Note: This article contains heavy spoilers for The Substance.
A Blood-and-Neon Drenched Spectacle
“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger? More beautiful? More perfect?”
I expect most women have, at least by the time they hit my age (forty-four). That question is the hook for The Substance (2024), a shocking story written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, who turned down directing The Black Widow to make this dark gem instead. Universal Pictures was set to distribute the film, but lost its nerve after executives at a test screening found the ending “disgusting,” and Fargeat refused to change it. Universal sold it like a hot potato to MUBI, only to see The Substance win a prize at Cannes, rake in $77 million at the box office worldwide, and garner Oscar nominations for best picture, best directing, best writing, and best actress (Demi Moore), with a win for best make-up and hairstyling. The prosthetics and practical effects were nauseatingly good.
Apparently disgusting and appealing aren’t opposites after all.
I knew from the trailer alone that this film would afford novel insights, but what I didn’t know going in was how much lithe booty and bloody gore I’d have to endure to reach those insights. The trailer doesn’t give away the high cost of entry for a tender conscience, and I hadn’t read any reviews or warnings prior to watching (note to self). If I had known in advance that this was soft porn body horror—a “blood-and-neon drenched spectacle”—I would have skipped the screen and gone straight for the written analysis. Not every provocative work of art is worth the moral injury. I’m writing this article in part for myself (to think it through) and in part for anyone else who’s curious and open to the challenge such cinema poses, but is hesitant to press “Play”—for very good reasons.
My husband and I watched The Substance together. Or rather, we watched the beginning together. I watched the middle while he closed his eyes and I narrated (“Sue is prancing around the apartment in her underwear, again. Sue is twerking for the camera, again.”), and then he narrated the end for me as I hid under a blanket (“The monster’s arm broke off. She’s spewing blood over the audience like a firehose.”) Admittedly, it’s not my favorite way to “watch” a movie. But we were in for a penny, in for a pound, so we split the difference.
Now’s the time to pause on this article and return to it later if you want to risk watching The Substance (with surprises intact).
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
Elisabeth’s desire for a better version of herself was natural, but she was mistaken in thinking that what needed to be changed was flesh and bone.
The Substance is a story about the flesh and bone of women’s bodies. It’s about aging. About becoming invisible. About self-loathing. About loneliness. About watching yourself transform from maiden to crone. It’s a story that could almost work as a silent film, so stark are its symbols, and so skilled are Fargeat and Moore at showing us what it’s like for a woman to lose her “Pretty Young Thing” status, that telling us isn’t necessary.
Actress Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), once the toast of the town, is now fading into obscurity and irrelevance as an aging aerobics instructor for a daytime TV show. A producer named Harvey (Dennis Quaid) fires Elisabeth on her birthday for being foolish enough to turn fifty in Tinseltown. “I have to give people what they want,” Harvey shrugs while stuffing his face with shrimp, “And people always ask for something new. Renewal is inevitable, and at fifty, well… it stops.”
Elisabeth is not in a good position to cope with the inevitability of aging or the cruel standards of Hollywood. She lives alone: no husband or boyfriend, no children, no extended family, no friends. She hardly speaks at all because there’s no one in her life to talk to. The face she sees most often is her own: on billboards around town, on giant posters in the hallway of the studio and in her own apartment, but most especially in the mirror. The shame, disgust, fear, grief, and rage that Demi Moore conveys with her eyes alone in these mirror shots is probably what won her the Golden Globe.
The saddest and in some ways most disturbing moment in the film is a common and highly relatable scene: primping for a date. When Elisabeth bumps into an old high school classmate named Fred—the epitome of awkward, starstruck sweetness—he gives her his number. In desperation for some kind of human connection, she calls him, and they make plans to meet for dinner.
We see Elisabeth in front of her mirror applying make-up and doing her hair. Every time she tries to leave for the restaurant, she’s drawn back to the mirror again as if she were cursed: tweaking, adding, plumping, re-applying, scrutinizing, judging, hating. She’s not pretty enough to leave the house. The one person in the whole story who takes a genuine interest in her—frumpy Fred who addresses her with her childhood name of “Lizzie” and blurts out, “You’re still the most beautiful girl in the whole world!”—is stood up by Elisabeth’s own self-hatred. Instead of spending her evening looking into Fred’s eyes and connecting, she spends a miserable night alone. The YouTube comments below this clip in the film are telling:
- This scene made me cry. I remember hating myself this much.
