Hear Me Out: ‘The Substance’ is the antidote to the ‘Barbie’ discourse that we never knew we needed

Posted On October 23, 2024October 23, 2024

When Coralie Fargeat’s body horror movie The Substance was released in September, it was billed as a gory, feminist take on the capital offence of ageing while female. But that turned out to largely be marketing spin, and at a time when the debate about feminism in movies has never been more disappointingly loud and hollow, that is most definitely to its credit.

The Substance stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a former Hollywood A-lister who, on her 50th birthday, is fired from her hit exercise TV show for supposedly not being hot anymore (though most people with eyes would disagree). When she learns about a secretive new treatment that can make her young again, she leaps at the opportunity, pausing only briefly to read the fine print.

Once injected, the neon-green substance produces a separate version of her, emerging through a giant slash down her spine. The younger Elisabeth calls herself Sue. Played by an inexhaustibly perky Margaret Qualley, Sue sets out to win back the role that Elisabeth lost and is quickly fawned over by the executives who nonchalantly fired the older star. The only catch, as the disembodied voice on the other side of the phone repeatedly warns, is that Elisabeth and Sue must alternate every week in order for the process to continue, and, most importantly, they must remember they are one – a symbiotic organism that cannot survive without its two halves.

It doesn’t take long for Sue to disregard the warnings, and Elisabeth finds herself waking up after longer and longer intervals, her body rapidly decaying.

Sexism is built into The Substance from its very foundations, but there is no overarching message unless “Sucks to be female” feels like enough of a takeaway. As the film progresses, it’s clear that it’s not a serious indictment of structural misogyny in the entertainment industry but a garish, grotesque romp through the finest and most campy hallmarks of body horror. What Fargeat has alighted upon is the same thing that reality TV shows like Botched and Extreme Makeover have been showing us for decades: reversing the ageing process, whether by knife or by needle, is a grisly, bloody, painful affair that is not for the faint of heart. 

When Greta Gerwig’s record-smashing Barbie hit cinemas last summer, it sparked a furious debate over whether it was feminist enough, too feminist, or the wrong kind of feminist. The inherent pitfalls of centring a movie on a plastic doll with physically unsurvivable proportions set the film up for controversy even before a single ticket was sold, and despite the mostly joyous tone of the film, that thorny question about internalised misogyny just couldn’t go away.

In America Ferrera’s now-famous monologue in Barbie, her character rails against the double standards that women have to contend with every day. “You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin […] You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood […] I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us.”

The moment is cathartic, the kind of moment that makes you want to cry or cheer or both. But it was criticised for being too obvious, for not going farther, and for pandering to a comfortable stereotype of female outrage. The truth is that Barbie could never win. No matter how eloquent the script or poignant Margot Robbie’s performance, there was simply no way to win, the great irony being that that is the crux of Ferrera’s monologue.

Despite the marketing, The Substance gleefully side-steps what Barbie tries and fails to confront. There is something joyfully facetious about it. Fargeat doesn’t attempt to offer reassurance to women who are slowly turning invisible with age. She leans into the ecstasy of youth. When Sue emerges from Elisabeth’s body, she runs her hands over every inch of her dewy skin with erotic pleasure. When Sue performs her workout routine for the cameras, Fargeat lingers salaciously on her thrusting hips and scantily-covered curves, demonstrating that sometimes, the only difference between the male gaze and the female gaze is who’s sitting in the director’s chair.

When the movie descends into squelching body horror and then even further into gooey slapstick, it’s a different catharsis to that of Ferrera’s speech. It feels like an exorcism through nauseous, revolting comedy, a glorious departure from any kind of thesis and toward pure absurdism. Five more minutes, and the movie would have been making fart jokes.

When Fargeat was interviewed on the MUBI podcast around the film’s release, the interviewer admitted, hesitantly, that he wondered while watching the film if he might try The Substance if he had the chance. “I would definitely do it,” Fargeat responded without missing a beat. This captures the essence of the movie’s charm. It isn’t trying to start a new line of discourse on misogynistic double standards or interrogate women for internalising them. It is simply tapping into the near-universal fear of ageing and seeing just how far it can go.

Sometimes, that’s all cinema needs to be – an escapist romp that allows us to laugh at our fears in a safe space in the hope that it might embolden us to laugh at them in the real world, too.

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