I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t think the industry had it in them for something like The Substance anymore. I thought the world had gone too soft for absurdist films that serve up some truly macabre hyperboles for things that are messed up enough, even without the need for any exaggeration. That was until Coralie Fargeat took a swing at creating a gory blend of multifaceted insecurities that took the reins of the feminine experience as a whole. In this Demi Moore-starrer, Fargeat intrudes into the heart of the toxic yardsticks that measure a woman’s worth–the ever-so-sexist entertainment industry.
Spoiler Alert
What happens in the film?
If you screamed out “but she looks so freaking good” every single time Elisabeth Sparkle was made to feel terrible about her fading youth in The Substance, you’re not alone. But this thought itself doesn’t exist independent of the implications that a woman’s worth is decided by whether or not she meets the beauty standards, eyes of the beholder notwithstanding. But since she’s in showbiz, Elisabeth doesn’t really have the privilege to see herself beyond her appearance. And then there’s the fact that The Substance’s timeline looks very similar to the late 70s or the 80s. So you can imagine how free people like Harvey will be in their gross rejection of any woman they can’t objectify. Being dumped by her network TV show on her 50th birthday wasn’t how Elisabeth expected the day to go. And having the obnoxious producer Harvey deliver the big news that her “renewal has stopped” was just the push that Elisabeth needed to go into a very dark place. Had the circumstances been different, Elisabeth might’ve had second thoughts about calling the number on the thumb drive that a mysterious nurse at the hospital slipped into her coat pocket.
That led to Elisabeth going to a sketchy downtown locker-room where she got her hands on the titular substance. It promised her a better version of herself, and Elisabeth was hardly in any condition to reject the possibility of a shiny new her. The rules were simple. Activate–you basically inject a green substance into yourself, and your back opens up to birth a better, more perfect version of you. So out came Sue, and her crowd-winning smile and practically flawless looks won over Harvey in a blink. Even though Elisabeth doesn’t feel or experience the things that Sue does, it’s still a win for her that the new version of herself gets to be the face of the new morning show that replaces hers. But since Sue is a whole person who has wants and needs, it soon gets tiresome for her to adhere to a crucial rule. You see, they’re supposed to switch every week, which means they have to alternate between living a normal life and being in a state of complete paralysis at the end of every week. When Sue gets greedy and takes more stabilizer fluid from Elisabeth’s spine than she can spare without any harm, Elisabeth’s body deteriorates rapidly.
Does Sue kill Elisabeth?
Elisabeth felt how it was to be on top of the world for long enough for her to forget that she’d have to take a terrible fall someday. In an industry that scrunches its nose at anything or anyone who’s not synonymous with youth and beauty, no woman can avoid the feeling of being disposable. And for women, the fear of being forgotten once they’ve somewhat lost the spark in their eyes isn’t really paranoia. For Elisabeth, the signs that she’d become yesterday’s news were everywhere. But the worst symptom of the insecurities that engulf women as soon as their skin wrinkles is body dysmorphia. Again, it’s not like Elisabeth was feeling all the love that the world was showering Sue with. Pretty much all she could comfort herself with was the fact that Sue came from her, so she owed all her success to her, too. But Sue didn’t see it that way. The higher Sue went, the more she lost sight of the firm ground below. The spotlight blinded Sue to the fact that her glory days would come to an end, too. Sue’s greed started small. She postponed the switch for hours and kept herself stable with the fluid from Elisabeth’s spine. Even when she saw that Elisabeth’s body was degenerating, instead of falling back into the weekly pattern, Sue only took more from Elisabeth. But since Sue came from Elisabeth and Elisabeth was the “matrix,” she could choose whether or not she wanted to continue with the process. Before it got too bad, Elisabeth even went for a relatively healthier way to feel good about herself and got ready for a date with someone who practically worshiped her. She got all dolled up, hid her deformed finger inside sleek black gloves, and then her eyes fell on the big poster and a glowing Sue on it. To Elisabeth, at that point, looking like anything other than Sue meant looking hideous. The substance’s misuse and its horrifying consequences are a direct parallel to the scalpels and syringes that offer enhancements based on societal beauty standards. These procedures are painful, packed with risks, and often go horribly wrong. But it’s wild to even judge people who choose to go under the knife without recognizing that they’re the victims of standards the world imposes callously. You’re vain if you “fake” it. You’re ugly if you don’t. Women can’t simply exist, let alone win. And since Elisabeth can’t win, she risks losing even more of herself by continuing the process. By the time she fully feels the rage of how much and how irreversibly Sue’s selfishness has damaged her, she’s lost too much to even be horrified anymore.
