Body horror, splintering and proliferation, gore, personality division, and eternal youth. When many diverse and intensely controversial topics come together, the result is an incredibly realistic and creepy work of art. The Substance adds a bone-chilling chill to the just-arrived fall.
The Substance, the second feature film from French director Coralie Fargeat, is bolder and more exciting. Its daring and accomplished screenplay has won major awards for its imagery and shockingly inspired design – Palme d’Or nomination and Best Screenplay award. If there’s one word that describes the movie’s visual impact, it should be blood. The movie’s gorgeous thrill brings back memories of the massacre of Carrie the Witch and the massive gush of plasma from the elevator in The Shining.
The movie’s narrative is rooted in the existential dilemma faced by Hollywood actresses and all middle-aged women, where aging brings not only mental anguish but also real employment problems: overstaying their welcome and a new generation in the industry. 21st-century requirements for women’s body and appearance are highly uniform: a toned body, white and delicate skin, and a sweet face. The protagonist Elizabeth Sparkle, as her name suggests, wants to shine on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but has to accept the cruelty of reality. When she overhears her manager humiliating her appearance and age in the restroom and is fired, her self-esteem and desires blossom to the maximum at the same time. A potion named substance becomes Elizabeth’s salvation, and after injecting it, the user splits into a more perfect and younger version of herself – a shining star named Sue.
The Substance‘s interpretation of the split ego is evocative and brilliant. The famous philosophical question of “who am I” becomes the main judge of this physical domination. Even though Substance emphasizes that the two people are one, Sue and Elizabeth have separate personalities, and they are hostile to each other, from using each other in the beginning to killing each other, and conflicts are everywhere. Sue’s personality has always been sleeping in Elizabeth’s personality, she is constantly lurking and looking for the time to break through and take control of her body. The rejection from the workplace and the infinite suppression of women are the catalysts for this fight, and the perfect matter is even more brutal to reveal this: “I” to become the new “myself”, “I” tore apart the old “myself”, like a cocoon into a butterfly, but could not completely free “myself” from the bondage of the old body.
The Substance features numerous images of Elizabeth and Sue looking at themselves in the mirror and exposes another theme of the movie, the gaze. Both personalities are constantly judging their bodies to maintain their optimal condition to stand firm in a world where appearance is the most important thing. But this gaze does not start with the woman, rather it is catalyzed by the outside world. The film’s numerous images of physical destruction are a metaphor for real-life male exploitation of women’s vision, i.e., this is a world in which women live under the gaze of men. The size of the breasts, the thickness of the waist, or the height of the body are all cold and cruel benchmarks used by men to measure the beauty of women. Every image we view as viewers of the two women is from the male perspective. The reflex of the movie is to bring the viewer, however, into the male perspective, and the overlap is stunning.
Elizabeth and Sue represent the two personalities of the protagonist, one inferior and sensitive, the other arrogant and conceited. One symbolizes the past and the other the present. Lifeforms from different timelines cannot coexist, and the broken balance reveals the doomed end of this flesh experiment. At the end of the movie, Elizabeth, who has become a lump of flesh but still maintains a face, struggles to wriggle to the star that bears her destiny, and finally reveals a relieved but saddening smile. Even if her flesh had been annihilated she would walk onto the starry stage and be adored by the stars. Even if in the end she is a mass of broken flesh swept away by the janitor.
The desire to be more beautiful and younger stems from unfulfilled ideals and society’s almost perverted aesthetic standards that poison the human race in this day and age. Women are surrounded, trapped, and besieged by the male perspective, a societal pathology and a theme that needs to be addressed.