A Higher Model of Your self? Self-Obsession in The Substance

Word: This text comprises heavy spoilers for The Substance.

A Blood-and-Neon Drenched Spectacle

“Have you ever ever dreamt of a greater model of your self? Youthful? Extra lovely? Extra excellent?”

I count on most ladies have, at the very least by the point they hit my age (forty-four). That query is the hook for The Substance (2024), a stunning story written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, who turned down directing The Black Widow to make this darkish gem as an alternative. Common Photos was set to distribute the movie, however misplaced its nerve after executives at a check screening discovered the ending “disgusting,” and Fargeat refused to alter it. Common offered it like a scorching potato to MUBI, solely to see The Substance win a prize at Cannes, rake in $77 million on the field workplace worldwide, and garner Oscar nominations for greatest image, greatest directing, greatest writing, and greatest actress (Demi Moore), with a win for greatest make-up and hairstyling. The prosthetics and sensible results had been nauseatingly good.

Apparently disgusting and interesting aren’t opposites in any case. 

I knew from the trailer alone that this movie would afford novel insights, however what I didn’t know stepping into was how a lot lithe booty and bloody gore I’d should endure to succeed in these insights. The trailer doesn’t give away the excessive price of entry for a young conscience, and I hadn’t learn any opinions or warnings previous to watching (observe to self). If I had recognized upfront that this was mushy porn physique horror—a “blood-and-neon drenched spectacle”—I might have skipped the display screen and gone straight for the written evaluation. Not each provocative murals is price the ethical harm. I’m writing this text partly for myself (to suppose it by way of) and partly for anybody else who’s curious and open to the problem such cinema poses, however is hesitant to press “Play”—for superb causes. 

My husband and I watched The Substance collectively. Or moderately, we watched the start collectively. I watched the center whereas he closed his eyes and I narrated (“Sue is prancing across the condo in her underwear, once more. Sue is twerking for the digital camera, once more.”), after which he narrated the top for me as I hid beneath a blanket (“The monster’s arm broke off. She’s spewing blood over the viewers like a firehose.”) Admittedly, it’s not my favourite strategy to “watch” a film. However we had been in for a penny, in for a pound, so we cut up the distinction. 

Now’s the time to pause on this text and return to it later if you wish to threat watching The Substance (with surprises intact).

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

The Substance is a narrative in regards to the flesh and bone of ladies’s our bodies. It’s about getting older. About changing into invisible. About self-loathing. About loneliness. About watching your self remodel from maiden to crone. It’s a narrative that might virtually work as a silent movie, so stark are its symbols, and so expert are Fargeat and Moore at displaying us what it’s like for a girl to lose her “Fairly Younger Factor” standing, that telling us isn’t needed. 

Actress Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), as soon as the toast of the city, is now fading into obscurity and irrelevance as an getting older aerobics teacher for a daytime TV present. A producer named Harvey (Dennis Quaid) fires Elisabeth on her birthday for being silly sufficient to show fifty in Tinseltown. “I’ve to offer individuals what they need,” Harvey shrugs whereas stuffing his face with shrimp, “And folks at all times ask for one thing new. Renewal is inevitable, and at fifty, effectively… it stops.”

Elisabeth will not be in an excellent place to deal with the inevitability of getting older or the merciless requirements of Hollywood. She lives alone: no husband or boyfriend, no youngsters, no prolonged household, no buddies. She hardly speaks in any respect as a result of there’s nobody in her life to speak to. The face she sees most frequently is her personal: on billboards round city, on large posters within the hallway of the studio and in her personal condo, however most particularly within the mirror. The disgrace, disgust, worry, grief, and rage that Demi Moore conveys together with her eyes alone in these mirror photographs might be what gained her the Golden Globe.

The saddest and in some methods most annoying second within the movie is a standard and extremely relatable scene: primping for a date. When Elisabeth bumps into an previous highschool classmate named Fred—the epitome of awkward, starstruck sweetness—he offers her his quantity. In desperation for some sort of human connection, she calls him, they usually make plans to satisfy for dinner.

We see Elisabeth in entrance of her mirror making use of make-up and doing her hair. Each time she tries to go away for the restaurant, she’s drawn again to the mirror once more as if she had been cursed: tweaking, including, plumping, re-applying, scrutinizing, judging, hating. She’s not fairly sufficient to go away the home. The one individual in the entire story who takes a real curiosity in her—frumpy Fred who addresses her together with her childhood identify of “Lizzie” and blurts out, “You’re nonetheless essentially the most lovely lady in the entire world!”—is stood up by Elisabeth’s personal self-hatred. As a substitute of spending her night trying into Fred’s eyes and connecting, she spends a depressing night time alone. The YouTube feedback beneath this clip within the movie are telling:

• This scene made me cry. I keep in mind hating myself this a lot.
• This was essentially the most horrifying scene in the entire film (for me).
• Isn’t this how all of us really feel after we look within the mirror as we age, it’s tough younger girls.