- This was the most horrifying scene in the whole movie (for me).
- Isn’t this how we all feel when we look in the mirror as we age, it’s difficult young ladies.
Into this personal pit of despair enters the possibility of a happier future, a more lovable self, a version that is worthy of walking out the front door. A stranger slips Elisabeth some information about a miracle drug, “the substance,” which promises to provide users with a younger, more beautiful, more perfect version of themselves. In a moment reminiscent of Victorian “split self” narratives like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (a chemically-induced transformation) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (a Faustian bargain for eternal youth and beauty), Elisabeth injects herself with a one-use-only activator serum, and waits for a renewed self to emerge.
The visuals evoke similarities to increasingly popular real-life injections that likewise promise “a better version” of you: Ozempic for the thin version of you, Botox for the young version of you, and cross-sex hormones for the transgender version of you. While our non-fictional drugs of choice may take weeks or months to craft our dream bodies, the effect of the substance is immediate.
Elisabeth “births” a full-grown Forever 21 version of herself, Alien-style, out of the unzipping skin of her back, while writhing on the bathroom floor. She remains inert as her beautiful Snow White self gazes at her own reflection. The two versions begin sharing one life: each gets seven days “on” while the other sleeps. The young version must extract stabilizer fluid from the original Elisabeth’s spine and inject herself with it to stay alive and functional. They must trade places every seven days on the dot, or Cinderella’s coach will turn back into a pumpkin: they are physically dependent on one another to survive (as the substance’s instructions insist, “Remember, you are one”). They must maintain the balance or things will spiral out of control.
You know where this is going.
“Old! Fat! Disgusting!”
Our culture prides itself on replacing opportunities to cultivate virtue with triumphs of scientific technique and purchasable products.
Harvey is delighted to find a perky, pretty girl to replace Elisabeth for a new sexed-up version of her fitness show. Gone are the Jane Fonda vibes: this is “Pump it Up!” with Sue (Margaret Qualley), the perfected version of the sagging Ms. Sparkle. Sue loves her L.A. life so much, she begins stealing time and extra stabilizer from Elisabeth, upending the balance between them and causing Elisabeth’s body to age rapidly. The more Sue steals her life and “pumps it up” at Elisabeth’s expense, the faster the original turns into a hag. The witchified Elisabeth becomes a bitter binge-eating couch potato, leaving half-eaten junk food and trash strewn around the apartment for Sue (in her skimpy underwear) to clean up before bringing a man home. The physical deterioration of Elisabeth into Quasimodo is mirrored in Sue’s moral deterioration into an entitled primadona, as her selfishness and arrogance explode into rage: “Old! Fat! Disgusting!” she shrieks as she surveys the mess Elisabeth has left behind. “CONTROL YOURSELF!!!”
Sue decides to stay awake and center-stage as long as she can, draining Elisabeth dry for three months. When there isn’t a single drop of stabilizer left to keep her alive, Sue switches places, and the unrecognizable horror of the person formerly known as Elisabeth decides to finally pull the plug on this sick experiment by killing Sue. The two sides of this one woman end up in a viciously bloody fight, until Sue finally kicks Elizabeth to death (thus dooming herself) in the most shocking scene symbolic of self-loathing that I’ve ever witnessed. In desperation and quite literally falling apart (she’s losing teeth, fingernails, ears), Sue breaks the rules of “safe” substance use yet again, and takes an activator dose herself.
From this point on, the gore is unspeakable. Sue becomes a grotesque monster with body parts sticking out of the wrong places, and with a gaping face of Elisabeth croaking out of her back, as though the two were put together in a blender. This “Monstro Elisasue” somewhat inexplicably waddles to the studio just in time for the live New Year’s Special that Sue was set to host. Despite the monster’s insistence—“It’s still me, it’s Sue!”—the horrified and disgusted studio audience attacks her. She drenches them in gallons of her own blood as she becomes unhinged and runs away, only to trip and explode all over the sidewalk. Elisabeth Sparkle’s face, now detached from the monster, squelches its way towards her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame a few feet away, and melts into it. The bloodstain is washed away by a street sweeper.
