Screening 'The Substance'

or 'How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Male Gaze.'

Okay so first off, hi! Did you remember you even signed up for this newsletter? I barely remembered I made it, so… yeah. Anyway my life/health is approximately 62% less dumpster fire than when I last sent a missive on this platform, and I just saw a movie I got all excited about. So here we are.

In our household we are heralding the arrival of “screener season,” in which my SAG-AFTRA affiliated spouse gets access to a whole whack o’ movies and TV shows to watch and vote for in sundry categories for the SAG Awards. And this season, there was a movie I was dying to watch nominated for Best Actress.

The movie is, of course, The Substance, a body-horror film from writer/director Coralie Fargeat. It stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging fitness personality who finds out on her birthday that her network is dropping her for someone younger and hotter. Through some traumatic events, Elisabeth is introduced to The Substance, a clearly not-FDA-approved drug that promises to give you another chance at youth. Dennis Quaid plays the network head, and Margaret Qualley plays the woman that ends up replacing Elisabeth.

Now. I’m not the world’s biggest horror fan, but there are some truly excellent films in the genre, and I think this is one of them. I was a little worried at first because I’d read a couple reviews that mentioned disappointment with how prevalent the “male gaze” was in the film. And that got my guard up a little, because surely having the male gaze front and center in a movie about a woman struggling with natural aging would be terrible, right?

WRONG.

Because in this story, the way it’s told, it has to be. Elisabeth’s entire career has been about her appeal to that gaze. When she loses favor, she loses her job. And almost every choice she makes thereafter is either about trying to appease that gaze, or made as a deliberate rebuttal of it. I don’t want to get all spoilery, but I can say for sure that Elisabeth has only one moment of genuine regret for her Faustian bargain with the faceless purveyors of The Substance, but ends the movie still firmly attached to her stardom. And thus, to her appeal to that gol-durn male gaze.

And Fargeat loses NO opportunity to make it a full-on character. Dennis Quaid is a grotesque, like the Willy Wonka of misogyny. One scene with he and a fleet of white-haired old creeps ogling a line of passing showgirls is like something out of an old slapstick. And it’s not just him, basically every man who appears in this movie completely loses his ability to function normally around the beautiful women who star in it. An ER doctor becomes so tongue-tied he has to flee. An old school friend can barely contain himself when Elisabeth asks for his number. An irate neighbor turns to a smarmy charmer when Sue (Margaret Qualley) opens her door.

And Sue. Oh my goodness, Sue. Never has a woman been shot with filters so fine, angles so flattering. Her dance moves are nearly pornographic. Even when covered in blood, she still oozes sex kitten. It’s over the top. It’s hilarious. And it’s meant to lampoon the ever-loving CRAP out of the male gaze.

There is a lot of female nudity in this film. Both lead actresses are fully nude for a good chunk of it, and while there is some “ain’t that male gaze some bullshit?” to parts of it, some of it did seem a little much until I got deeper into the movie and realized it was intended to be a “before” shot for all the epic prosthetics coming down the line.

There’s also a statement being made when watching a naked Elisabeth choosing to risk her life for a chance to be young and beautiful again instead of, it must be said, remaining older and still beautiful. Because damn. 50-year-old “Elisabeth” is played by 62-year-old Demi Moore, who still looks basically the same as her 1992 Vanity Fair cover in which she wore nothing but body paint and a take-no-shit expression.

She is by any available standard an incredibly beautiful woman, and watching her make this clearly catastrophic choice while being inescapably confronted with that beauty is an incredible moment.

It’s also just a beautifully shot film. The colors are rich and saturated, the sets stylized and sharp. The lighting is gorgeous and emotional. The sound is very well done (anyone else deeply fed up with straining to hear every word of dialogue?), and the score hits all the right notes of dread and out-of-control-ness. It strays from time to time into Kubrick-worship, but overall it’s a really great movie. I feel like the best horror and sci-fi stories draw us to bigger themes and questions, and The Substance definitely does that.

Of course, it’s not for everyone. There is gore. There is grossness. There are things happening to bodies that will make you recoil. And it’s a little bit campy. But if those things generally = “a good time at the cinema!” for you, you will probably like this movie. I sure did.

In the interest of full disclosure, a lot of my desire to see this movie was driven by the fact that I’ve been working on a novella for the last year or so in a similar vein: a woman undergoes a cutting-edge procedure to lose weight and save her marriage with monstrous consequences, and I wanted to be sure I wasn’t doin’ an accidental plagiarism. Thankfully I am not, so my plans to have said novella self-published later this year continue apace! Keep an eye out for future missives, I will update when ready!