Compromise and Conceit

The other day I aimlessly chose a movie to watch at the local cinema, and settled on The Substance, which I somehow mistakenly thought was a psychological thriller with a fantastic or horror element. I don’t know where I got that idea from, but the poster certainly did not give away that it is a body horror. I also had a vague impression that this movie is a reflection on the politics of female aesthetics in Hollywood, possibly even that it was a feminist critique of Hollywood’s double standards, so I imagined it would have some kind of feminist ending possibly working a revenge/thriller angle into the feminist critique. Since I’m a sucker for that sort of thing, I thought I’d give it a go.

Unfortunately, it’s a body horror, which is a terrible kind of movie to watch without proper preparation, it’s not feminist at all – quite the opposite! – and it has a really, really bad ending that is both thematically and aesthetically ridiculous, and an insult to both the artistic and intellectual capacity of its audience. The Substance is, in essence, one of those increasingly common movies that insults its audience’s intelligence, carrying a deeply misogynist message while missing all the best possibilities of the genre, and being gross besides.

I do not recommend you watch this movie for any reason, and I’m going to explain why now. Warning: extensive spoilers ahead, but you’ll thank me for it when you get to the end and realize what an awful shitshow you avoided by reading this.

The premise

The basic premise is actually cool. Elizabeth Sparkle is a famous showbiz star (even has her own star! on that godawful street in LA that isn’t worth visiting) who gets sacked from the show she headlines on her 50th birthday because she’s no longer young and sexy. By coincidence she is offered a chance to trial a new “experience”, which will make a new and better version of herself. She stupidly agrees to do this, and goes through an obviously shady and extremely dodgy process of acquiring a package of medical tools that will change her.

The basic process is: she injects a substance that makes a new, young, sexy version of herself crawl out of her own body. Her body remains alive but comatose, and the new version of herself (called Sue) needs to use a horrible need to drain spinal fluid from comatose Elizabeth, and inject it into herself every day as a stabilizer. Then, after 7 days they switch: Sue plugs a two-way catheter into Elizabeth, they exchange fluids and then Elizabeth wakes up and Sue sleeps. During each seven day period either Elizabeth or Sue (whoever is sleeping) receives IV nutrition, and the rules are strict: they must switch every 7 days *without exception*, and they must remember that the two bodies are actually one.

The important point here is that Sue is young and beautiful and sexy and luscious, while Elizabeth is old and gross and fading. I like the process, it’s very body horror and gross and it leaves this kind of Dorian Gray-like body in the apartment while the other woman lives her life. It seems that each woman doesn’t know what the other one did, so when Elizabeth wakes up she doesn’t know that Sue has taken her old job, or who Sue is fucking, or what plans she is making. Everything each woman needs to know about the other woman’s life is learnt from clues left around their (awful) apartment.

The story

From here of course it all goes wrong in the expected ways. Sue, young and sexy and reckless, starts extending the time to the Switch, taking extra spinal fluid from Elizabeth and having fun until things go wrong, and every time Elizabeth wakes up a part of her has been ruined by Sue’s excesses. For example, the first time Sue goes over, one of Elizabeth’s fingers is a mess. Elizabeth has no way of knowing what Sue is doing and both of them are too stupid and self-absorbed to write each other notes, so they just kind of try to figure it out.

Elizabeth starts to resent Sue, and Sue becomes very successful very quickly, with many reasons to put the Switch on hold. Finally, Sue is offered the chance to host the New Year show (which doesn’t make any sense, for reasons we’ll explore below), delays the Switch for weeks, and finally has to Switch when Elizabeth runs out of spinal fluid. But this happens the evening of the New Year show, of course, so Sue makes a reckless gamble. She digs up the unused portion of the original injection material and injects it into herself, thinking she can birth a prettier version of herself to do the show. Unfortunately the self that is born is a hideous monster, composed of horrible parts of Sue and Elizabeth, which goes to the theatre, intrudes on the show, and at the highlight of the show starts exploding with blood all over the audience. This last 30 minutes goes from Body Horror to David Lynch style stupidity, with the horrible Sue/Elizabeth creature spurting blood like a fountain across the stage and the crowd, stupid music playing, overdone and overdramatic scenes from the crowd as they panic and run, etc. It’s like a terrible, blood-soaked, juvenile version of the mall scene in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, if that scene was awful in every way.