Medical Solutions for Metaphysical Longings
The entire arc of The Substance shows us suicide-by-selfie.
Such is the fate not of women who dare to grow old in public (that’s going to be all of us, ladies), but of women whose obsessive self-regard drives them to seek a material solution for a spiritual problem.
Elisabeth did indeed require a better version of herself—renewed, more beautiful, more perfect. But the new self she needed wasn’t Sue. She needed a self that could forget herself long enough to feel love for someone else. She needed new eyes that looked not into the mirror with scrutiny but deeply into the eyes of another, unashamed to form crow’s feet when smiling. She needed a self that accepted her own mortality, that could cope with suffering—a self clothed with strength and dignity that could laugh without fear of the future (Prov. 31:25). She needed to stop living for the eye of the camera, and start living with and for other human beings. She needed a self that wasn’t a picture but a person.
Elisabeth’s desire for a better version of herself was natural, but she was mistaken in thinking that what needed to be changed was flesh and bone. She took a metaphysical longing and made it medical: instead of insight, she reached for an injection, short-circuiting the possibility of moral renewal. But those facing the latter half of life don’t need a path to becoming a PYT again: they need a path to becoming a sage and a saint—someone who lets suffering and loss orient them away from self-absorption and towards wisdom and love. But our culture prides itself on replacing opportunities to cultivate virtue with triumphs of scientific technique and purchasable products. It’s good for business to groom a consumer base into feelings of self-loathing.
After all those years of being seen and recorded by the camera, Elisabeth internalized the lens. She turned that lens on herself in the mirror and became her own worst enemy, embodied in Sue. Being fired from the industry could have been the best thing that ever happened to her, a chance to be free from scrutiny, judgment, and performance anxiety—a chance to finally take her eyes off herself and focus on someone else. But she craved the adoration and attention of the silver screen, and it killed her. It’s not so much that Hollywood is the bad guy here (though its avatar Harvey is truly vomitous). Rather, Elisabeth/Sue brought this on herself by participating—like an addict—in her own objectification.
We are used to thinking of narcissists as those who hurt others through their inordinate self-love, but the tale of Narcissus is derived from the ancient Greek superstition that it is unlucky—even fatal—to see your own reflection. The Substance shows us that the moral curse of being tethered to your own reflection doesn’t have to mean believing you’re the best: it can also mean believing you’re the worst. The point isn’t how you feel when you stare at yourself, it’s simply the act of staring at yourself that matters.
The entire arc of The Substance shows us suicide-by-selfie.
Females in Action vs. Passive Pictures
The proverbial measuring stick, the camera lens, the mirror—these are common tools women use to inflict self-harm.
For the past five years I’ve gathered with local women to exercise as a chapter of the national group FiA (Females in Action). It’s a free, always outside, all weather, all women, peer-led fitness group. None of us are professionals, but we take turns creating and leading workouts. The median age is forty-two-ish, but we’ve got a few twenty-somethings in there, and those in their fifties and sixties get extra respect. We gossip, groan, and give advice while pumping it up—rain or shine—in a public park. We work out in a circle: plenty of sweat and chatter, but no recordings. We exercise together to stay healthy, to keep each other company, to get a break from the fam, to laugh, to stay grounded, and to justify going out for coffee afterwards.
We come in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and ages, but the friendships formed in FiA are rooted in our common female embodiment. These women have taught me that the body is for doing things not merely for being seen. They taught me the body is worth taking care of, but that it’s also good to laugh at it sometimes. They taught me to work my body hard but also to modify as needed, because stuff starts hurting randomly when you turn forty, and you’ve got to have some TLC for a bad back or a bum knee. They taught me the only selfie worth taking is the group shot at the end of the workout which proves you showed up and in which everyone looks their worst (and which is posted on a private Slack channel, not publicly on Facebook). Being around other quirkily nicknamed women when you’re at your sweatiest, with unwashed hair and smelly, disintegrating yoga mats, enjoying the workout music, with zero competitive spirit, no money involved, and no men in sight, is a balm for my body and soul.
