The Substance
You are one. You can’t escape from yourself.
This is technically my 100th newsletter–not including the mini The Lizzie McGuire Movie newsletter I did in May 2023. For the 100th newsletter, I'm writing about one of the most talked about films of 2024. I've wanted to see The Substance since it premiered, and people were raving about it. Now that award season has kicked off, it's reentering film conversations. However, I wanted to wait until the Holiday season was over and I was done rewatching Christmas movies.
Now that we're in the new year, I'm excited to finally be covering it. My initial thoughts are that this was a bold move to make in the Ozempic era of Hollywood and right as several celebrities have been appearing with new faces from an alleged new Hollywood plastic surgeon. Before watching The Substance, I imagined it was pretty similar to Death Becomes Her. I'll let you know if I still feel that way after my analysis.
Monstro ElisaSue
In many ways, The Substance is a lot like Death Becomes Her, except less campy and mystical and more sci-fi and horrifying. The actual substance that Elisabeth Sparkle takes is a lot like the potion that Madeline and Helen drink and the resentment between Elisabeth and Sue is pretty similar to the feud between the two frenemies in Death Becomes Her. The way Elisabeth and Sue’s bodies start to decay at the end, eventually conjoining into a giant blob that explodes, is also pretty close to how Madeline and Helen’s bodies decay at the end of Death Becomes Her, resulting in them shattered into pieces after falling down a staircase. The Substance isn’t necessarily an original idea, but it puts a unique spin on the story.
Elisabeth Sparkle
Elisabeth Sparkle was once a celebrated young actress but is now a 50-year-old "has been" pushed out of her job as an aerobics show host because her boss, Harvey, thinks viewers want to see someone younger. I just finished reading journalist Rob Sheffield's latest book on Taylor Swift, Heartbreak Is The National Anthem, so the popstar is at the front of my mind–which isn't unusual even when I'm not reading books about her. While watching the start of the film, I couldn't help but think about the stories she references in songs like "The Lucky One" and "Nothing New" about her fears that someone younger was going to come around and push her out of the spotlight.
“How the old bitch has been able to stick around for this long, that’s the fucking mystery to me,”-Harvey, The Substance.
She also talks about her fears of being taken away to the elephant graveyard in her 2020 Miss Americana Netflix documentary. Then, there's that scene in the 2022 Elvis biopic where a radio host suggests the former King of Rock n' Roll is for older crowds while celebrating the new success of The Jackson 5. All of this is to say we've seen time and again how easy it is for Hollywood to push their once beloved stars aside to make room for a shiny new toy.
Given the opportunity to take the substance, which promises to make her her best self again, Elisabeth takes it. This might seem as sketchy as when Madeline drank the purple potion in Death Becomes Her. Most of us with common sense wouldn’t make either of these choices. However, it’s important to understand how desperate Elisabeth is. She doesn’t have any friends or family. She has nothing to make her feel good about herself outside of the external validation she gets through fame. If the only thing that contributed to your confidence was snatched away from you, you’d probably go to extreme measures to get it back, too.
This is what Hollywood does to people. It builds them up, treats them like royalty, manipulates them into relying on external validation from strangers, and then throws them away once they’ve squeezed the last bit of relevance and monetary gain out of them. After being tossed aside, Elisabeth struggles to see her value anymore. Sue, her new youthful alter ego, a result of the substance, has taken over her life. In one scene, she almost goes on a date with someone from high school who she ran into earlier in the film. However, after looking at Sue’s beautiful, youthful appearance, she obsesses over her own appearance, redoing her makeup over and over again, never pleased with how she looks. She ends up sitting on her bed alone while her date texts her frantically, wondering where she is.
This is one of the scenes I found the most heartbreaking because Elisabeth seemed genuinely excited to go on a date before she sabotaged herself. Her former classmate seemed interested in getting to know her again, and she was enthused by the idea that someone still found her appealing. Since she has no one else in her life, this would have been a great opportunity for Elisabeth to connect with someone who saw her as a human being, not a beautiful face, to make money for the Hollywood machine. Watching her ruin this chance for herself was disheartening.
When given the opportunity to leave the experiment, Elisabeth stops herself because, at this point, she’s betrayed her own body beyond repair. Despite resenting Sue, it’s her only way of experiencing fame and attention any more. She and Sue are one, even if she fails to fully comprehend their connection throughout the film. If no one cares about Elisabeth Sparkle anymore, then she’ll live out her former glory days through Sue. Despite being warned to respect the balance, Sue keeps breaking the rules–she can only exist for seven days before consciousness is switched back to Elisabeth. It will switch back again after another seven days. Breaking the rules results in Elisabeth’s body decaying, starting with just one finger until she starts to look somewhere between a wicked witch and Sloth from The Goonies.
Demi Moore talked about her role in a few interviews, including Variety’s Actors on Actors and Actresses Roundtable. What she took out of the film most is how we can all be so violent toward ourselves. This is exactly what I took away from the film. I couldn’t help but focus on how much Elisabeth had betrayed herself and her own body. At the start of the film, she is 50 years old, and her boss pretty much views her as an old hag. However, by the end of the film, in her full monster form, it’s undeniable how beautiful she was at the start and how much she took it for granted. Elisabeth keeps blaming Sue for what has happened to her, not understanding that she is doing it to herself. She is the one betraying herself. She is at battle with herself.
“It gets harder each time to remember that you still deserve to exist. That this part of yourself is still worth something. That you still matter,”- Old Nurse, The Substance.
