to whatever extent that you hate yourself
on the malaise of becoming a hot girl (pt. 1)
In recent times I’ve been following a compulsion to erase myself to its natural ends. I largely don’t have a presence online lately, both for the obvious reasoning of “every social media platform’s owner is using their personal wealth & overwhelming influence of scale to try and encourage a genocide of people like me” and for a second, more personal grievance: “discourse”. We have stopped having conversations about art itself, and increasingly turned to having a conversation about the conversations being had about the thing. It drives me fucking crazy on a number of levels, including but not limited to:
Most of the people getting yelled at are literal teenagers who know their opinions suck or are not saying these things in good faith.1
Most of the things being talked about do not need this level of cyclical argument around them.
Most of the conversations being had cease to be about The Thing being discussed and then become a referendum about the people who do or don’t like that Thing, or even about the way said Thing is being talked about.2
Conversely to all this, I speak less. I try to focus on the parts of the world that I love first, and then consider that which deserves ire later, with a little less of my attention. I try to reserve stepping off of my perch on Hater Mountain for things which are not necessarily easy targets, but which I find necessary ones. The world does not need me to join the chorus of people willingly wasting two hours of their time on Emilia Perez.3 However, among its compatriots in the current Best Picture class, I immediately zeroed in on one with a reaction somewhere between (annoyed grunt) and exhausted sigh, with all the same hate as for Emilia and for shockingly similar reasons.
The Substance is the latest and largest theatrical release from the current golden child of the numerous boutique film companies trying to become lifestyle brands, MUBI. Their slate up to this point has been largely inoffensive4, but with The Substance, the little streamer that could seems all locked in to make the leap towards playing with the big boys. Before you’ve seen the movie, it makes a little bit of sense on paper. A metatextual film about stardom, with both the rising star of Margaret Qualley5 and the legacy cache of names like Demi Moore & Dennis Quaid? Yeah, of course Hollywood would go cuckoo bananas for that. The wrinkle lies in its particular genre leanings, with The Substance being an out-and-out body horror film that at first glance finds zero shame in its embrace of the genre. Even a few years ago, Titane couldn’t scrape the kind of respect accrued here in the US despite wholehearted embrace from every previous awards body. Yet, The Substance seemingly marks a shift towards embrace of the gross. Faces are melted, thousands of gallons of fake blood are spilled, teeth fall out. It’s undoubtedly the grossest film to ever receive a nomination for Best Picture6, and yet despite being a ride or die lover of any film which lets me see a heinous amount of bodily nightmares, I’ve maintained nothing but active contempt for it since before I’d even left the theater in September.
The Substance is a satire. This is the first detail mentioned about it in most contexts, and in principle, this isn’t even something I put as a fault against it. I love comedies that take very obvious & repetitive shots at their targets7 just as much as anything you could attribute “subtlety” to, but The Substance, from its first frames, seems deeply disinterested in taking meaningful shots at its sole subjects, instead making many confusing knife slashes in the dark & stepping out into the sunlight, all covered in its own unnecessarily inflicted wounds. It’s a film riffing on the culture of Hollywood patently uninterested in basing itself from any material portrait of America or American film culture, an issue evidenced by its opening montage of protagonist Elizabeth Sparkle’s star on the Walk of Fame being covered in snow, a weather pattern that famously happens all the time in Los Angeles, California.8 Much of the film’s early drive revolves around Dennis Quaid’s bizarrely effeminate9 business executive type person, “Harvey”. Do you get it??? Harvey wants to oust Elizabeth from her unnamed morning workout show for being old and out of touch. Do you get it??? Harvey does all this despite being an incredibly gross-looking, bizarrely dressed middle-aged man himself. Do you get it??? In case you don’t, the production wills itself to go five steps past the extra mile, with constant leering close-ups on his face, his hands, the food he’s gnashing down on, his everything concentrated to re-iterate the point again and again. This does not improve over the course of the film. There are at least two hours of this left for me to talk about. I am very tired.
From here, the film continues on its lengthy path, with the satirical elements falling into one of two buckets: “We have unreasonable beauty standards for women” and “isn’t Hollywood evil?” The former group takes the form of one of three modes:
Look at how hot Margaret Qualley is. Look at her face. Look at her ass. Look at them! Aren’t they perfect? Don’t you feel like shit looking at her???
