The Substance Asks the Question: Can Hollywood Escape Its Own Beauty Standards?

Editors’ note: Spoilers for the film The Substance ahead!

In The Substance, Elisabeth Sparkle is like most women who work in Hollywood: she built a career on looking good. Men want to be with her, and women want to be her, which Elisabeth obliges with a workout TV show reminiscent of Jane Fonda’s New Workout, which airs on a nondescript cable channel that seems to exist only to profit off Elisabeth’s fuckability. Also like most women who work in Hollywood, Elisabeth starts losing clout in the industry because – like all human women – she is aging, and her body isn’t as aspirational as it once was. When the grotesquely misogynistic producer of her show, Harvey (not sure if this is a Weinstein reference, it’s never made explicit, but my brain went there), decides she’s too old to be on TV and dismisses her unceremoniously, Elisabeth’s world crumbles.

Elisabeth is embodied onscreen by Demi Moore, an actress who has – much like Elisabeth – grown older in the public eye. Moore rose to fame in the early 1990s, starting her career as a model and breaking through as a movie star with her memorable (and sexy) role in the classic film Ghost (1990). Back in the day, Moore was one of the most desirable actresses of her generation, as well as the highest paid actress in the world. For her role in Striptease (1996), Moore was paid $12.5 million, an amount that was unprecedented at the time for a single performance. Casting Moore as Elisabeth was a stroke of genius – her striking looks and signature long, dark hair evoke Moore’s own Hollywood past as an intensely desirable woman.

Despite this summoning of the collective history of Moore’s desirability on the big screen, The Substance – like all movies that are deemed feminist in some way – raises the question of whether a film made in Hollywood can truly deliver a feminist critique of Hollywood-made beauty standards. As Moore’s depiction of Elisabeth evokes experiences of women’s body dysmorphia that all of us can probably relate to, Moore’s own desirability isn’t as accessible to most of us – and neither is the amount of financial power she has accrued because of her beauty in an industry that runs on looks.

Back to the film: Watching herself naked in the mirror in her white-tiled bathroom, Elisabeth counts the flaws that probably cost her her job. Her droopy boobs and her undereye circles, lined with tiny wrinkles that are increasingly difficult to hide with makeup without creasing; her sagging, thin lips that naturally fall into an unappealing frown; the unmistakable wisdom in her eyes, now lived-in and lacking the ingenue’s sparkle. Why has her body betrayed her like this? Why has time – despite all those aerobic classes – taken away her youth? The cold, colorless bathroom matches the indifference frigidity with which her body – once desired by both men and women – is now regarded by the world around her.

Distraught by her loss of job and identity, Elisabeth crashes her car when she sees a billboard of herself being taken down. Landing at the hospital with minor injuries, Elisabeth is examined by a young doctor who checks her spine and slips her a flash drive with information about "the substance,” a black-market serum that purports to deliver a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of Elisabeth. Desperate to be young again and regain some sense of who she is, Elisabeth orders the miracle drug – but of course, there’s a catch.

Rather, there are several body-horror related catches. Elisabeth cannot spend more than a week as the new version of herself. She has to alternate between her new body – one that sprouts from her old one like a snake shedding old skin, old skin she must stitch together at the spine herself – and her old one, keeping the inactive body connected to intravenous food and injecting the active body with “stabilizer fluid” once a day. It’s all very gross, but Elisabeth seems to think it’s worth it, at least in the beginning. Her new body, “Sue” (played by another actor altogether, the bright-eyed Margaret Qualley) is everything her old body is not: firm where it needs to be, no wrinkles or shadows, no hard-earned wisdom in her eyes, just the youthful perkiness of a body (and perhaps a soul) unmarked by time and experience.