Into this private pit of despair enters the potential for a happier future, a extra lovable self, a model that’s worthy of strolling out the entrance door. A stranger slips Elisabeth some details about a miracle drug, “the substance,” which guarantees to offer customers with a youthful, extra lovely, extra excellent model of themselves. In a second paying homage to Victorian “cut up self” narratives like The Unusual Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (a chemically-induced transformation) and The Image of Dorian Grey (a Faustian discount for everlasting youth and sweetness), Elisabeth injects herself with a one-use-only activator serum, and waits for a renewed self to emerge.

The visuals evoke similarities to more and more standard real-life injections that likewise promise “a greater model” of you: Ozempic for the skinny model of you, Botox for the younger model of you, and cross-sex hormones for the transgender model of you. Whereas our non-fictional medication of selection could take weeks or months to craft our dream our bodies, the impact of the substance is quick.

Elisabeth “births” a full-grown Ceaselessly 21 model of herself, Alien-style, out of the unzipping pores and skin of her again, whereas writhing on the lavatory ground. She stays inert as her lovely Snow White self gazes at her personal reflection. The 2 variations start sharing one life: every will get seven days “on” whereas the opposite sleeps. The younger model should extract stabilizer fluid from the unique Elisabeth’s backbone and inject herself with it to remain alive and purposeful. They need to commerce locations each seven days on the dot, or Cinderella’s coach will flip again right into a pumpkin: they’re bodily depending on each other to outlive (because the substance’s directions insist, “Bear in mind, you might be one”). They need to keep the stability or issues will spiral uncontrolled.

You already know the place that is going.

“Previous! Fats! Disgusting!”

Harvey is delighted to discover a perky, fairly lady to exchange Elisabeth for a brand new sexed-up model of her health present. Gone are the Jane Fonda vibes: that is “Pump it Up!” with Sue (Margaret Qualley), the perfected model of the sagging Ms. Sparkle. Sue loves her L.A. life a lot, she begins stealing time and further stabilizer from Elisabeth, upending the stability between them and inflicting Elisabeth’s physique to age quickly. The extra Sue steals her life and “pumps it up” at Elisabeth’s expense, the quicker the unique turns right into a hag. The witchified Elisabeth turns into a bitter binge-eating sofa potato, leaving half-eaten junk meals and trash strewn across the condo for Sue (in her skimpy underwear) to scrub up earlier than bringing a person residence. The bodily deterioration of Elisabeth into Quasimodo is mirrored in Sue’s ethical deterioration into an entitled primadona, as her selfishness and vanity explode into rage: “Previous! Fats! Disgusting!” she shrieks as she surveys the mess Elisabeth has left behind. “CONTROL YOURSELF!!!” 

Sue decides to remain awake and center-stage so long as she will be able to, draining Elisabeth dry for 3 months. When there isn’t a single drop of stabilizer left to maintain her alive, Sue switches locations, and the unrecognizable horror of the individual previously often known as Elisabeth decides to lastly pull the plug on this sick experiment by killing Sue. The 2 sides of this one lady find yourself in a viciously bloody combat, till Sue lastly kicks Elizabeth to dying (thus dooming herself) in essentially the most stunning scene symbolic of self-loathing that I’ve ever witnessed. In desperation and fairly actually falling aside (she’s shedding enamel, fingernails, ears), Sue breaks the foundations of “protected” substance use but once more, and takes an activator dose herself. 

From this level on, the gore is unspeakable. Sue turns into a grotesque monster with physique elements protruding of the improper locations, and with a gaping face of Elisabeth croaking out of her again, as if the 2 had been put collectively in a blender. This “Monstro Elisasue” considerably inexplicably waddles to the studio simply in time for the stay New Yr’s Particular that Sue was set to host. Regardless of the monster’s insistence—“It’s nonetheless me, it’s Sue!”—the horrified and disgusted studio viewers assaults her. She drenches them in gallons of her personal blood as she turns into unhinged and runs away, solely to journey and explode everywhere in the sidewalk. Elisabeth Sparkle’s face, now indifferent from the monster, squelches its manner in direction of her star on the Hollywood Stroll of Fame a number of toes away, and melts into it. The bloodstain is washed away by a avenue sweeper.