Look at how gross Demi Moore is. Look at her putrid old face, look at her visibly decaying, aged, hunch-backed body. Look at it! Isn’t it perfect? Don’t you feel like shit looking at her???
Look at these little oafish annoying men! Yeah, sure, they’re not of any active threat to the women, and sure, the actual Harvey Weinstein calling a woman into his office may have merited something much worse than her simply getting fired, even for those who benefited from his axis of influence in the industry, but like, isn’t it horrible how these guys keep telling us to smile? And like, yeah, we know this film is supposed to be about how men dangle women’s ability to have careers from a values system based on physical beauty, but like. We’re never gonna show them actually committing to any of this violence beyond just telling Demi Moore “no” one time and being a little weird to Margaret Qualley once. That would be too much!!!
The latter group overlaps a bit with the former, but it shares the same quality that dogs the entire film’s being: non-specificity. Nearly every event, person, or object in the film that gets proper noun status seems to have not made it past placeholder naming: the titular substance is literally called “The Substance”, not one project that Elizabeth Sparkle or her counterpart Sue has worked on its given an actual name, the climax of the film takes place at an event called “The Big New Year’s Show”, which seems to just be a hot woman with backup dancers standing on a stage. The only job anyone seems to have in show business is just a variation on “executive” or “TV yoga instructor”, a job which I don’t think has been a prominent career for at least thirty-five years?10
After Elizabeth’s ousting, she’s soon introduced to The Substance(TM) by a hot twink doctor who will absolutely not be plot relevant later. From this point onward, the film becomes a closed circle. Liz takes her dose of The Substance. Sue emerges. Sue has a good time & gets jobs. We spend ten minutes looking at Sue’s ass. She spends a little too long on the medication cycle and makes Liz look worse. Liz is bitter about it and self-sabotages until it’s time to become Sue again. Rinse, repeat. This cycle is utterly miserable to watch, because the film’s deathly commitment to repeated & unessential referentiality means you’ll hardly get a moment where you’re not being prompted to remember a more exciting movie than the one currently in front of you and because, well, this is where all the “horror” is. One critical moment is the reappearance of the earlier boy, but, GASP! as an old man??? In case you didn’t catch this, the film does Saw-esque rapid flashbacks to things that were on screen both thirty minutes and thirty seconds before, hammering in the nightmare that awaits: he’s old. The film’s gross-outs before the finale are limited to only facets involving untimely aging11, willful bodily self-harm, and binge eating. All of these beyond those segments of branching into surreality are actual problems that women face judgement for and resort to in the strictures of our current system of beauty as being central to value, but these are the moments when the audience felt most prompted to laugh or scream. In recreating the dreadful cycle of-hatred, she’s failed to answer for how to rise above it and instead just put this pain on stage as a gross-out freak show display. Auteurs inviting us to ridicule women for being a certain type of “wrong” and labeling it as camp so people don’t miss the glaring condescension? Where have I dealt with that one before?
Just as we think the thing is wrapping, there’s another forty minutes piled on into the back, repeating the previous cycle at hyperspeed, playing the same low blow jokes before going with a finale that is trying to be Society, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Elephant Man at the same time in full One Perfect Shot mode. To expand on that last movie cited: Fargeat has repeatedly cited Elephant Man as the primary inspiration for the film’s final monster. She claims she was trying to draw from a similar empathy, but again, if I’m just judging off the continual laughter and screaming coming from both inside of and directed at the film, it has utterly failed to translate. It is a film consumed with self-hatred, inversely determined to depict its own problems. When portraying the precarity of Western standards of beauty, do we want to fall into the trap of just bringing the cruelty out in everyone? Is there such a thing as empathetic satire? Can art with a total absence of reality say anything meaningful about our reality? Nah.
Much like its brethren in contemptuous Best Picture-worthy “““camp”””, Emilia Perez, The Substance is bogged down with the same sort of toothlessness12 to care about its subject, content just to let them suffer, rather than leaping to the same extension of the question that Napalm Death did in a single second: “but why?”. These are two more in a lengthy line of European arthouse directors who have made works which retain a bizarre fixation in capturing “the reality” of non-European culture, followed by a total disinterest in the actual circumstances of that culture. They become paeans to ignorance and total nihilism, killing off all their protagonists who have had to undergo the suffering of Being A Woman or Being a Trans Woman without even granting the reprieve of a meaningful “fuck you” in the form of injury to the people who taught them to hate themselves in the first place. The obvious alternative here is “let those in the more under-represented & societally oppressed groups have the means to speak for themselves”, but we can’t afford to do that too much now. Just as Jacques Audiard cannot seem to grasp a basic fact as a trans woman’s scent changing after time on hormones or like, any realistic information about Mexico not cited from Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Coralie Fargeat does not want to look the contemptuousness of the American media machine directly in the eyes. And why should she? There’s more reward in being loudly wrong than quietly doing your best.
