All style, no substance?
After watching The Substance, I was waiting at the platform of Euston station to get the train home and, glancing up at the advertisement opposite me, my eyes were met with the huge, terrifying lettering of a tagline selling a skincare product that read: “LOOK UP TO 5 YEARS YOUNGER.” The irony was incredible, and it surely confirmed director Coralie Fargeat’s claim that her recently Oscar-nominated movie isn’t really a horror film at all, it’s real life.
Indeed, modern beauty standards are ripe for Cronenberg-esque exploitation; it doesn’t take much to make the phenomenon of anti-aging frightening. We live in an age in which there doesn’t seem to be a single woman in Hollywood over the age of 30, whereas the men look completely normal. George Clooney bares his wrinkles and becomes a ‘silver fox’, while the faces of his female co-stars have gradually and collectively frozen into a single ubiquitous mask of pseudo-youthful, skin-taut plasticity. And then rest of us are sold products that claim to mimic the needle of a cosmetic surgeon from the walls of Underground stations, “available at Boots”.
But Fargeat’s film, like many of the post-MeToo age, fails to challenge, let alone topple, the horrific patriarchal forces it comments on; it simply presents us with them. The Substance tells the story of a woman plagued by beauty standards, driven to horrific levels of bodily transformation. It’s horrifying, sure, and the style is masterful, the score pulsing, and the performances enthralling. But that’s it.
Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, an actress and television aerobics instructor who’s been fired from her workout show and seemingly ousted from Hollywood. When Elizabeth decides to take ‘The Substance’, she begins a life split between the increasingly gruelling monotony of inhabiting the aged body of Elizabeth, and renewed starry career success as the younger ‘Sue’ (Margaret Qualley), for seven days at a time. Qualley’s younger, shiny alter-ego then slowly begins to manipulate the ‘balance’ of this 50/50 time-share between the young and older ‘selves’ to allow more time to enjoy the riches with which Hollywood showers its younger stars, with increasingly bloody consequences.
However, fundamental to this conceit is the fact that Sue is having a fabulous time, while Elizabeth is miserable, and this begins even before Sue starts to manipulate the balance and jeopardise the older ‘self’. Sue never questions or doubts her decision, nor does she question the system which rewards her for her youthful appearance. Instead we’re made to watch, and cringe, as Elizabeth becomes older and more deformed.
As Nicole Flattery recently pointed out in an article for Sight and Sound Magazine, the film also indulges and wallows in Elizabeth’s misery in a way that feels exploitative and lazy. “Where have all these powerless, humiliated, punished women come from?”, Flattery asks. Why couldn’t Moore’s Elizabeth have neglected Sue, and decided to inhabit her older self readily, and with vengeance? Why must our female leads inevitably find the prospect of aging uncomfortable? Why can’t we do something more radical with this?
Recent films like Promising Young Woman and Blonde were similarly sold as ‘feminist’ while remaining centred around the anguish of their respective female protagonists. They too adopted slick stylistic choices: bold colour grading, snappy editing and catchy soundtracks predominate. But can’t we do better than all this style over substance?