It is 8:15pm Friday night, the 1st November 2024 and I have just set foot at home after seeing The Substance at the cinema.

Wow.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Written and Directed by french Filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, who you might also know from the 2017 Rape & Revenge film literally titled Revenge (sidebar – do check that out too), anyway. The Substance is unapologetically feminist, angry, hilarious, shocking and most importantly. Entertaining.

***NO SPOILERS IN THIS ARTICLE BELIEVE IT OR NOT***

What is the Substance?

I love movies where people body swap, and in fact my previous post on this site was for a film called Melanin where a white man takes an injectable substance and becomes a black man. But in this film, the result of taking the substance is a younger, better version of YOU. How alluring. I mean there is billion dollar industries already thriving based on this fact. Women are dying to be better versions of themselves quite literally. Going under the knife for plastic surgery, or what I like to call, assault with a deadly weapon. The fact is women are constantly bombarded with images and video of young, thin, white and beautiful girls and women. It is almost like living in a sci-fi movie when you see a thin white blonde woman playing the fat and unattractive girl in a movie because, Goddess knows, they would never actually cast a fat and unattractive woman to play that part. In movies where men come in all shapes and sizes, and most importantly, Ages, women are relegated to a sea of never ending 20-somethings, a world on film in which women do not age, and if they do, it is depicted as horror.

And here we are, another horror movie about women aging. Or is it?

Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a star. A human female star. So she is therefore beholden to rules outside of humanity, rules like, Don’t age. And if you break that rule, like all women are destined to, you need to leave.

What if though, women still want to live? What if women don’t stop being human just because men stop seeing her beauty? What if beauty isn’t the price women need to pay to participate in life? I am personally frustrated by this because I am such a huge fan of Madonna, and I see this mentality surrounding Madonna all the time. Madonna is an artist. A dancer. A musician. And a woman. If she was a man, people woudn’t be telling her to go away now. And I talk about Madonna’s artistry all the time, and i’m met with “OH, i loved her music in the 80’s”. I ask “Have you listened to her later stuff?” “Have you listened to Hard Candy? MDNA? Rebel Heart? Hell. Have you listened to Ray of Light?. I’m often met with blank stares as commercial radio plays Borderline for the 50 millionth time.

I”m going off on a tangent but what The Substance is talking about is a very real and very unfair phenomenon where there is this male defined cut off point, where women need to disappear. The overwhelming power of the male gaze is such that women get defined by what men find valuable about women, and so far that is looks. And Elisabeth Sparkle is no different. Randy Quaid plays producer Harvey, a man who gets to age, wrinkle, eat and slurp disgusting prawns and basically, his humanity is a given. And Harvey wants to replace Elisabeth. He wants someone young, and Elisabeth overhears him.

Why can’t Women age?

Elisabeth also sees an ad in the paper for her replacement. Women aged 18-30 only. This age 30 cut off is so ubiquitous as a woman, I can recall turning 30 and also coaching female friends as they approached that awful cut-off age. As a now 41 year old. I laugh. I see it now as another patriarchal attack on women’s humanity and women’s sense of self that we are taught to dread turning THIRTY. It’s like cussing out a baby for being old. It’s ridiculous. Yet in this sci-fi existence of only twenty something pop-starlets, only twenty something models, only twenty something actresses, all of the visibility for women is in that twenty something range so we don’t even KNOW what thirty looks like. It turns out it looks like this;

So Elisabeth Sparkle takes the substance.

And a new and younger version of herself now exists. I was concerned for the gore here and I have to say, this part is not too bad. Stressful, yeah, but not as gory as the hype would have you believe. This is where I started feeling real bad about myself. In the movie, we are shown as Sue, Elisabeth’s new “me”, takes on the role of fitness trainer and we are shown a montage of extreme close ups of her body as her and the back up dancers engage in a routine that appears overtly sexualised and could be lifted off the stage of strip club.

Every single inch of Sue is perfect.

