Issue #346: The Substance of The Substance
Issue #346: The Substance of The Substance
There have been plenty of changes in the world of Paradox Newsletter over the last week. You already know last week I introduced an addendum for my paid subscribers. This is going to be something I’ll be doing more and more often, to reward those of you who are supporting the letter financially and incentivize more people to make the jump. Nothing for the paid heads this week other than commenting privileges, but if you want to jump in, two of the three auction listings I shared last week are still available. You already get a lot for your $5 if you want to outsource your browsing of unknown auction sites full of amazing stuff. And more to come.
Had a nice yard sale last week, thanks to those of you who stopped by. Also, I got all newsletter distro packages in the mail, so if you’re waiting on something it’s coming this week.
The 39 Steps (1935) was transcendent at Somerville Theater last week. Tomorrow I’ll be in that historic room again to see Strangers on a Train (1951) and Dial M for Murder (1954).
This week, I wrote about The Substance (2024). I would call what I did today a theoretical overview. I don’t do much close reading because I don’t want to spoil the movie. It’s too new. And, there are some things written below that constitute spoilers in the most restrictive sense. But I would say that there isn’t anything I’ve written that gives you greater insight than what you would infer at the movie’s outset or see in a trailer.
What I hope this piece of writing does is give you some tools to understand the movie as you are watching it or, perhaps, make sense of some things you didn’t understand having already seen it. Although, for the latter goal, a more spoiler-filled analysis would be more successful.
Whatever camp you fall in, this is what I’ve got for you today. I’m highly motivated to return and write more about The Substance in addition to what you’ll read here, but I’m not sure if the newsletter will be the venue for that future writing.
Theoretical Excess in The Substance
The Substance begins with a moment that is nearly indistinguishable from the title cards that would introduce a production company or film studio. So set apart is it from the film, and normal film logic, one wonders why it is even there at all.
An egg, injected with “Activator,” one of the film’s principal sci-fi contrivances, divides its yolk into two. This is an introduction to several of the key ideas of the film. The yolk divides, but it also duplicates, a parody of the process of cell division that makes life possible. The divisible, or duplicated, object in The Substance is often circular or spherical, attuning the audience to wherever and however the shape appears in the film.
Without question, a circle is a governing symbol for The Substance. Egg yolks, cells, bodily shapes, pupils, and lenses. These circles are at the junction between constructive and consumptive. Though work, like film, is produced by way of the lens, it is only through the intake of light that the lens can record. And the gaze of the camera is always consumptive in this film, divesting the protagonist(s) Elisabeth (Demi Moore) and Sue (Margaret Qualley) of an unobserved existence.
The Substance avoids one of the most obvious of symbols of roundness, though not precisely circularity: the egg itself. Elisabeth and Sue are embodiments of a refusal to conflate femininity with biology, any specific interior biological features are never determinative of a gendered or sexed identity. Every bit of the emergence of “woman” is in the world of signs.
Elisabeth and Sue are supposedly one, Sue emerging from Elisabeth’s spine as some sick reverse image of Eve (from Elisabeth’s spinal bones rather than Adam’s rib) and an Alien (1979) Xenomorph. What Sue leaves behind is a gashed body, that of Elisabeth, eternally marked by Sue’s emergence with a large spinal scar. Sue’s handling of Elisabeth’s body is utterly devoid of tenderness. Sue’s body is precious, but Elisabeth is derelict, dragged about without concern, merely flesh compared to the significant embodiment of Sue.
Indeed, Sue’s significance is not because of her beauty, but because of her social circulation as a sign of something. In this case, it is the non-existent woman of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Television 38). What Lacan bars in the case of la femme is not femme but la:
Un homme, a man. I didn't say l'homme. It's rather funny, though, how the signifier gets used. People say to the lad, Be a man. They don't say, Be man. Why is that? What is curious is that you don't hear Be a woman very often. On the other hand, people speak of la femme, with a definite article, the woman. (…or Worse 23)
The Substance takes on this formulation too, dealing with the woman as such in the multitudinous plurality of a social form, rather than a psychic one in the case of Lacanian sexuation. The film even calls back to the ultimate interrogation of Lacan’s non-existent woman, Vertigo (1958).