Written, directed and produced by Coralie Fargeat, whose 2017 feature debut, Revenge follows a young woman on a quest for retribution against men who assaulted her, The Substance grapples with similar, or at least adjacent, feminist themes. It was one of the most divisive movies shown at Cannes this year, receiving the longest standing ovation of the festival and awarded best screenplay, even though its gnarly, prosthetic-based body horror and blood-filled storyline resulted in a few walkouts during the screening. The reviews following Cannes have been mixed. Some reviewers dismissed The Substance because of how extreme the body horror becomes (I personally liked that), while others pointed out that the relationship between Elisabeth’s two selves becomes repetitive and dull, without much development beyond the initial conflict. The film has been called “as shallow as the very thing it’s critiquing,” which has some truth to it.

This is always the way: when the word “feminist” gets attached to a film, expectations are high and disagreement is common, even de rigeur. (After all, we are only a year out from the Barbie movie discourse.)

These critiques are warranted because The Substance draws heavily on experiences of womanhood to deliver its story. When Elisabeth looked at herself in the mirror, I also looked at myself. Or rather, I recalled all the times I’ve stood in front of the mirror counting my flaws. Dark undereye circles, fat around my belly, body hair where it’s not attractive. I am only 34, but my body and face have changed so much, and I don’t feel as desirable as I used to feel ten years ago. As a feminist, I feel forced to say that there’s nothing wrong with any of this, with my body becoming older and bigger. It’s just how bodies work. Yes, intellectually, I know this. But I know people younger than me getting botox and liposuction, fighting against every second that ages them with moisturizer and miracle beauty products. I don’t want to buy into that. I want to age gracefully and not spend a dime on looking younger, but that’s a hard position to hold when everyone hates the concept of aging, period. My 65-year-old mother tells me regularly how irrelevant she feels in her current field of work, how old she feels when she enters her postgraduate degree classes and everyone is in their mid-20s. She questions what she has to offer at her age, and that has nothing to do with looks. It’s not just about beauty standards, it’s about hating the passage of time, particularly when we are women.

❝ I want to age gracefully and not spend a dime on looking younger, but that’s a hard position to hold when everyone hates the concept of aging, period.

This hatred of how the passage of time affects women’s bodies becomes evident with Elisabeth and Sue’s body-switch every week. As Sue grows into her own cable TV aerobics career – she replaces Elisabeth at her old job, once again showing the audience what an aging woman’s body lacks in energy, perkiness and desirability – she pushes Elisabeth’s (unconscious, naked) body out of the way, not just figuratively but literally disobeying the rules of the serum that created her by overstaying the prescribed period in the new body. Every time Sue overuses her new body, Elisabeth suffers irreversible deformation, starting with an old, ugly witch’s finger that she hides with a satin glove.

It’s a little confusing – Sue is the new version of Elisabeth, but she isn’t Elisabeth, really. Sue is Sue, but she is also Elisabeth, or an offshoot of Elisabeth. There’s no Sue without Elisabeth, but there is an Elisabeth without Sue. Sue does have her own consciousness, and she creates her own life, a life that is going very well because she’s young and desirable. But Sue cannot exist without Elisabeth, and that vexes her. The line between the two selves is very tenuous, especially because they must switch bodies every week, which escalates Elisabeth’s self-loathing when her rapidly aging body is active again. Sue thrives as a new cable TV star, while Elisabeth becomes a social recluse who hates every minute of her existence as an older woman. Returning to Elisabeth’s older body is a reminder of everything she already hates about herself and how much better it feels to be in a young body that men want to fuck. The distance between Sue and Elisabeth widens throughout the film, but the creators of the substance technology disagree with the separation between selves, reminding Elisabeth that “there is no she and you. You are one. Respect the balance.”

The Substance doesn’t really care about detailed world-building, but I do wonder about the philosophy of the Sue/Elisabeth dynamic. If Sue is a younger version of Elisabeth, is she also a past version of her? Or is she a new version of Elisabeth altogether? In one of the most visceral scenes of the film, Sue and Elisabeth finally meet and try to kill each other. Sue prevails, pummeling Elisabeth to death in a hateful rage, swinging at her dead body way after it stops breathing. The hatred for Sue’s older version, for a body that is no longer agile and fuckable, is palpable in those seconds of excess violence – Sue doesn’t just want to kill Elisabeth, she wants to decimate her older body, destroy the body that betrayed her.