If only Elisabeth had a FiA chapter to love on her instead of a fitness show to film for a fickle audience. Demi Moore acknowledged her own struggle with “those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough, or skinny enough or successful enough, or basically just not enough.” But another woman told her the truth she needed to hear: “Just know, you will never be enough. But you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.” It’s hard to believe that a woman who believably plays a fifty-year-old on screen but is sixty-two in real life struggles with comparing herself to others. But that just shows how the problem isn’t generated by an objective beauty standard—it’s rooted in a subjective inner critic.
The proverbial measuring stick, the camera lens, the mirror—these are common tools women use to inflict self-harm. Tools are not morally neutral things: iPhone cameras and mirrors frame you and flatten you; they turn you into an image for comparison and consumption. For most of human history, nobody looked at themselves frequently because we didn’t have the tools to do so. Mirrors didn’t become common and affordable until the mid-1800s. The first non-professional popular camera didn’t appear until 1900; the instant Polaroid arrived in 1948. But the real revolution came in 2007 with the iPhone and the advent of social media platforms which seemed like digital public scrapbooks on which anyone and everyone could comment.
Our sense of what is “normal” when it comes to self-images is historically short-sighted. Selfie and posting behaviors, as common and ubiquitous as they’ve become, are unprecedented, morally deforming, and dangerous, especially for young women and girls. It’s one thing to actually be a Hollywood star and face rejection from a boss like Harvey because your very livelihood depends on your youthfulness. It’s another thing entirely to be a normie but to carry an imitation of Hollywood exposure and Harvey-esque rejection around in your own pocket and willingly play the game.
What Is Your Body For?
If our takeaway from The Substance is yet another lament about Hollywood’s impossible beauty standards for women, then we’ve let ourselves off the hook.
According to Laura Mallonee in her Wired article “The Great I AM. Your iPhone Photos Are You,” the fact that the world uploads 1.8 billion photos each day communicates that the body is for images; the body is for representation. If we do not make a public display of ourselves, we might as well be invisible. Without a picture to prove it, we are nobodies (no bodies): “If it’s not on Insta, it didn’t even happen,” says one mother addicted to posting family vacation shots online.
Welcome to “Our Cameras, Our Selves.”
I just googled “taking selfies” and nearly every image that popped up is of girls and women smiling at images of themselves they’re creating on their own phones. Apparently, the average millennial will take around 25,700 selfies throughout their lifetime, and women take more selfies than men. We mamas aren’t off the hook here for posting pics of our kids instead: Elisabeth was initially happy to let Sue take her place on the screen, since she viewed Sue as the best part of herself (and Sue was “born” from her body after all). A charitable interpretation of mommy-posting is that it’s a way to take the invisible (to the public) joys and sorrows of parenting and make them visible: it’s a way of saying “parenting is real work and it counts” to a culture that sees motherhood as low status. But there’s a shadow side to this: pictures of children can function as digital extensions of a mother’s body and sense of self. If you curate your children’s images online, you may be offering them up for your personal benefit. Over a third of American children begin their digital footprint while in utero as unwilling subjects of sharenting. All that youth and beauty might belong to her children, but if mama is the one posting, mama gets the likes.
Social media selfies are not actually like your grandmother’s scrapbooks—that’s a deceptive analogy. The value of private keepsakes as an aid to personal memory does not carry over to public self-exposure and solicitation for attention. I personally love receiving photos from my friends by text (even selfies!), but a photo posted on a Facebook wall or an Instagram feed isn’t the same. The first is a gift, a relational bid, much more like giving someone a printed photo for their fridge. The latter is displayed for everyone, which means it’s not for/to anyone in particular (and a gift is always given to someone). Regular public posting of our bodies-as-images turns us into billboards. If you curate your images as content for someone else’s “feed,” you are turning yourself into consumable digital food for someone else’s visual appetite.
We add our avatars to a line-up which someone else will flick past with their thumb. You (and your children) are worth more than that. Rather than capturing your “best side” and using filters to Facetune your flaws away, you can relearn how to engage with the reality of your mortal, aging body by putting it to good use for the benefit of others.
And so, dear [sisters], I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you… Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think (Rom. 12:1-2, NLT).
