The Substance Coralie Fargeat (USA;2024)
The Substance Coralie Fargeat (USA;2024) Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley
viewed Tyneside Cinema 28 Sept 2024; ticket: £12.25
live by the image die by the image.
Coralie Fergeat’s ‘The Substance’ derives from a Dr Hyde and Mr Jackel structured script with good and evil retained as an underlying register but formally transposed into today’s trope: young and the old.
Image: the film is about image. It picks up and reflects back certain core social psychic elements that affect the way we experience and re-act to contemprary conditions of our lives. Image.
‘The Substance’ is a latex wonderland overlaid with digital FX. Most of the effects have appeared before in other latex fantasias – films by David Cronenburg come to mind. Fergeat’s movie is described as a satire but it’s a particular form of satire, a parody of physical body horror using the effect of gross exaggeration to expose the absurdity of aspects of contemporary America.
Fergeat and some commentators suggest that folded into the layers of flesh that characterise the movie’s special effects there is a feminist issue; a core concern with the way in which women in Western society are judged by their looks. oHow ageing in women as they lose the bloom of youth, affects their identity self esteem confidence and ability to get work. Cue the burgeoning billion dollar industry geared up to produce all sorts of forever young products: creams applications injectable face lifts and other surgical interventions to prevent wrinkles, hard skin cellulous etc. But the appeal of ‘The Substance’ goes wider into the experience of living in today’s image dominated environment than concerns that are specifically feminist.
In some respects Fergeat’s claim for a feminist angle looks ingenuous. Sparkle – the protagonist – is the script’s exemplar. (whether she is one or two) In the script Sparkle’s aging results in her losing her show. (This never seemed to be a problem for Jane Fonda) But setting the script in the privileged razzle dazell of Tv culture effectively removes it from the real world. The script might insist Sparkle’s an ordinary sort of person but the viewers know she inhabits a world removed from the everyday. She is no gal next door. The full on body sex dance workouts that Sparkle fronts are pure projections of her image as a celebrity, and celebrity status overrides age. Celebrity exerts a protective influence over aging, but ‘The Substance’s script demands a human sacrifice, and Sparkle fits the bill on this count.
Sparkle’s dilemma such as it is, simply works as a pretext for the substance of the movie. The spectacle of a full on body fest of bone blood fluids open wounds that makes up the rest of the movie. The body as a horror show the body as a site of rotting flesh. The body projected as an image of decaying matter.
My feeling is the motivation to produce and to receive movies such as ‘The Substance’ is linked to the pervasive images of perfection that range across the entire spectrum of American and Western life. We have moved out of the Christian ethos which stresses innate human imperfection in relation to God, into another moral zone: the market capitalist ethos whose pitch is that we are all or can be perfect beings.
Fashion advertising even public information all project a world in which social images are almost entiraly made up people of perfection. The smile the teeth the relaxed demeanour the presentation of ease with self is what we see. This idealisation of perfection has moved out of the commercial industrial into everyday practtice on the internet: projecting self image is a central feature of people’s on-line presence. Users cannot only talk themselves up but now employ quick picture edit tech to project images of themselves on platforms such as Tiktok. The governing imperative is to: airbrush out the warts and present a smooth blemish free image.
To conform to the pervasive presentatoin of image perfection has become a source of significant social pressure. But this provokes re-action, to oppose of the image idealisation of body relations with another idea: the damaged smashed up body as the countertype. The wounded body presented as an act of rejection of the objectification of the body.
My thinking is that the audience for films such as ‘The Substance’ are those who feel unhappy with or hostile towards the overwhelming pervasive effects of image in our society. Going to and enjoying body horror movies is an enjoyable form of protest to the omnipresence of image perfection. ‘The Substance’ is not a particularly good film, its repetitive derivative and arbitrarily amoral. But as a commercial statement it’s part of the psychic opposition to our ‘image’ society.
I suppose this is just one way of thinking about “The Substance’. But it seems to me that one the characteristics of film in popular culture is how to a greater or lesser extent either directly or indirectly it feeds and picks up on significant themes coursing through the social matrix. Film (and other forms of expression) working either consciously or more or less unconsciously, reflecting on hopes anxieties fears dreams acquiescence protest, giving them expressive realisation in the form of entertainment.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk