I can’t stop my face. I even have been this fashion for so long as I can recall.
In my small-town American highschool, I used to be voted ‘Most Prone to Be Caught Looking within the Mirror,’ by my graduating class. It’s funny, and just a little embarrassing, nevertheless it’s accurate. To this present day, I even have a mirrored phone case to ascertain my lipstick, my skin, my hair. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed small changes, crinkles, tiredness that’s more apparent and everlasting than it was before. So should you’re like me, you begin to take into consideration injectables. In case you’re like me, you get them periodically, to mixed reactions from family and friends. In case you’re like me, you don’t really need to stop.
Elisabeth Sparkle, the protagonist of Coralie Fargeat’s latest feminist body horror film The Substance, knows a thing or two about this habit of self-monitoring into oblivion. She spends quite a lot of time obsessing about her appearance, to the detriment of nearly every other priority in her life. The world round her tells her she should care, nevertheless it’s greater than that: the decision is coming from contained in the house. Played by Demi Moore, as an Oscar-winning actress now aged into obsolescence in a cruelly patriarchal show-biz world, Elisabeth works tirelessly on a television fitness programme for middle-aged women. But she’s hit 50, and he or she’s going to get replaced by a bouncier, shinier version of herself. And so Elisabeth tries a mysterious, too-good-to-be-true, experimental beauty treatment often called the Substance, which allows a young, hot version of yourself to live your life for seven days, after which point you have to swap out again.
There’s a way this can be a reckless selection; the origin of the product is murky, its HQ in some dingy downtown basement, its color a vicious neon green. And, not by accident, it’s administered via injection. The incontrovertible fact that the actual advantages of this treatment seem scarce, or like a little bit of a scam, is hardly a coincidence; while Sue (Margaret Qualley, playing Elisabeth’s youthful avatar) takes the wheel, Elisabeth only seems to get the shadow of her younger version’s experience. It leaves her tantalisingly close, pressing her face against the window right into a more perfect self, and it slowly drives her mad with envy.
Many ladies – including younger ones than Moore’s character – have knowingly ignored risk to health, mental wellness, and even life to try a latest and promising beauty tweak. Beauty has its own form of power, in spite of everything, and should you’ve relied on it for long enough, feeling any lack of that power is critical. What The Substance underscores is how addictive – how dangerous – this impetus to maintain ‘fixing’ imaginary flaws really is. Even when Sue is plunging a needle into an infected wound for her own gain, destroying what’s left of Elisabeth’s body and life, Elisabeth cannot appear to put an end to the method. She’s too caught up within the hope she might finally find perfection.
Critiques of The Substance have often referenced its emptiness – a frustrating lack of depth in its characters and their motivations. It’s my contention that the superficiality is precisely the purpose. It’s a warning. Have a look at the production design of Elisabeth’s luxury LA flat. An unlimited photograph of her, firm-thighed in unforgiving latex, smooth as a dolphin, with sleek dark hair and an almost-plasticine perfect face, fills her lounge. There’s little else there of note; large picture windows, a settee, some dusty awards in a case. There are few signs of any inner life, any books, any paintings. The kitchen is tiny and the lavatory weirdly cavernous, vivid white like a laboratory. Appetites should be suppressed and bodily realities should be monitored and adjusted, in spite of everything. It isn’t ok, and requires constant and exhausting labour from morning to nighttime. Nonetheless, the body will proceed to age – it’ll sag, it’ll dimple, it’ll grow unwanted hair. Beauty treatments are not any longer self-care once you cannot reconcile with this fact; as a substitute, they will turn into self-harm.
After a few years of uneventful and well-received beauty injectables, my body began to revolt on a cellular level. I developed swelling, itching, and a painful allergic response which required all the product to be dissolved. My face was visibly patchy and asymmetrical. After which, like Elisabeth, I made a reckless selection: I went back and had a rather different treatment, taking a substantial and unwise risk in doing so. I couldn’t stand the concept of leaving well enough alone. So listen: when Elisabeth’s back literally rips open and the primary sight of her perfect, pert, youthful avatar pops fully formed from her body, I could have been horrified, but I could form of understand it.
After she saw the film, a friend of mine said to me: ‘That is for the girlies who’ve in some unspecified time in the future of their lives got so frustrated while preparing that they’ve hit themselves on the pinnacle with their hairbrush.’ I’m unsure I even have done that, but I immediately understood the impulse and knew I’d felt what drove it. The sense that regardless of the way you adjust your straps or reapply mascara, something is just not right; there’s a rage that comes from it. In a single scene, Elisabeth gets able to exit on a date with a nerdy friend who clearly adores her; she looks stunning in a red cocktail dress. But she cannot stop fixing her hair, picking at her appearance, comparing it to the plush image of 25-year-old, dewy-mouthed Sue. She overapplies her make-up. Then she gives up; she rubs it off and he or she doesn’t exit.
It’s comprehensible that some women viewers have come away finding the film’s messaging depressing, hopeful that a long time of feminism would make a girl like Elisabeth a relic of the old, bad days, or a movie about this subject stereotypical and rote in the way it presents the pressure of beauty standards. But so far as I can see, those standards remain pretty evergreen. Cyborgian make-up, undetectable filler, glass skin, TikTok ageism, AI beauty contests; these trends all underline the identical desire for thinness, femininity, conformity and symmetry of features, only increasingly augmented by tech innovation and capitalist hunger. We’re more flooded with images of perfection (a la Fargeat’s wilfully distasteful, music-video leering at Sue), bombarded with the normality of aesthetic treatments, and faced with the extra pressure of opting out, as a superb feminist. That’s before you consider the fear of something going flawed, and it often does – everlasting bumps or overdone lips which bleed and burst. And also you’re sure to be judged for that, too.
Granted, my experience with injectables didn’t turn me right into a slimy blood and teeth-spewing mutant à la Elisabeth and Sue. But Fargeat’s cautionary tale is sufficient to scare an individual straight. The urge to win an unwinnable battle against the vicissitudes of age is what drives the protagonist of The Substance to doom. Ultimately, she remains to be trying to straighten her hair within the mirror when she has an additional eyeball growing out of her back. The vicious cycle of taming and glossing and streamlining the feminine body is neverending, and so Fargeat chooses to finish with its opposite. There’s a form of retributive, violent expulsion of bodily fluid that brings the reality of the human body to a kamikaze conclusion. It’s disgusting, because we’re all disgusting, with wrinkles and spots and cellulite, and thank god for it. The choice is an empty luxury apartment. A picket hairbrush-to-the-head. A pointy needle within the spine. Or a foreign body in your face, seeping underneath your skin, making you itch. What may very well be more of a horror than that?