Housekeeping:
Hello, yes, new publication name, new priorities for the new year. I have struggled for a bit with trying to find a tolerance for my own work where I did not feel obligated to be catching up with something constantly, when I did not really have the togetherness to be writing or doing much of anything else artistically or critically for a good while. As you can tell from the amount of time since the last attempt at this, it’s been a rough year. Going to be doing better though. In the further pursuit of Logging Off & attempting to find more to say with that, I want to make writing that focuses less on licking my own wounds and more just trying things and seeing what comes out. In this case I just got very angry about a movie and it spiraled out a bit. I’m making more these days, and hopefully, you will see most of it. Part fiction part criticism part video part text part music part serious part silly part lies part truth part heart part garbage. Some of it will be through this channel of newsletter or whatever people are calling Substack these days, some of it will be posted on other websites, but I’ll have it all archived by upload date on this main website here.
I am trying to see what I can do in new pursuits. I hope you’ll indulge me. Next piece going up is the counterpoint to this one, which is my legally obligated round of actually talking about something I enjoy: A Different Man13. After that, I have no idea what I’m working on, but probably nothing critical (except one thing in February) and definitely not about movies, but again, trying new things. We’ll see what order they end up taking shape in. Just keep checking the website.
Thank you for reading,
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The number of times during my too-long period of being on Twitter where I’d see a single post a hundred people are yelling at, go to the profile of the person who made it, and their bio said “16 // Swiftie” or something to that effect was staggering. Touch grass!!!!
Does enjoying the film Licorice Pizza make you a bad person? Is “brat” a personality archetype for chronic narcissists? Can I watch Inland Empire on my phone and still honor the memory of David Lynch?
I already had zero plans to talk about this, but I really consider it a closed circle of an argument now that my friend Lily has published the definitive piece of writing on the matter. Go read Intakes!
Making a note here to point out handful of the exceptions thus far, the always stellar Park Chan-Wook’s romantic thriller Decision to Leave & Romanian provocateur Radu Jude’s three-hour monolith, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Also. anyone who funds a Kelly Reichardt picture gets a brief pass from me.
Shoutouts to my beloved Death Stranding and the Ethan Coen/Tricia Cooke lesbian b-movie trilogy, both of which have already produced immense yields for any prospective Qualley stockholders.
Barring a sudden awards play from Brandon Cronenberg,
Once again, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World! Go see it!
This is without getting into the uncomfortable underwriting in one of its other symbols of Sparkle’s lost fame…a homeless person walking around and making a mess on the star??? Is the world starving for more jokes about homeless people being gross???
I need an hour-long breakdown on what his instructions & inspirations here were, between him and that one orderly in Longlegs, it’s been a big year for “straight guys inexplicably playing it gay”.
Are Peloton instructors the contemporary version of this? Does anyone reading this even know anything about Peloton? Sound off in the comments or something.
In the event that one of you knows that I really enjoy the movie Old, a film which plays around similar tricks of gross-out horror based on this same kind of play around age, I personally think Shyamalan gets a pass on this because he finds horror in all stages of human development, from pregnancy to birth to youth to all stages before death! It’s such a variegated haunted house where all the scares are new facets of just being alive. It’s Shyamalan, so yes, the dialogue can be clunky, but like, Vicky Krieps, dude. Would Vicky Krieps being in The Substance have made it a better movie? Who’s to say?
Congratulating myself now on being the only person to do criticism of The Substance without using the word “hagsploitation” which I do not think is a relevant vector as it’s clearly pulling from a larger Hollywood fixation on aging stardom, not always female. Anyway yeah, A Different Man, have you seen that thing? Oh yeah if you’re reading all of these footnotes I might as well let you know that one of t
could not have said it better myself, first movie i found myself loudly scoffing at since paper towns