../the-substance

The Substance

At a glance...

It's flashy, it's nauseating, and it's also annoying. For all the great effects work and powerful visuals, this movie still talks at you like a kid's TV show reminding the audience when an important clue is appearing on-screen. The absolute worst for me was towards the end when Elisabeth is begging for Sue to wake up, and she says, "you have to succeed because you're all that matters, because I hate myself!" or something like that. I literally laughed when she said that in pure incredulity. Is there any doubt for anyone watching this movie that Elisabeth hates herself? That the entire fulcrum of this story hinges on self-hatred? The Substance dresses up all of its dramatic build up in the most hyperrealistic viscera possible, and then when it matters most it puts a big sign on the screen that says, "THIS IS IMPORTANT. THIS IS THE MORAL. THIS IS THE REASON WHY THE BAD THINGS ARE HAPPENING. REMEMBER, YOU ARE ONE". God, how could I forget!

Honestly, I find it a frustratingly shallow narrative for how painstakingly detailed they made the monstrosities. I'm sure other trans women can relate, but the framing of self-love vs. self-hate for body modification is so damn tired and so limiting for how we relate to people who, for one reason or another, want to change their bodies. I have stopped talking to cis women about this stuff but back in my early 20's when all I wanted was to be included by the real girls around me, any conversation about my desire to change my body to look more feminine was met with, "oh but sweetie, you don't have to do that! You're already so beautiful! Of course you do you, but don't feel like you need to change anything, you don't want to really get into that stuff, I actually really like how you look." The implication was two-fold. First, if I learned to really love myself the way all beautiful trans people should do, I wouldn't need to change anything about myself because I'm already perfect. If I do change myself, that means fundamentally I'm doing it to be seen by others in a different way, and that means being motivated by pleasing others and that's not very self-love of me. Second, it was clear that I was not a real woman, so I could opt out of the beauty standards that caused so much harm, while the participation and enforcement of these standards by the cis women around me was always a foregone conclusion. That part, where I can choose but cis women cannot, has always annoyed me.

In The Substance, it is a foregone conclusion that the evil beauty standard exists and is inescapable. You cannot defeat it, so you cope in solitude, privately managing your relationship to it as best as you can. Your failure is preordained, and the way we are meant to confront this destiny of failure is through the heartbreak of a wealthy and established woman in the thinness sales industry losing her job. What Elisabeth experiences is nakedly discriminatory and misogynistic...but it is also something that she loves participating in. She wants to go back to this job working for the big bad shrimp man because she loves being a symbol of thinness, fitness, and feminine success, and essential to the functioning of this film is that this part of her is never questioned. If we frame this woman's subsequent reaction, decision, and escalation to annihilation purely in terms of self-hate (which, again, the movie is extremely purposeful in reinforcing), we can just cast this wealthy, powerful white woman who has everything as the ideal and most profoundly relatable victim of misogyny and sexism.

I am frustrated at how much movies like this and Barbie leave me feeling like those conversations I've had with the women who are, I suppose, the target audience for this (or at least the primary source material). If I can only understand Elisabeth the character through her own self-loathing, then I am narratively compelled to empathizing with her. But in reality, I have a lot of critical thoughts towards wealthy and successful white women who appeal to emotions to maintain their status and power. And I don't believe that just because someone in a position of power is of a marginalized identity, it's therefore more important to be mindful of their identity than critical of their power. If I look at Elisabeth purely as a font of self-pity, ultimately made manifest with a grotesque, hyper-exaggerated interpretation of transforming into an old lady, it is harder to see that the omnipotent beauty standard is something that she really wants. She does not want to stop, she wants this. A better movie that cared about that might interrogate why she still wants it, why she can't see Harvey or the board of trustees or even her neighbor across the street as a better target for her hate, why she can't even let go of this job and this career she's made out of her desirability.