When Elisabeth does decide to terminate the experiment, she immediately regrets it. Even in the end, as she’s dying as a blob, spread out over her old Hollywood walk of fame star, she’s envisioning she is once again the beloved ingenue she used to be. She hears fans cheering and screaming her name, showering her with love. This is actually the one thing I dislike about The Substance and Death Becomes Her. While there are many sad moments where I feel deep compassion for the characters, both films end in a way that makes a mockery of them. Look at these self-absorbed idiots. Look what they’ve become because they’re so obsessed with youth and attention. I understand the message filmmakers wanted to get across, but I also wish there could have been a different ending for The Substance, something that makes us feel for Elisabeth, not laugh at her.
Sue
Sue literally climbs out of Elisabeth's back in The Substance. Right after Elisabeth injects herself, the new, young version of herself is born. Then, Sue struts into the studio, immediately becoming Elisabeth's replacement. She's so beloved that she quickly gets a gig hosting the network's New Year's Eve show because, as Harvey tells her, the people love her. Sue is getting the exact same attention that Elisabeth used to get. Since Sue and Elisabeth are technically one in consciousness, Elisabeth gets to live out her dreams again. However, this doesn't stop them from deeply resenting each other.
The most violent scene is when Sue beats up Elisabeth, ultimately killing her. Elisabeth sees Sue as stealing the life she once had, and Sue sees Elisabeth as a disgusting older woman who keeps stealing her time. If it wasn't for Elisabeth, Sue would have more time to enjoy her young Hollywood lifestyle. Unfortunately, Elisabeth's death results in Sue's body starting to decay as well. Her teeth start falling out right before her New Year's special, so the cycle continues.
Sue takes the substance, but since she's already an extension of Elisabeth, it messes everything up, and the two are combined into a giant blob, which eventually explodes blood everywhere and combusts. It's the goriest, most horror-inspired moment of the film. To circle back to Taylor Swift, Elisabeth and Sue are playing out the plot of her The Tortured Poets Department track "Clara Bow." It's a song about how Hollywood keeps finding new ingenues to be the next big thing, telling them how they're just like the one who came before them except even better. Hollywood loved Clara Bow, then they loved Stevie Nicks, then they loved Taylor Swift, and now they love all the girls coming after her.
In The Substance, they loved Elisabeth until she was old news, and then Sue came along. Then, when Sue started to fall apart, she tried to produce the next star, who, had her plan worked, would have taken her place. It's a never-ending cycle. However, I really love something Demi Moore said during her actress roundtable interview. The Substance actress said, "When we shift how we hold ourselves. When we hold our value, our beauty in every stage of our existence then the outside world will eventually catch up."
As much as Moore understands the industry's responsibility in the cycle, she also knows she and other people in Hollywood have the ability to stop the cycle by not allowing Hollywood to have such power over them. I think this was so well said and incredibly influential.
Coralie Fargeat’s Directing
Demi Moore also mentioned that in a lot of her scenes, there isn't much dialogue since her character is very isolated, so her physical actions were very important to the storytelling. My conclusion after watching The Substance is that it is the directing and visuals that make the movie. There are so many crucial shots; it is certainly not a movie you can play in the background while doing something else–like Netflix apparently wants to make more of.🙄
There were so many important shots in The Substance, like when Elisabeth watched her face being ripped off a billboard after being fired or when she threw her old snowglobe–a relic of her glory days–at a large portrait of herself, shattering the frame right around her eye. There's an amazing shot later on when Sue is doing her morning stretches right in front of the shattered portrait. It's like the old, damaged Elisabeth is watching the new version of herself come to life, ready to take everything she's worked for. I also loved the direction of the scene when Elisabeth keeps reapplying her makeup for her date, which never happens.
I love the way she wipes the red lipstick across her face, her dead stares into the mirror, and the way the camera moves back and forth from her to the clock on the wall, showing how much time she's wasting obsessing over how she looks. However, a very crucial shot that I didn't see the significance of until I heard Moore talk about it is when Harvey is firing Elisabeth. They go to lunch, where he's violently eating shrimp, chomping on it, then spitting out the shells. Moore explained this is a metaphor for how Hollywood eats people up and spits them out.
There are also incredible shots of Elisabeth when she's morphing into an old monster due to Sue breaking the substance rules. Elisabeth's hair has turned grey, and in a scene where she's cooking dinner, she looks like an old witch brewing a potion in her cauldron. While this is going on, she's watching Sue on a talk show and mocking her. It's like watching the evil queen in disguise as an old woman poisoning Snow White with an apple because a mirror suggested the princess was more beautiful than her.
There are also a lot of powerful shots toward the end of The Substance, like when Sue and Elisabeth are in conjoined blob form, and Sue is still trying to get ready for the New Year's special. She puts on her dress, covering Elisabeth's face with the fabric, still trying to conceal her old identity that she's so ashamed of. I also love the gory blood scenes when it sprays out over the audience and performers and then explodes down the hallway, covering the portraits of the once beautiful Sue.
“Gorgeous, the pure heart people are gonna love that”-Harvey, The Substance.
It feels like another metaphor saying Sue is no longer the young, beautiful girl in Hollywood, and she will soon be replaced, too. Her posters, where she once looked like a dream girl, are now submerged in blood. They're tainted and disgusting, just like she and Elisabeth are. It also feels like an obvious reference to The Shining when the blood pours out of the elevator. In conclusion, this film is exactly like Death Becomes Her and nothing like it at all. It's not such an original idea, but it was done again because as long as society's obsessed with youth, it will continue to be relevant.
Though, if everyone lives by Demi Moore's rules, films like The Substance could lose relevancy, becoming relics of the past when staying young was important, and everyone placed their value on how famous they were. I do hope we get to the point where we stop trying to shame people for aging and push them out of their careers just because they aren't as young as they used to be. As Moore suggested, if we want that to happen, we have to change our views of ourselves from within and then let the world reflect that back to us.