I started to wonder when the “Accept yourself” message of this film would kick in because at this point, I was being treated to gratuitous close ups of an utterly perfect young women and all I felt was “Not good enough.” It’s a feeling I know well. Just the other day I was trying to read about the US election and in the middle of the article was a cartoon-like advertisement telling me how I too could get rid of my cellulite, if only I would click right there. I tried to report the ad as I felt it was A) Poorly drawn and B) highly inappropriate but clicking on the ad to try and report it only got me to the next sales screen. I looked for a way but soon gave up and tried scrolling downwards, continuing on reading, only to have the ad attacking MY FEMALE BODY scroll down right along with me.

I drive down the highway to work. Oh look, its a swimsuit company and once again I am confronted with a perfectly tight, twenty something year old woman. I’m not saying to be a young and beautiful woman is bad. I am saying however that the male gaze overwhelms us all culturally and it is a constant psychological attack on women’s bodies. On my body. As a woman.

The urge to overwhelm women into believing we are not good enough is a highly profitable campaign. If we are not good enough, we will buy something that makes us better. If we are ugly, we can buy beauty. If we are overweight, we can buy thinness. If we are wrinkly, we can buy youth. But in this world, image reigns supreme and the target is women. Men get to dress the same, men get to wear the same clothes as each other, day in day out, and men get to age. Men are the lookers, and women are the looked upon. And most importantly, if women don’t have any self esteem, we won’t ask for better treatment. We won’t fight back or demand higher wages, or demand pay at all, because you know. Women are worthless. Or at least that what patriarchy wants you to believe.

But wait, there’s more!

Okay so this has turned more into a rant about how constantly attacked in my body I feel, and less about the movie. But there is a reason for it. You know that pesky thing, sexism? Well. It’s an all out assault on women. And it is targeted at our Female Bodies.

From birth, no, from BEFORE birth, if some people even find out the fetus is female, we get discarded. We get aborted. Next is childhood, if you are lucky enough to get born, then you suffer from being a little girl in a world where little girls are snatched up by grown men for rape, or marriage, and if you are lucky enough to never have that happen to you, well then it just happens to your friends. Or your neighbour. Or your sister. Or your mother. And then if you grow into a teenage girl, you get told by advertising, your peers, your parents, or your boyfriend, that you are too fat actually, And can you get rid of that hair? Why aren’t you thin like the other girls? Or how about you just stop eating? You better blossom into something beautiful. And then if you survive into twenty-year something, and don’t have an eating disorder, and haven’t been raped…yet, now you get to stress about aging. You get to work in environments where you don’t get listened to or noticed for promotion. You get to navigate healthcare and get told to lose weight or it’s all in your head, because remember, you exist in a female body. Oh and also in your twenties, you have to remember that these are the best years of your life. Better get married. Better have kids. Better not waste your youth and beauty because this is it. You get 15 years maximum to be the right age. And then, if you have reached 50 and you haven’t been raped, you’ve never been sexually assaulted, you’ve never had someone tell you outright to your face that your body is wrong, and you haven’t got an eating disorder, well, I tell you what. No such woman exists. Not on this planet.

So The Substance has a catch. It’s 7 days on. 7 days off. 7 Days of being young and perfect. 7 Days of being You.

And what’s going to happen when you have to deal with being YOU.

Here is where I don’t give any more away.

Coralie Fargeat inserts some blink and you miss it moments that I revelled in. In one elevator scene, a distressed Sue is having a hard time, and a man gets on the elevator, chats to her, completely oblivious to her distress, and then hops back off the elevator, none the wiser. I think this moment really encapsulates an important point regarding the male gaze. Men might be looking. But they don’t see us. They don’t actually see women for the human beings we are. I laughed out loud quite strongly at this amazing little mini-point sat amongst many many big points.

But how do you feel about your body after watching this?

I’ll tell you the truth. I bought a bag of Maltesers, AND a bag of Twisties into the film. I was nervous about the rumours of Gore and couldn’t decide between sweet or salty so I picked both. And I ate both too. I have been feeling pretty bad about my body lately, that low level disappointment had swung into a higher level disappointment as my eating habits go unmonitored and unrestrained and has me feeling bloated, heavy, and a strong sense of failure as a woman. But I tell you what? I leave the cinema after watching the Substance feeling beautiful.

How? How Camilla? You went from looking at Sue and feeling bad to walking out of the cinema and feeling beautiful. Well. You’ll have to see for yourself. Thank you Coralie Fargeat. This is a movie like no other and an important entry into the feminist film lexicon.