It all just reeks of that liberal ideal of private, anonymized violence that I ranted about in Juno as well. It's people like Elisabeth who are instrumental in peddling the beauty standard down to the rest of us. I know lots of regular-ass people who will come out of this film and say, "this is exactly what being a woman feels like", but it's not! What we go through is actually way worse because we don't have nearly the power or security to insulate us from harm. We don't have penthouse suites filled with accolades and name recognition, there's no sidewalk star for the average old, fat lady who can't get a doctor to believe her about her symptoms to save her life, and I've never met a trans woman who was dying to have someone from 10th grade recognize her and call out to her on the street. But go watch this movie and you can see a movie star commit self-harm for 2 and a half hours to really hammer home how fucked up it is for wealthy, thin white women. There is no solidarity amongst women in this film, there is no way to be critical of the actual source of Elisabeth's suffering, there is no room to even be critical of Elisabeth herself. Self-love is when you gracefully accept the verdict handed down to you by your sleazy boss, self-hate is when you radically alter and destroy yourself to try to go back. Self-love is when you say no to the Cronenberg juice, self-hate is when you say yes.

This is the foregone conclusion. In a liberal fixation on privatized misogyny enforced through self-hate/self-care, we never experience a fundamental break with the mindset of misogyny. In other words, the framing of this movie makes its own reproduction of misogyny inevitable. After all, isn't the horror being directly connected to aging kind of misogynistic? The punishment for misusing the substance is...you get older faster. What will we tell all the old women in our lives, and how are they meant to be an audience for this film? Really how is anyone who can't identify with and empathize with thin whiteness supposed to engage with this film? How does a fat person watch this film when so much of the monstrosity comes with getting bigger, when so much of Elisabeth's decline is tracked in terms of her ever-increasing desire to eat? What is up with French women and fatness and food? They have such a damn complex about it, I should have known a French woman made this.

It is kind of batshit to watch this movie right after my facial feminization surgery recovery. I took the Cronenberg juice to get bigger tits, to shave off my eyebrow ridge, to plump the fuck out of my previously pencil thin lips. I used to grow a really patchy goatee and pseudo-beard on my face and with the power of lasers I melted those hairs right off, and the smell is so memorable I've been getting flashbacks while I'm having my ball hairs zapped off so I can hot swap my junk for a designer pussy. Do I hate myself for doing all this, just to meet a beauty standard that shouldn't exist? No! Through the framework of bodily autonomy, we can actually access something more connective and empowering than "self-love", and we can get to more critical questions of motivation. If we acknowledge that Elizabeth and I both are in choice when we change our bodies, we can immediately follow up with examining the conditions that motivate those choices. How convenient for this movie that we never have to consider how this character is situated. The rest of the unfolding horror can almost be entirely dumped into a bathroom. As gross as some of these flesh-rending visuals are, I just feel worn out after a while because it feels like pure spectacle. The substance never has to interact in conflict with any of the forces that demand its creation.

As it is, I wonder if this movie would have been better off with no dialogue at all. No exposition, let the viewer figure out all the rules of the substance through pure inference. The visual design of this is so striking it probably totally could have worked. When things are ambiguous, the viewer can read in whatever framing they want. When so much is just declared, like assumptions in a math proof, I feel no choice but to believe what I'm told. Maybe a lot of this criticism is just wanting the movie to be a different movie, but I guess I feel happy to do that as long as these "feminist" movies being released and promoted are movies that don't have the guts to show anything radical about femininity. I'm on the substance right now, it's called estradiol valerate, and it fucking rules. Being a woman fucking rules, and when it doesn't, it's in relationship to things beyond just my self. It is not my responsibility to love myself enough that I can just power through the worst of the patriarchy and go back to work. I get that we love the idea of a woman having some feral energy to unapologetically unleash upon the world, but I guess I just have to admit that once again making the story about culturally iconic, well-resourced, and well-platformed elites feels less like relatable fairy tale and more like propaganda to me.

/2024/ /2.5 stars/ /it's hard being a white feminist/