If our takeaway from The Substance is yet another lament about Hollywood’s impossible beauty standards for women, then we’ve let ourselves off the hook. The scariest part of the movie isn’t the all-seeing eye of the studio camera that records and disseminates and judges: it’s the way the studio’s eye becomes Elisabeth’s eye through the medium of the mirror. It’s the way she allowed that eye to hollow herself out, to disembody her, to flatten her into nothing but a formerly pretty face with no life, no family, no friends, and no meaningful actions and life choices to speak of. She became nothing but the echo of past praise. Like Tinkerbell, she could only exist if audiences believed in her beauty and clapped for her; if they stopped paying attention, she would disappear.
Elisabeth’s belief in the necessity of an audience is what made her vulnerable to the idea that an injection could deliver her from the very human task each of us is called to: to learn the art of suffering, aging, and dying. Philosopher and Catholic priest Ivan Illich wrote in his book Limits to Medicine that in an intensely industrialized society like ours, “people are conditioned to get things rather than to do them; they are trained to value what can be purchased rather than what they themselves can create. They want to be taught, moved, treated, or guided rather than to learn, to heal, and to find their own way.” What if we thought of aging less as a threatening, personal insult and more as a spiritual challenge—a chance to come to terms with realities that are easy to ignore when we’re young?
I had a conversation with my teenage daughter the other day about aging. I told her I wanted to look recognizably older as the years go by. I’m earning these gray hairs—they are my “crown of glory” (Prov. 16:31), and the slow weathering of my face means I have accumulated experiences which have made me wiser. Wrinkles and silver locks are evidence of my many times around the sun, and I don’t want to hide the evidence. I admire actress, director, and author Justine Bateman’s confidence: she eschews cosmetic procedures because they would erase the authority she’s gained over the years. “I like the feeling that I am a different person now than I was when I was twenty. I like looking in the mirror and seeing that evidence. …I think my face represents who I am. I like it.”
So do I. Such a face can reveal a woman’s stature, much like a tree’s height and girth reveals how long it’s been around, how deep its roots go, how implacably it has withstood the test of time and the contingencies of life. Why would we hide the evidence of such steadfastness and experience? As Bateman asks, why do we believe that women’s faces get broken over time and need fixing? What if my face is just fine, and what’s broken is a society that is disgusted by the appearance of the hard-earned female authority that comes with maturity and suffering? A society that fetishizes the perpetual maiden (e.g., Sex and the City), ignores or pities mothers (e.g., Chappell Roan), and feels repulsed by confident matriarchs (witch, b*tch, Karen, crone) is spiritually sick.
Get Out!
The Substance is a scream for deliverance from the prison of self.
I don’t care about wrinkles, but I do want to steward my body well. I want to remain fit as I age, to have good posture, to have strong muscles and bones from lifting weights, to have a healthy heart and lungs from exercise, to avoid injury and be capable and useful for as long as I can be. There are many things I still want to do as I age, people I want to love. I hope I have the privilege of being a grandmother someday, with the energy to get down on the floor to play with little ones. (And be able to get back up again!)
I know that life is full of unavoidable suffering and loss. I know I will grow old and die. But I also know that although “outwardly [I am] wasting away, yet inwardly [I am] being renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16). Harvey is dead wrong that renewal stops at fifty; that’s when it’s just getting started. The psychologist Carl Jung believed that life really begins at forty, and that we can’t live “the afternoon of life” according to the program and values of “life’s morning.” It can be difficult to fear the Lord and fix your eyes on things unseen before being forced to face the personal reality that “beauty is fleeting” (Prov. 31:30). It’s often coming face to face with deterioration, pain, grief, and the inevitability of physical death that reminds us what we truly have to fear—not aging and supposed irrelevance, but what Cardinal Ratzinger called “the prison of self” and “the incapacity to love and make a gift of oneself” that is a form of spiritual death.
So what is your body for? The answer is a phrase which Christians the world over hear every single Sunday. “This is my body, given for you” (Luke 22:19). The body is meant to be given as a gift of love. The longer you look at yourself in a mirror or in a photo, the more you curate your online persona, the more you attempt to renew your outward appearance rather than your inner heart, then the more self-absorbed you become, and the less present you are to the people around you and to the God who made you. Self-obsession and self-gift can’t co-exist.
The Substance, like other well-crafted horror movies, generates that rising sense of panic which makes us holler at the heroine to “Get out!” before it’s too late. Not to escape from a monster or a killer or a natural disaster, but rather, to escape from the navel-gazing version of ourselves. The Substance is a scream for deliverance from the prison of self.