Why it sucked

There are multiple reasons it sucked: the background of the star and the reasons she was replaced, the nature of her replacement, the complete failure to explore the sinister organization providing “the Experience”, the deeply misogynist message, and the absolutely trashy, shitty ending. Let’s go through them.

Nobody cares about your aerobics

The problems start with the source of Elizabeth Sparkle’s “fame” and why she lost her job. Although the movie hints that Elizabeth was once a famous movie star, when it opens Elizabeth is the star of a morning aerobics show for middle-aged women, in which Elizabeth and all her co-stars are mature women who are leading their audience (the viewers at home) through a high-energy aerobics set. This is cool and everything, but it is absolutely the stony end of fame, and anyone who has sunk to fronting an aerobics show knows their star has long since flamed out. Not only should they have long ago come to terms with their fading glory, but they also would be well aware that their job is entirely dependent on their fitness and looks. Being sacked because you’re too old and ugly is the most ordinary thing about such a show!

Also, it’s completely normal, realistic and to be expected that a 50 year old woman is too old for an aerobics show. It’s high energy! They have to speak while they bounce! They have to look young and energetic! These shows are never fronted by women over 50. If I was turning 50 as the host of an aerobics show I’d probably resign! That’s hard work.

Of course it didn’t have to be this way: the show could have started off with Elizabeth working in a role she does not need to be attractive for. She could have been a newscaster, a daytime interview host like Oprah, a weather presenter, the host of a kids’ show. In these cases, sacking her because she’s too old and ugly and replacing her with some floozy is an insult to her and to women everywhere, and it provides a really good starting point for her rage. Why did you sack me from a talking job because my tits are sagging? I’m going to fix this by making a new me!

That works! But the aerobics show thing just doesn’t. No one who does that is actually successful, and nobody who does that expects to last in the role past 50.

But there’s another problem here: the actor playing this woman is Demi Moore, famous sex symbol from the 1990s. We see her naked early on and she’s still got it! No 50 year old woman, looking in the mirror and seeing Demi Moore’s body looking back at her, is going to be especially exercised about making a younger, hotter version of themselves. It just doesn’t work!

The failure of the replacement

So, to fix this Elizabeth goes through this insane and horrible transformation, where her back splits open and a new version of herself crawls out of the wound, then for the rest of her life she has to be stabbed with a needle once a day by her alter-ego Sue, be asleep for 7 days in every 14, etc. It’s an enormous price to pay! And what does she get for this enormous price? A mediocre-looking Sue, who simply restarts working in the same job. Doesn’t become a movie star or bed the richest man on the planet or anything like that – just goes to the casting for the role Elizabeth just lost, gets it, and starts working as the next aerobics show host. Birthed from Elizabeth’s spine, she crawls bloody and mediocre straight to the equivalent of showbiz failure. Why?

Sue is not especially beautiful or sexy, within the rules of Hollywood. There is one scene where she is walking towards the camera in her leotard and her thighs are rubbing together – this “super hot” aerobics instructor doesn’t even have a thigh-gap. Do you think a modern Hollywood production studio would cast a woman without a thigh gap in an aerobics show? I don’t think so. Of course, by the standards of us mortals she’s hot and pretty, but she’s inferior in every way to her backing dancers, and she’s not that pretty by the standards of the industry she’s in. This is what Elizabeth sacrificed half her waking life for?

If you go to the casting list for the show you’ll see why Sue is not especially attractive, though. It’s not because she’s meant to look this way. It’s because the actor is Andie McDowell’s daughter, and all the major roles in modern cinema have been reserved for the children of famous actors. Whenever Sue has to look hot, a team of body doubles do her job for her.

They could of course have made a play out of this in the movie: Elizabeth could have told the studio her daughter was going to apply for the job, and then Sue turns up for the audition. Cue scenes of all the hopeful nobodies being disappointed because the actor’s daughter got the part. Fun, right?

Wrong. No fun is allowed in this movie.

About the Experience

It’s really unclear who is behind the treatment Elizabeth receives. She never meets anyone who dispenses it, speaks to them only on the phone, picks up her supplies from a dodgy postbox, has no company name, nothing. Who are they? Is she paying? Is she an experiment? What is the purpose? Where is this tech from? We don’t learn anything, even though they’re obviously dodgy. If the whole movie were not completely tied up in the personal drama between Elizabeth and Sue, they could have perhaps joined forces to take on this organization and reveal the truth, maybe find some serum that frees both of them to live their lives. And this is the most interesting thing about this movie! Why would anyone come up with this weird treatment, why do they call it the Experience, why are they giving it away?

We find out nothing, and instead everything remains locked in this personal drama between two women, which is instigated and fueled by an organization that seems to be staffed entirely by men …

The misogynist message

The first half of the movie is interesting, as Elizabeth begins to become jealous of Sue and Sue’s selfish activities begin to affect Elizabeth. Elizabeth calls the organization and complains about Sue but they remind her of the fundamental principle that the two bodies are one, implying that anything Sue is doing is somehow under the control of Elizabeth. But Sue is a reckless, shallow party animal, and her selfishness is slowly draining Elizabeth’s life blood. Elizabeth becomes increasingly angry with Sue, expressing her anger in the most ridiculous ways (none of which are a note to Sue!) This conflict finally ends with the two confronting each other (due to Sue’s recklessness) and Sue killing Elizabeth, which incidentally is ridiculous since Sue cannot live without Elizabeth.

So basically the entire plot revolves around a conflict between two women, somewhat akin to a mother-daughter conflict, in which the mother is jealous of the daughter’s beauty and the daughter refuses to respect her progenitor or to treat her own body with the respect it needs, and this brooding resentment grows until they have a conflict where one woman kills the other. All of which was brought about by the elder woman’s shallow desire to stay pretty, and the younger woman’s inability to respect an older, uglier woman. And the quintessential cause of all this was a series of injections provided to the older woman by a man.

It’s all a bit shit, isn’t it? It’s just the same old misogynist story, repackaged with body horror. This misogyny is reinforced by the constant stream of tits, arse and cunt throughout the movie. Sue’s reimagined aerobics show is a twerkfest, and every time we see her on the show we get the typical crotch-shot, the classic semi-pornographic promise that the leotard/bikini is going to slide enough for you to get a glimpse. We routinely get full-body shots in the shower of both women, and in the ridiculous climax all the backup dancers are bare-chested, tits out for all to see. When the hideous Sue/Elizabeth monster has its on-stage meltdown a breast even slowly bulges out of one eye, and falls to the stage like one of those weird gross flying sperms in Eraserhead[1]. It’s a grotesque manipulation of the female body, intended to humiliate and disgrace women as a gender. Sure, there are gross men depicted grossly, who pray on these women and are in charge, but we never ever see them naked or in compromising, humiliating positions related to their bodies. Only the women in this show are embodied, and their bodies are grotesque, sexual or treacherous but never valued.

It’s classic misogyny!

The trashy ending

The ending makes no sense and is no fun, just 30 minutes of cringe. You sit there hiding your eyes as this badly-done monstrosity pumps impossible amounts of blood in spurts onto an over-acting, cartoon-like crowd to the backing of bad music. It’s really obvious that after establishing the complex psychology and body horror of the relationship between Elizabeth and Sue the writers are completely out of ideas. They don’t know how to end the story, so they just plunge it into bloody farce.

This ending also betrays the body horror of the first half of the movie, which while gross is also carefully done with a specific tacky /trashy theme. The way the male producer eats, the way he pisses, the grotesque birthing of Sue from Elizabeth, the specific aesthetic of the medical implements used, the sounds of Sue sewing up Elizabeth’s back, the colours of the spinal fluid as it degrades to snot, the horrible puncture wound in Elizabeth’s spine, everything is carefully designed to disgust, disturb and horrify in a particular way. Then in the last 30 minutes it’s just fountains of blood and squealing women, all the nuance and care and attention to detail replaced with this dumb-arsed fountain of blood. It’s one of the lamest, most inconsistent thematic turns I’ve ever seen in cinema, as well as the stupidest non-ending you can imagine. It really smells like the writers had a different ending in mind but the producers shit-canned it – probably because it was feminist – and forced the director to retcon this broadway shitshow onto the end.

I really wish I had walked out at the point where the final scene obviously turned dumb, but the cinema was dark and it was too much effort and I wanted to know just how stupid the directors were, so I had to sit through the worst 30 minutes of lame-arsed bloodspurts you’ve ever seen. It was gross, dumb, boring and cringey.

If you do watch this movie, walk out 30 minutes before the end. In fact, walk out when Sue kills Elizabeth. Everything after that is a waste of your time.

Why do they do this to us?

The first half of this movie was hard going but interesting. Demi Moore and Denis Quaid did well, and the plot was intriguing at this point, buoyed up by the weirdness of the Experience. Also, the music was okay. But as soon as they had to come to a resolution of the tension between Elizabeth and Sue they failed, and turned the show into a misogynist shitshow that was an insult to its audience. Why?

There were alternative stories they could have told. Elizabeth could have been a news announcer rather than an aerobics presenter, with no reason to be fired and an abiding rage. Sue could have got her job through sexual favours, knowing from Elizabeth’s experience that this is how it is done, and carrying an abiding rage. They could have written notes to each other, or left videos on their phone, and slowly built a rapport, then in their separate 7 day periods of activity prepared a terrible revenge. The movie manoeuvres so that they wake up together – they could have done this but then united as a team, rather than fighting out of jealousy, raided the location of the lab that produced the material and sought answers. They could have done a Thelma and Louise style flameout, taking down everyone who ever wronged Elizabeth when they realized that the Experience could only end badly. There were so many opportunities to make an interesting ending, but instead they just had this tortured Elizabeth/Sue body, this weird progeny of both of them, explode in blood onstage and then die.

The ending – the entire second half of the movie – was obviously shit. It was transparently bad. Why is it that movie producers routinely do this to us? It’s an insult to us as consumers, as adults, as rational people, as consumers of art. Do these producers even think of what they do as art, or just see it as a very roundabout way of delivering investment profits? Do they care about their audience at all? Or is Hollywood now so inbred, inward-looking and cloistered that they look at a plot like this and think it’s smart, incisive, politically insightful? Did they think this misogynist trash was a feminist movie? Or do they think that if they tell a story about two women we’re all so stupid we’ll immediately interpret it as feminist? Do they think we think at all?

I’m so sick of the movie industry doing this to us. It happened with Star Wars, which was an absolutely epic six episodes of treating us like shit, and of course they do it with so many of their action movies with their daddy issues and their completely superficial attempts to engage with social issues. They did it in spades with Game of Thrones, which was a slap in the face to everyone who had watched it for so many years. And they somehow here found a way to do the same insulting failure with body horror, which you would think would be immune to stupidity and condescension. It’s so common, so disappointing, and such an indictment of the modern movie industry.

So, don’t be like me: Don’t give these fuckwits your money to watch this trashy, patronizing, misogynist crap!

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fn1: One of the shittest movies ever made