It’s hard to say how similar Sue is to her matrix. Maybe a young, more confident Elisabeth was just as entitled as Sue is now. The world’s thrown itself at her pretty feet. And Sue’s finding it unfair that every other week, she has to stop absorbing all the love that she gets showered with. She is too happy to not want to fully exist. And since Sue’s increasingly enraged at Elisabeth, it gets easier and easier for her to stick a syringe into Elisabeth’s infected back and fill jars with the fluid that rejuvenates her. If anything, the physical signs that something’s going very wrong only makes Sue all the more desperate. If you think about it, Sue and Elizabeth’s dynamic sometimes takes the shape of a very messed up mother-daughter relationship. Elisabeth “had” Sue for a very selfish reason, and now Sue’s robbing Elisabeth of her life-force for her own interests. The cycle of trauma and abuse takes a more obvious shape in the final act of the film, but I’ll get to that later. Coming back to Sue, the turning point in her career seemed to be the upcoming New Year’s Eve show she got selected for. That’s also the point where she feels truly detached from Elisabeth. So much so that she takes jabs at Elisabeth and practically calls her outdated on national TV. But despite how terrible Elisabeth feels about all this, the more Sue takes from her, the more she feels the need to live vicariously through Sue’s triumph. At any given point, she could’ve stopped the process and preserved whatever life and mobility was still left in her body, but Elisabeth chose to go on. Sue would’ve kept depleting Elisabeth if she hadn’t run out of the fluid. So even though switching and letting the matrix reboot was risky so close to the New Year’s Eve show, Sue didn’t have a choice. By the time Elisabeth opts for termination, she looks older than a hundred. Being that close to death got her terrified of losing any more of herself. But Elisabeth couldn’t go through with it. She’d pushed most of the termination fluid into Sue before realizing that she was about to kill the only part of her that the world still loved. And because she only loved herself as much as the world loved her, Elisabeth thought that Sue deserved to live more than she did. But when an odd phenomenon during the switch leaves them both awake at the same time, an enraged Sue beats Elisabeth to death. By that point, the show was all that mattered to Sue. She needed for the world to be mesmerized by her bright smile more than she needed to preserve the source of her existence. It’s practically a gruesome metaphor for how the self is annihilated in the process of achieving the kind of upgradation that appeals to the world.
What happens to Sue in the end?
The Substance’s tone is never hopeful. It couldn’t have been hopeful if it really wanted to hold a mirror to a society that’s been poisoned by expectations that make no logical sense. I mean, the moral angle aside, it’s baffling how beauty standards got to be a thing when appearance is the most noticeable ever-changing thing about a person. And I think that comes from a place where society needs to justify or approve the existence of a person based on what they offer. While that itself is an utterly problematic thing to uphold and encourage, it takes its most ridiculous form when a person’s worth is attached to something they have the least bit of control over. But that’s show business. It feeds the world’s starvation of qualities that set the star apart from the audience. It creates this pedestal for a small fraction of people who sometimes don’t realize the ephemerality of the whole thing. The world’s eyes are on Sue. She’s the picture of perfection in that blue dress until her body falls apart. Something went terribly wrong during that frantic mix of termination, switch, and murder of the matrix. Now, Sue is losing what she wanted to preserve so desperately.
The activator serum that Sue injects into herself with the hope that it’d ignite the creation of a better version of her is long past its best-by date. It was single use, and Sue didn’t have the time to call the number and ask if she could even be the matrix to a new creation. Sue brings the story to a full circle, and someone comes out of her. Dubbed Monstro Elisasue, this grotesque creature has things all in the wrong places, including a screaming Elisabeth’s face on her back. Monstro Elisasue doesn’t quite understand what the world expects to see when she gets on stage wearing a cutout of Elisabeth’s picture. Given that this is a version that holds Elisabeth’s consciousness, she hallucinates the memories of all the applause and the break-a-legs she used to get when she was a star. But the world finds Elisasue hideous. Amid all the ruckus and the shrieks of the frightened, someone even tries to kill Elisasue and fails to do so because she can regenerate her body parts to some extent.
In The Substance’s ending, Monstro Elisasue sneaks out of the studio and breaks apart on the sidewalk. It’s safe to assume that Sue dies in the process. And there’s that cycle of trauma I was talking about. In her desperation for perfection, Elisabeth created Sue with the preset goals of making it big with her beauty. Think about it. Since Sue was a part of Elisabeth, she’d not only been born with Elisabeth’s gifts but also with her dreams. And that dream, that obsessive need to be loved and admired by people was the rot that ate up her heart. When Monstro Elisasue crawled her way out of Sue’s back, she headed right to the stage and basically to her death. This cycle will repeat as long as people like Harvey are allowed to thrive. People will be disposable as long as there’s someone in line to replace them. And there’s always someone in line to replace you in the industry.
In The Substance’s ending scene, Elisabeth’s face, still very much alive, falls off Elisasue’s back and crawls to rest on her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She melts into the star and becomes one with the admiration she garnered when she was young and, by Network TV’s standards, beautiful. The applause went quiet, the flowers stopped coming, and the most frustrating thing was that there was nothing Elisabeth could do to stop these things from happening. When Elisabeth stopped giving people the only thing they wanted from her, she was nothing but muck on the street–mopped up and forgotten. In The Substance, the star itself symbolizes Elisabeth Sparkle’s journey as a woman in show business. The closing scene connects directly to the opening sequence. When Elisabeth was young and at the peak of her success, a lot of love and devotion were put into the creation of this star. With time, the star lost its shine and cracked. Similarly, when Elisabeth lost her youthful glow and appeal, people walked all over her with little to no acknowledgement of the fact that she was a human being with feelings and things to offer that weren’t limited to her beauty. The last desperate creation–Monstro Elisasue–was the morbid embodiment of the soul-crushing dreams that destroyed the two women before her. She inherited Sue’s desperation to keep the show going no matter the cost. And from Elisabeth, she absorbed the need to be loved and admired. In quite a peculiar way, Elisasue getting on stage kind of meant that both these dreams were fulfilled. But Elisasue forgot that the love that people feel for a star is the least unconditional love there is. Like youth and beauty, that love is fickle. So I guess you can say that if there’s any actual mistake on Elisabeth and Sue’s parts, it is basing their entire self-worth on something that was always supposed to fade. But since it’s a depressing paradox, it’s not like they were ever seen beyond their skin, so you can hardly hold them accountable for all that self-destruction.
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