Medical Options for Metaphysical Longings

Such is the destiny not of ladies who dare to develop previous in public (that’s going to be all of us, girls), however of ladies whose obsessive self-regard drives them to hunt a materials answer for a religious downside.

Elisabeth did certainly require a greater model of herself—renewed, extra lovely, extra excellent. However the brand new self she wanted wasn’t Sue. She wanted a self that might overlook herself lengthy sufficient to really feel love for another person. She wanted new eyes that appeared not into the mirror with scrutiny however deeply into the eyes of one other, unashamed to kind crow’s toes when smiling. She wanted a self that accepted her personal mortality, that might deal with struggling—a self clothed with power and dignity that might giggle with out worry of the long run (Prov. 31:25). She wanted to cease dwelling for the attention of the digital camera, and begin dwelling with and for different human beings. She wanted a self that wasn’t an image however an individual.

Elisabeth’s want for a greater model of herself was pure, however she was mistaken in considering that what wanted to be modified was flesh and bone. She took a metaphysical longing and made it medical: as an alternative of perception, she reached for an injection, short-circuiting the potential for ethical renewal. However these dealing with the latter half of life don’t want a path to changing into a PYT once more: they want a path to changing into a sage and a saint—somebody who lets struggling and loss orient them away from self-absorption and in direction of knowledge and love. However our tradition prides itself on changing alternatives to domesticate advantage with triumphs of scientific approach and purchasable merchandise. It’s good for enterprise to groom a client base into emotions of self-loathing.

In any case these years of being seen and recorded by the digital camera, Elisabeth internalized the lens. She turned that lens on herself within the mirror and have become her personal worst enemy, embodied in Sue. Being fired from the trade might have been the perfect factor that ever occurred to her, an opportunity to be free from scrutiny, judgment, and efficiency nervousness—an opportunity to lastly take her eyes off herself and give attention to another person. However she craved the adoration and a spotlight of the silver display screen, and it killed her. It’s not a lot that Hollywood is the dangerous man right here (although its avatar Harvey is really vomitous). Relatively, Elisabeth/Sue introduced this on herself by collaborating—like an addict—in her personal objectification.

We’re used to considering of narcissists as those that damage others by way of their inordinate self-love, however the story of Narcissus is derived from the traditional Greek superstition that it’s unfortunate—even deadly—to see your individual reflection. The Substance exhibits us that the ethical curse of being tethered to your individual reflection doesn’t should imply believing you’re the perfect: it will possibly additionally imply believing you’re the worst. The purpose isn’t how you’re feeling if you stare at your self, it’s merely the act of watching your self that issues.

All the arc of The Substance exhibits us suicide-by-selfie.

Females in Motion vs. Passive Photos

For the previous 5 years I’ve gathered with native girls to train as a chapter of the nationwide group FiA (Females in Motion). It’s a free, at all times outdoors, all climate, all girls, peer-led health group. None of us are professionals, however we take turns creating and main exercises. The median age is forty-two-ish, however we’ve obtained a number of twenty-somethings in there, and people of their fifties and sixties get further respect. We gossip, groan, and provides recommendation whereas pumping it up—rain or shine—in a public park. We work out in a circle: loads of sweat and chatter, however no recordings. We train collectively to remain wholesome, to maintain one another firm, to get a break from the fam, to giggle, to remain grounded, and to justify going out for espresso afterwards. 

We are available in quite a lot of shapes, sizes, colours, and ages, however the friendships fashioned in FiA are rooted in our frequent feminine embodiment. These girls have taught me that the physique is for doing issues not merely for being seen. They taught me the physique is price caring for, however that it’s additionally good to giggle at it typically. They taught me to work my physique onerous but in addition to change as wanted, as a result of stuff begins hurting randomly if you flip forty, and also you’ve obtained to have some TLC for a nasty again or a bum knee. They taught me the one selfie price taking is the group shot on the finish of the exercise which proves you confirmed up and through which everybody appears their worst (and which is posted on a non-public Slack channel, not publicly on Fb). Being round different quirkily nicknamed girls if you’re at your sweatiest, with unwashed hair and smelly, disintegrating yoga mats, having fun with the exercise music, with zero aggressive spirit, no cash concerned, and no males in sight, is a balm for my physique and soul.

If solely Elisabeth had a FiA chapter to like on her as an alternative of a health present to movie for a fickle viewers. Demi Moore acknowledged her personal battle with “these moments after we don’t suppose we’re sensible sufficient or fairly sufficient, or skinny sufficient or profitable sufficient, or principally simply not sufficient.” However one other lady instructed her the reality she wanted to listen to: “Simply know, you’ll by no means be sufficient. However you may know the worth of your price for those who simply put down the measuring stick.” It’s onerous to imagine {that a} lady who believably performs a fifty-year-old on display screen however is sixty-two in actual life struggles with evaluating herself to others. However that simply exhibits how the issue isn’t generated by an goal magnificence normal—it’s rooted in a subjective internal critic.

