This article contains massive spoilers for “The Substance.”
Tales of the folly of beauty have been told since time immemorial. Once human beings understood the irreconcilable fact that youth and beauty are natural attractants even though the ravages of time and age are impossible to hold back, cautionary stories of characters either looking to hold on to their beauty forever or simply trying to recapture it have cropped up. These are stories with characters who become so obsessed with their own vanity that they’re willing to commit crimes or atrocities in order to maintain it are viewed as people who’ve fallen from grace, their external beauty masking their internal corruption.
In recent decades, these tales have grown a new wrinkle, as they’ve absorbed the effects that society, industry, and the media have had on reinforcing such damaging ideals. Just using cinematic examples, there’ve been films such as “Looker,” “Death Becomes Her,” “Showgirls,” and “The Neon Demon” which portray characters — primarily women, given the outrageous emphasis society puts on them regarding their appearances — who are perpetrators and victims of a systemically noxious ethos. Sure, the women in films like these may lie, betray, compete and kill all for better looks, but that’s the world they live in. Don’t hate the player, hate the game, in other words.
What’s less exploited in these films is the concept of how living in such a world turns such corruption and hatred as much inward as outward. There’ve been satires, noirs, sci-fi comedies and horror films about aging and beauty, but not many that tap into how wholly damaging the self-loathing of vanity really is. Welcome, then, to writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance.” As the title suggests, substance is what ultimately makes a person, not their looks or style, and it cannot be artificially bolstered or substituted.
The sheen comes off of Elisabeth Sparkle
“The Substance” opens by introducing us to actress and personality Elisabeth Sparkle not through her face, body, or voice, but through her star being constructed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. After the star is finished, Fargeat’s camera never moves while a time-lapse-esque montage of Sparkle’s star occurs as its namesake’s fame begins to wither. People passing it move from treating it with excitement and reverence to bemused trivia to, finally, complete indifference, as a man rushing across it drops his messy hamburger all over it, creating a blob of meat and ketchup which he barely cleans up.
We then meet Elisabeth (Demi Moore), looking fabulous and quite limber on her 50th birthday as she hosts her daily exercise program “Sparkle Up Your Life.” However, she accidentally overhears the producer of the show, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), describe how they’re firing Elisabeth and are on the hunt for a replacement as long as she’s young and hot. After the first of many long looks at herself in the mirror, Elisabeth is taken to a farewell lunch by the obnoxious, misogynistic, fake, and downright rude Harvey. His only parting words of wisdom to her is the phrase: “When you reach fifty, it stops.” Elisabeth’s follow up question of “What stops?” is never answered.
It seems Elisabeth feels the answer deep in her bones, though, as a crew of maintenance men begin literally ripping her face off of a billboard, which distracts her long enough to get into a nasty car accident. Although Elisabeth is informed by a doctor that she’s sustained no injuries, she breaks down and cries, her pride and self-image already torn apart. Seeing this, a beautiful, young male nurse stays behind after the doctor has left, examining Elisabeth’s spine and telling her she’d be a good candidate. This time, Elisabeth gets an answer to her follow up question of “For what?”: a flash drive slipped into her pocket labeled “THE SUBSTANCE,” along with a handwritten note that reads “It changed my life.”
The final blow to Elisabeth’s self-esteem comes from her encounter outside the hospital with an old primary school classmate of hers, a hopelessly nerdy man named Fred who’s clearly harbored a crush on her since their childhood. Upon handing her his phone number (after the paper he writes it on is literally dragged through the mud), the very single Elisabeth politely promises she’ll give him a call, clearly dismayed that this is all life has left to offer her. All that’s left seems to be this mysterious Substance.
A Sue is born
At first, Elisabeth is not so easily swayed by the flash drive’s dubious sales pitch. It promises to deliver “a beautiful, more perfect” version of the person who injects it, a creation that comes from the original host (“You are the matrix,” the mysterious voice intones) and can survive only seven days at a time before needing to switch back to the host body. Although Elisabeth throws the drive away after watching it, the sight of seeing no job prospects for herself as well as an ad searching for “The Next Elisabeth Sparkle” causes her to reconsider. She calls the number, and is directed to a creepy (and seemingly unmonitored) collection of deposit boxes where she picks up her welcome kit that includes the green “Activator” fluid — to be used only once, says the label in bright warning letters.
Upon injecting The Substance, Elisabeth’s spine cracks open and births a fully-grown, twenty-something female body: Sue (Margaret Qualley). After sealing up Elisabeth’s spinal wound and inserting a “Food Matrix” mush that’s fed to her unconscious body intravenously, Sue discovers that she needs to inject one shot of “stabilizer” fluid into her body each of the seven days that she’s conscious, taking the fluid directly from the base of Elisabeth’s spine. With that housekeeping out of the way, Sue instantly embraces her new lease on life, buying herself the most flattering (and revealing) clothing as well as attending that audition for a new exercise morning show host and landing it.
As Sue gears up to host the new “Pump it Up” show, Elisabeth finds life back in her body has lost nearly all its meaning. She simply vegges out in front of the television for seven straight days until it’s time to switch back to Sue. Unfortunately, this mentality seems to be reinforced by just how popular and successful Sue becomes via her new show, and soon enough, Sue has removed every vestige of Elisabeth, telling her neighbors that she’s moved out even as she constructs a secret room inside her bathroom where she keeps her sleeping other self.
Elisabeth gives Sue much
Naturally, all of this leads to Sue pushing her time limit of consciousness by just a few hours. This seems to cause some mental deterioration, as either Elisabeth or Sue (or possibly both) begins to hallucinate such disturbing things as Sue’s internal organs falling out of her body. When Elisabeth is awake again, she discovers something that isn’t a hallucination: those extra few hours of Sue remaining awake means that one of her fingers has become rotten and withered away. Upon calling the contact number for The Substance, Elisabeth is informed that anything taken on one side of the duo is taken for good. There is no reversing the process, there is only stopping it, and even that will not restore Elisabeth to how she was before the initial injection. “Remember: You Are One,” the instructions say.
Despite that warning, Elisabeth and Sue no longer see each other as two halves of one whole, but as bitter rivals, like roommates who’re never home at the same time but who resent having to clean up one another’s mess. Desperate, Elisabeth attempts to go on a date with Fred, but the presence of Sue literally and figuratively haunts her. Her appearance in the mirror no longer looks anywhere close to acceptable to her; in her eyes, she’s already become a ghastly wraith.
Sue’s career then reaches even greater heights, as she’s pulled from the morning show in order to start rehearsing to host the big New Year’s Eve show. A further deteriorated Elisabeth takes her petty revenge by opening up Harvey’s thoughtless farewell gift (a French cookbook) and making a disgusting mess of the kitchen and apartment. At one point, Elisabeth violates the food she’s making while watching Sue giddily disparage her on television, an image that strikes at the many layers of metaphor Fargeat is playing with in the film. Sue is many things at once to Elisabeth: her shadow self, her younger self, her younger rival, her younger crush, her daughter. The Sue and Elisabeth relationship is one that encapsulates the horror at the core of all of us: our enemies often become raised to that status based not so much on what we think of their differences, but because of how much of ourselves we see in them, whether we admit that or not.
Sue do it to yourself, it’s true
While “The Substance” is clear to make such elements and characters like Harvey, the media, the way women are viewed and treated and the existence of a black market drug like The Substance itself as evil as they possibly can be, it’s clear that the film’s main antagonists are Elisabeth and Sue. The metaphor is broad and elastic enough to carry numerous interpretations at once, not least of which is a subversion of the fairy tale trope most popularized by Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” that of the young, beautiful, innocent princess preyed upon by the wicked old witch. Sue is directly responsible for creating her very own wicked witch by leaving Elisabeth asleep not just for some extra hours or days, but for several months, extracting as much spinal fluid from her as possible. The night before the New Year’s Eve show, Sue discovers that Elisabeth is quite literally tapped out, and The Substance helpline only tells her that she has “reached the end” of the “experience,” and if she wishes to continue, she must switch to Elisabeth and let the stabilization fluid regenerate.
Waking up in a grotesque new body, Elisabeth calls The Substance back, insisting that she wishes to stop the experience. She goes out to the deposit boxes (wrapped in heavy, concealing rags, the most concealed any version of her has ever been) to pick up her final kit, which contains a large fluid and needle labeled “Termination.” About 2/3rds of the way through injecting a sleeping Sue with the fluid, however, Elisabeth quickly changes her mind. Sue is revived, meaning that the two women are now awake in the same place and at the same time, further driving a wedge in their connection. A vicious fight ensues, whereupon the weaker, older Elisabeth is eventually bested by the enraged Sue, who beats her other self to death.
Even though Sue sheds some tears for Elisabeth upon realization of what she’s done, she nonetheless believes she can continue life without her. She heads off to the backstage area of the New Year’s Eve show, only to discover that “You Are One” was no idle phrase; because Elisabeth is dead, Sue’s body is beginning to break down, with first her teeth and nails, then eventually her ear rotting and falling off. No longer able to speak or hear let alone smile (as a leering Harvey requests for her to do), Sue desperately rushes back home to re-inject the Activator fluid in the hopes that it will create another perfect and beautiful replica. What it creates instead is “Monstruo Elisasue,” an unholy hybrid blob made up of parts of Sue and parts of Elisabeth.
Elisasue is not a human being, she is an animal
Although Elisasue now looks like the baboon turned inside out from one of Seth Brundle’s failed experiments in “The Fly,” she insists on prettying herself up as much as possible to go back to the New Year’s Eve show. In a montage which sees the monster put on earrings and crimp a single strand of her long, stringy hair, Fargeat drops a snippet of Bernard Herrmann’s theme from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” referencing that film’s fetishistic look at women and subverting it. Elisasue cuts up Elisabeth’s portrait, super glueing the face onto her head. As she arrives at the studio, Elisasue is now having a different kind of hallucination; where before she was fantasizing about her death and deterioration, now she’s imagining a throng of breathless admirers in place of the empty hallway walls where Elisabeth’s posters used to hang (and where Sue’s haven’t quite replaced them yet).
Another series of reversals occur when Elisasue makes it to the main stage of the New Year’s Eve show: she’s introduced to the strains of Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the piece that famously opens Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a film which sees men being continually transformed into more evolved versions of themselves. As Elisabeth’s picture slips from Elisasue’s face while she’s at the mic, the horrified reactions of the crowd to her true visage recalls not just classic monster movies like “Frankenstein,” but also “The Elephant Man” and the real life John Merrick. Instead of a decent man forced to live inside a malformed body, Elisasue is a narcissistic killer whose insides are now on the outside. During the chaos that erupts at this revelation, Elisasue is attacked and decapitated, only to have her head spontaneously regrow somewhere else while the wound sprays gallons of blood all over the audience. Just like “King Kong,” a supposedly innocent event is revealed to be the grotesque exploitation it always was, and just like in “The Shining,” the halls run red with blood, the inner evil made external.
The Substance gets all used up
Elisasue finally makes it outside the studio, shuffling away from the scene of her greatest shame. Her body continues to mutate even as it disintegrates, her knees giving out and her figure shattering on the ground into a dozen pieces. Like John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” Elisabeth’s face (which had been trapped on Elisasue’s back, gasping for air, or perhaps helplessly trying to speak) detaches itself from the wreckage, continuing to crawl along. Finally, it finds a resting place: Elisabeth Sparkle’s star on the Walk of Fame. As Elisabeth gazes up at the night sky, some actual sparkle as well as a spotlight seems to shine down on her before she completely melts away, her remains looking remarkably similar to that dropped hamburger from the opening montage. After a street sweeper cleans up the mess, only a cracked and faded star is what is left of Elisabeth.
As befitting such a metaphor-rich film, the ending of “The Substance” is left up to your interpretation. Who knows what followed the ghastly happenings at the New Year’s Eve show; perhaps Elisasue is now infamous for all time, her star continually visited and life remembered, albeit not for the reasons she hoped it’d be. Yet not providing us with an epilogue seems to make such head canon interpretations beside the point Fargeat appears to be making. “The Substance” isn’t really a tale about fame and legacy at all costs, but one about how a media- and patriarchy-enforced obsession with beauty and youth can cause a woman to literally and figuratively destroy herself, if not also hate herself. True substance, after all, is more than skin deep, and The Substance (the drug, not the film) is only all about skin. For all of us, we’d do well to constantly remind ourselves that our younger selves and our current selves are One, and not attack our debt to time and age, which we truly have no control over, let alone mastery of. Otherwise, we may end up like Elisasue: for her, both at 50 and at 20, it stopped.