The murder feels like more than self-loathing; it expresses a hatred of the female body’s limitations, of the unstoppable force of time marking our bodies and how we are treated for something we cannot change. It feels like the hatred of society distilled into an act of violence. I hope to never feel that hatred for my own body – I want to run my fingers across my wrinkles and think of all the laughter that created them instead; I want to stretch in front of the mirror and thank my body for everywhere it has carried me – but society does feel that much hatred for older women’s bodies. An older female body isn’t fit for objectifying and sexualizing anymore, so it’s not actually fit for anything.

On the red carpet, Margaret Qualley and Demi Moore do not appear to be that different from each other. Posing for photos side-by-side, they just look like two thin white women. In Moore’s Academy Award photo, some wrinkles are visible, but others have been presumably erased by make-up and photo editing. Of course the point of The Substance is that even someone as beautiful and “well-preserved” as Moore would need to take youth serum to reach the level of beauty that makes Hollywood money, but the marketing cycle around the film feels more performative than usual. It was Hannah Strong, in a review for Little White Lies, who aptly observed that “The Substance’s presentation is as shallow as the very thing it’s critiquing,” also charging the film with “hagsploitation” and an unwillingness to push the discourse forward. Other reviewers said the film is too repetitive, as Sue’s greed for youth increasingly makes Elisabeth look like a deformed monster and the cycle of greed-equals-more-body-horror becomes endless onscreen, until it results in the grotesque Elisa-Sue Monster, who can only be described as a ball of flesh and limbs cobbled together on two feet.

❝ Hollywood is selling us back to ourselves, a population largely incapable of admiring older women for anything other than how young they look in comparison to their actual age.

Did I mention that The Substance is a comedy? I am still convinced people weren’t laughing enough at my screening, particularly when the Elisa-Sue Monster starts spraying the audience in a theater with copious amounts of blood as everyone becomes disgusted by their (her? its?) looks. Perhaps the message is that we cannot fight beauty standards, we can only make fun of them. That we are all trapped here – but who trapped us in the first place? Like other reviewers, I also find that the film falls short in bringing new elements to the subjects of women’s aging, learned self-loathing, and beauty mythology. We already know we are taught to hate ourselves; we already know we all look in the mirror wishing for a smaller this and a younger-looking that. So what’s The Substance trying to say?

The Substance fails at escaping the very environment it attempts to critique because it’s still, despite its message, entrenched in Hollywood. It’s an interesting film, sure, but watching Moore and Qualley be praised for their looks after watching a film that demonstrates how beauty standards can drive women insane strikes me as both a symptom of feminism’s definitive entrance into the Hollywood zeitgeist and of Hollywood’s inability to figure out what the actual fuck to do with it. Hollywood – because of its continued investment in women’s fuckability – does not have the capability or space to deliver a film that truly pushes feminist discourse forward without continuously celebrating women who manage to stay fuckable, or who are at least understood to be trying. When we have Kim Kardashian openly praising Moore for how she looks in the film – completely missing the point of the very thing she just watched while she herself sells fuckability and youth daily on her Instagram – it’s difficult to say the critical reviewers are wrong.

But this is hardly a problem that is unique to The Substance. It’s a Hollywood problem, and it’s also a societal problem. Is it really that shocking that the marketing cycle of The Substance has been surrounded by comments on how good Moore looks despite how old she is? Hollywood is selling us back to ourselves, a population largely incapable of admiring older women for anything other than how young they look in comparison to their actual age. According to The Substance, this fucking sucks, but according to the film’s marketing cycle, Moore and Qualley will get more buzz if they look snatched. The irony is, I think, inescapable.

This piece was edited by Andrea Grimes and copy edited by Chrissy Stroop.