the darkness beneath the “absurdist” comedy is too impossible to ignore. This, again, indicating that female body image has only worsened over the decades rather than improved. Which, one would think, shouldn’t be the case with a theoretically more progressive worldview among the “collective.” All the more reason that a film like The Substance has arrived at a time when its scathing message is as needed as ever to shake society out of its youth and “perfect body” obsession.
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