Long Live The Old Flesh
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance goes looking for the soul and finds only turkey legs and blood sausage.
These days, Naomi Wolf may be reviled as an over-the-hill conspiracy theorist, but in 1991 everything was different. She was young and vivacious, not to mention the author of the best-selling The Beauty Myth, a seminal text of third-wave feminism. The thesis of the book, while controversial at the time, quickly became doxa within feminist ideology. As women gained political and social power, the thesis maintained, reactionary forces within society used airbrushed and cosmetically altered images of women in fashion magazines, movies and television shows to burden regular women with impossible-to-meet beauty standards. The beauty myth was a war on women’s self-esteem, and as long as women continued to buy into it they hampered the struggle for sexual equality.
The Substance, the new release from writer and director Coralie Fargeat, begins as a grotesque recapitulation of Wolf’s thesis, and if you are satisfied with reading the film as a satire of the insane lengths women will go to meet the beauty standards of a disembodied male gaze embedded within society the film will kindly reward you with musical cues from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the male gaze film par excellence.
Odds are, though, you won’t be able to leave it there. Something more is going on in the film. The film is suffused with an anachronistic atmosphere. For example, contemporary feminism has long left Wolf’s ideas behind. In the 2010s, feminism went through an embarrassing phase of commercialized popularity, wherein habits of self care, such as getting one’s nails done and “looking hot,” were supposed to be the highest form of female empowerment. I have used the word female advisedly here, leaning on the ironic sense in which Andrea Chu uses it, since contemporary feminism has incorporated trans rights into its ideological framework, thus jettisoning biological females as its sole locus of concern. Needless to say, this development has not been greeted enthusiastically by all feminists.
Joined with an moribund ideology is an aesthetic sensibility that is firmly stuck in the late 20th century. Why is the film’s protagonist, Elisabeth Sparkle (played by Demi Moore) doing jazzercise? In a world of Tiktoc and the Hawk tuah girl, how can Sparkle’s workout show be the hottest thing going? It makes no sense. The film seems to be purposely alienating the audience from the present day world. It is not that interested in issues, but in ideas.
In the late 20th century, artists and thinkers were obsessed with the idea that media images had so merged with the reality that they purported to represent that nobody could tell the difference between the two. The perfect example of this trend is David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983). In the world of this movie, you can fuck your TV. More frighteningly, it can fuck you back. The TV no longer merely stimulates desire. It itself desires, specifically merge with humanity to such an extent that it creates the “New Flesh.” The film presents the New Flesh as a form of transcendence. Depending on how you read the film, this transcendence may or may not be a negative one, but in any case it is presented as inevitable.
Videodrome has the distinction of actually predicting the future. Cronenberg, as well as Marshall McLuhan before him, saw that the telecommunications revolution could not be stopped from altering human nature. That has happened most intensely with our phones. Our phones are more than tools. They have merged with our limbic systems. They influence our emotions and construct our perceptions. As such, they are almost always with us. Without them, we feel naked and alone.
One way to read The Substance is as a reconsideration. What does it mean that Videodrome came true? The answer is not that inspiring. Nothing happened. The promised transcendence never arrived. We went online just to find out that we are bodies. Nothing but flesh.
Elisabeth Sparkle has the simplest desire. She wants to be loved for who she is. But who is she? She doesn’t know because she has grown old. She has changed. Therefore, she is not really a who. She is a what. She is a body.
She uses a black market technology to outwit this cosmically horrible reality, but it can’t be outwitted. She is a body. It is all she is. She is one with it. This fact is stressed to her over and over, but instead of accepting it she externalizes her anxiety. She begins cooking a lot of meat. Turkey legs. Blood sausage. She is an alchemist of flesh, trying to transmute the base metal into solid gold. She fails because, in reality, meat can only produce more meat. There is meat everywhere. It is multiplying. This is her ultimate fate: to become a monstrous multiplicity of meat.
The men in this movie are also meat, but their meat is not fetishized in the same way. The men are presented as ugly buffoons. They can salivate over the women’s bodies, but they must do it in the background. They have no subjectivity.
Which brings us to the big question that the film raises for me. Does Sparkle have subjectivity? Is her desire to be loved ultimately a mindless drive, a muscle spasm with a biological purpose to survive and propagate? Or can we ascribe to it a personhood? The film leans in both directions for dramatic effect, but it never really resolves the issue.
In this way, I consider this film to be evil. That’s a high compliment, I know, and I’ll have to revisit it after some time to see if my opinion still stands.
