Pretty girls should always smile
On Coralie Fargeat's The Substance (2024) or What the fuck did I just see?
I should preface this with the fact that I’ve had approximately 5 hours of sleep because I decided to join the sicko convention that is Edinburgh International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness to witness Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. Having seen everyone losing their minds about it at Cannes, with comparisons to early David Cronenberg (there are moments which can only be described as straight up homage to both Rabid and Videodrome) and to Julia Ducorneau’s Titane, I decided I had to see it for myself.
I have also just finished reading Anna Bogutskaya’s magnificent book Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold On Us. If, as she claims, “fear is earnest and it cannot survive camp” then there is something very strange indeed going on with The Substance. Just before the film started, my pal and I were talking about Society (Brian Yuzna, 1989) and its incredible ick, and afterwards, I ran into C, another friend and former student who remarked that a screening of Society she’d witnessed had been less noisy than this one in terms of the audience’s utterances of disgust.
But there is something else happening here in The Substance and its relationship to bodies and flesh. In their essay on The Blob and Society, Carrow Narby nails it: “certain kinds of intimacy are beyond the pale…what would a homo/heterosexual dichotomy (or gender for that matter) even mean for creatures who can physically merge with their sexual partners and manipulate the shape of their own bodies at will? What is it like to experience such absolute intimacy? Is it exquisite?” (2020: 82 in It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror)
Throughout the film, a disembodied voice reminds Elisabeth (Demi Moore in her greatest role?) and Sue (Margaret Qualley) “you are one”, reinforcing the absolute intimacy shared by these two women who eventually become something else. Bogutskaya notes “horror has often latched on to the idea of ageing as a failure of character and symbol of deviousness” (196) and while ageing is certainly a dominant motif here, the film is also steeped in all the ways that patriarchy objectifies pretty young people, and in the ways that the entertainment industry eats its young. Looking at the way the film treats pretty, femme-presenting bodies (with the exception of one magnificent sequence of what I can only call comparative ass work) we know we are in body genre territory. Having come of age during the era of The Twenty Minute Workout, (you’re welcome, leotard fetishists!), Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance, and porn on videocassette, much of this imagery felt deeply familiar. To see this kind of fetishisation deployed so deliberately in 2024 does almost feel like camp at times, but it also feels like ‘oh, this is still here.’
If the substance itself is something that can only be injected or taken intravenously, then it is interesting to note the way the film depicts food. We open with the installation of Elisabeth Sparkle’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: pristine, then cracked, then splattered with ketchup from someone’s take-out burger. The tang of ketchup and mustard, and the smear of grease from the type of food that is never meant to pass the lips of a starlet. Later, in an act of retaliation, Elisabeth begins maniacally cooking French haute cuisine, featuring offal and that most controversial (and delicious) of foods: foie gras. If Cronenberg has offered us bodies that open in unexpected ways, then Fargeat presents us with bodies that expel in unexpected ways. More than simply a metaphor for disordered eating, much of what we see in The Substance speaks to the deeply troubled and monstrous relationship we can all have with our bodies. I must tell you this is not a film for the faint-hearted and while I didn’t find this as difficult to watch as Titane it is not far off. I’m sure I will still be thinking about this film for some time, about its aromas of alcohol wipes, sweat, make-up, cold diet soda, and rotting chicken carcasses. I will also be thinking about how Demi Moore is still so beautiful at 61, and how much I enjoyed seeing her embody this character, how much inelegant physical movement she is permitted here. I will also be thinking about the audacity of filming Margaret Qualley from a low angle in a skintight pleather bodysuit and red-soled high heel boots and whether or not I imagined a collective intake of breath in the cinema at the unzipping of this outfit, but how this is decidedly NOT the image that will stay with you after watching The Substance.