The proverbial measuring stick, the digital camera lens, the mirror—these are frequent instruments girls use to inflict self-harm. Instruments usually are not morally impartial issues: iPhone cameras and mirrors body you and flatten you; they flip you into a picture for comparability and consumption. For many of human historical past, no one checked out themselves regularly as a result of we didn’t have the instruments to take action. Mirrors didn’t grow to be frequent and reasonably priced till the mid-1800s. The primary non-professional standard digital camera didn’t seem till 1900; the moment Polaroid arrived in 1948. However the actual revolution got here in 2007 with the iPhone and the appearance of social media platforms which appeared like digital public scrapbooks on which anybody and everybody might remark. 

Our sense of what’s “regular” in relation to self-images is traditionally short-sighted. Selfie and posting behaviors, as frequent and ubiquitous as they’ve grow to be, are unprecedented, morally deforming, and harmful, particularly for younger girls and women. It’s one factor to truly be a Hollywood star and face rejection from a boss like Harvey as a result of your very livelihood is dependent upon your youthfulness. It’s one other factor totally to be a normie however to hold an imitation of Hollywood publicity and Harvey-esque rejection round in your individual pocket and willingly play the sport.

What Is Your Physique For?

In line with Laura Mallonee in her Wired article “The Nice I AM. Your iPhone Pictures Are You,” the truth that the world uploads 1.8 billion photographs every day communicates that the physique is for photos; the physique is for illustration. If we don’t make a public show of ourselves, we would as effectively be invisible. And not using a image to show it, we’re nobodies (no our bodies): “If it’s not on Insta, it didn’t even occur,” says one mom hooked on posting household trip photographs on-line.

Welcome to “Our Cameras, Our Selves.”

I simply googled “taking selfies” and practically each picture that popped up is of women and girls smiling at photos of themselves they’re creating on their very own telephones. Apparently, the common millennial will take round 25,700 selfies all through their lifetime, and girls take extra selfies than males. We mamas aren’t off the hook right here for posting pics of our children as an alternative: Elisabeth was initially blissful to let Sue take her place on the display screen, since she seen Sue as the perfect a part of herself (and Sue was “born” from her physique in any case). A charitable interpretation of mommy-posting is that it’s a strategy to take the invisible (to the general public) joys and sorrows of parenting and make them seen: it’s a manner of claiming “parenting is actual work and it counts” to a tradition that sees motherhood as low standing. However there’s a shadow facet to this: photos of youngsters can operate as digital extensions of a mom’s physique and sense of self. If you happen to curate your youngsters’s photos on-line, you might offer them up to your private profit. Over a 3rd of American youngsters start their digital footprint whereas in utero as unwilling topics of sharenting. All that youth and sweetness would possibly belong to her youngsters, but when mama is the one posting, mama will get the likes.

Social media selfies usually are not really like your grandmother’s scrapbooks—that’s a misleading analogy. The worth of personal keepsakes as an support to non-public reminiscence doesn’t carry over to public self-exposure and solicitation for consideration. I personally love receiving photographs from my buddies by textual content (even selfies!), however a photograph posted on a Fb wall or an Instagram feed isn’t the identical. The primary is a present, a relational bid, far more like giving somebody a printed picture for his or her fridge. The latter is displayed for everybody, which implies it’s not for/to anybody specifically (and a present is at all times given to somebody). Common public posting of our bodies-as-images turns us into billboards. If you happen to curate your photos as content material for another person’s “feed,” you might be turning your self into consumable digital meals for another person’s visible urge for food.

We add our avatars to a line-up which another person will flick previous with their thumb. You (and your youngsters) are price greater than that. Relatively than capturing your “greatest facet” and utilizing filters to Facetune your flaws away, you may relearn how one can have interaction with the truth of your mortal, getting older physique by placing it to good use for the good thing about others.

And so, pricey [sisters], I plead with you to offer your our bodies to God due to all he has achieved for you… Don’t copy the conduct and customs of this world, however let God remodel you into a brand new individual by altering the best way you suppose (Rom. 12:1-2, NLT).

If our takeaway from The Substance is one more lament about Hollywood’s unimaginable magnificence requirements for ladies, then we’ve let ourselves off the hook. The scariest a part of the film isn’t the all-seeing eye of the studio digital camera that information and disseminates and judges: it’s the best way the studio’s eye turns into Elisabeth’s eye by way of the medium of the mirror. It’s the best way she allowed that eye to hole herself out, to disembody her, to flatten her into nothing however a previously fairly face with no life, no household, no buddies, and no significant actions and life decisions to talk of. She grew to become nothing however the echo of previous reward. Like Tinkerbell, she might solely exist if audiences believed in her magnificence and clapped for her; in the event that they stopped paying consideration, she would disappear.

Elisabeth’s perception within the necessity of an viewers is what made her weak to the concept an injection might ship her from the very human process every of us known as to: to be taught the artwork of struggling, getting older, and dying. Thinker and Catholic priest Ivan Illich wrote in his e book Limits to Medication that in an intensely industrialized society like ours, “individuals are conditioned to get issues moderately than to do them; they’re skilled to worth what might be bought moderately than what they themselves can create. They need to be taught, moved, handled, or guided moderately than to be taught, to heal, and to search out their very own manner.” What if we considered getting older much less as a threatening, private insult and extra as a religious problem—an opportunity to come back to phrases with realities which might be straightforward to disregard after we’re younger?

I had a dialog with my teenage daughter the opposite day about getting older. I instructed her I needed to look recognizably older because the years go by. I’m incomes these grey hairs—they’re my “crown of glory” (Prov. 16:31), and the gradual weathering of my face means I’ve accrued experiences which have made me wiser. Wrinkles and silver locks are proof of my many instances across the solar, and I don’t need to cover the proof. I like actress, director, and writer Justine Bateman’s confidence: she eschews beauty procedures as a result of they’d erase the authority she’s gained through the years. “I like the sensation that I’m a special individual now than I used to be after I was twenty. I like trying within the mirror and seeing that proof. …I feel my face represents who I’m. I prefer it.”

So do I. Such a face can reveal a girl’s stature, very like a tree’s top and girth reveals how lengthy it’s been round, how deep its roots go, how implacably it has withstood the check of time and the contingencies of life. Why would we cover the proof of such steadfastness and expertise? As Bateman asks, why can we imagine that ladies’s faces get damaged over time and wish fixing? What if my face is simply high-quality, and what’s damaged is a society that’s disgusted by the looks of the hard-earned feminine authority that comes with maturity and struggling? A society that fetishizes the perpetual maiden (e.g., Intercourse and the Metropolis), ignores or pities moms (e.g., Chappell Roan), and feels repulsed by assured matriarchs (witch, b*tch, Karen, crone) is spiritually sick.

Get Out!

I don’t care about wrinkles, however I do need to steward my physique effectively. I need to stay match as I age, to have good posture, to have sturdy muscle tissues and bones from lifting weights, to have a wholesome coronary heart and lungs from train, to keep away from harm and be succesful and helpful for so long as I might be. There are numerous issues I nonetheless need to do as I age, individuals I need to love. I hope I’ve the privilege of being a grandmother sometime, with the vitality to get down on the ground to play with little ones. (And be capable of get again up once more!)

I do know that life is filled with unavoidable struggling and loss. I do know I’ll develop previous and die. However I additionally know that though “outwardly [I am] losing away, but inwardly [I am] being renewed day-to-day” (2 Cor. 4:16). Harvey is useless improper that renewal stops at fifty; that’s when it’s simply getting began. The psychologist Carl Jung believed that life actually begins at forty, and that we will’t stay “the afternoon of life” based on this system and values of “life’s morning.” It may be tough to worry the Lord and repair your eyes on issues unseen earlier than being compelled to face the private actuality that “magnificence is fleeting” (Prov. 31:30). It’s usually coming nose to nose with deterioration, ache, grief, and the inevitability of bodily dying that reminds us what we actually should worry—not getting older and supposed irrelevance, however what Cardinal Ratzinger referred to as “the jail of self” and “the incapacity to like and make a present of oneself” that may be a type of religious dying.

So what’s your physique for? The reply is a phrase which Christians the world over hear each single Sunday. “That is my physique, given for you” (Luke 22:19). The physique is supposed to be given as a present of affection. The longer you take a look at your self in a mirror or in a photograph, the extra you curate your on-line persona, the extra you try and renew your outward look moderately than your internal coronary heart, then the extra self-absorbed you grow to be, and the much less current you might be to the individuals round you and to the God who made you. Self-obsession and self-gift can’t co-exist.

The Substance, like different well-crafted horror films, generates that rising sense of panic which makes us holler on the heroine to “Get out!” earlier than it’s too late. To not escape from a monster or a killer or a pure catastrophe, however moderately, to flee from the navel-gazing model of ourselves. The Substance is a scream for deliverance from the jail of self.