Where the rubber hits the road for femininity in The Substance is right over the derelict, but still living, body of Elisabeth onto which grandiose ideological frameworks are projected. Elisabeth and Sue both fit into an inconsistent ideological framework that defines womanhood as essentially “young … hot … [and] now” according to Harvey (Dennis Quaid), the executive, named to evoke another real life predator, in charge of Elisabeth and Sue’s careers.
Each body of the supposed “one,” the matrix that is Elisabeth, differently negotiates the expectations that attempt to turn the woman into the woman by the logic of patriarchy. This is primarily because of their age, yet another component of their subjectivity and identity that brings with it assumptions about what one can and can’t do. The film’s characters do little to upset those assumptions. Elisabeth does not use her time in her older body, or her time of wakefulness, very well, a source of constant frustration for Sue. Using Elisabeth’s lack of activity as justification, Sue seeks to dominate more and more waking time and upset the balance the two are supposed to maintain. But the effect here is cyclical, Elisabeth has less life to live the more Sue takes. As the disembodied representative of the substance (Yann Bean) tells Elisabeth over the phone, “what has been used on one side is lost on the other side.”
The question of how exactly one should understand the relationship between Elisabeth and Sue is a significant one. That same disembodied voice says in an introduction video for the substance:
Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger. More beautiful. More perfect. One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division that will release another version of yourself. This is the substance. You are the matrix. Everything comes from you. Everything is you. This is simply a better version of yourself. You just have to share. One week for one. And one week for the other. A perfect balance of seven days each. The one and only thing not to forget: You are one. You can’t escape from yourself.
Some of the obvious questions this orientation leaves are unimportant to the film’s characters or plot. The details of the process, the nature of the various substances one injects, the precise relationship between the “matrix” and the “better version,” are all left ambiguous. The instructions included with the substance itself are minimal. It’s not important to remember where to administer the injection or how to attach the “food matrix,” “the one and only thing not to forget” is “you are one.”
Following Hamlet (1599), the insistence on the point of Elisabeth and Sue’s oneness is excessive. It points to the method by which The Substance disrupts the familiar film trope of the double. Films like Enemy (2013), Black Swan (2010), Dead Ringers (1988), The Double (2013), and Doppelganger (2003) use the trope following from Freud’s original theorization. In these and other similar films, the double is an uninhibited other associated with the unconscious able to accomplish what the ostensible original is unwilling or unable to do. Freud writes in “The Uncanny” (1919):
The theme of the “double” has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank. He has gone into the connections the “double” has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the astonishing evolution of this idea. For the “double” was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego, an “energetic denial of the power of death,” as Rank says; and probably the “immortal” soul was the first “double” of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of the genital symbol … From having been an assurance of immortality, he becomes the ghastly harbinger of death.
This pattern unfolds, more or less, in each of the paradigmatic films of the double. The embodiment of the unconscious that holds the potential for enriching the life of the supposed original in fact seeks to displace the original, overcoming the division that results in the inability of the two to occupy the same space. Freud goes on to describe how the narcissism of the ego is offensive to the “ego-criticizing faculty, which may be incorporated in the idea of a double[,]” in turn showing how a hostile relation emerges between two identical persons with a shared subjectivity.
Freud goes on to relate the idea of a double to the title of his essay:
But, after having thus considered the manifest motivation of the figure of a “double,” we have to admit that none of it helps us to understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception; and our knowledge of pathological mental processes enables us to add that nothing in the content arrived at could account for that impulse towards self-protection which has caused the ego to project such a content outward as something foreign to itself. The quality of uncanniness can only come from the circumstance of the “double” being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since left behind, and one, no doubt, in which it wore a more friendly aspect. The “double” has become a vision of terror, just as after the fall of their religion the gods took on daemonic shapes.
Freud’s account rings considering the use of the double as a horror motif. One’s clone, twin, ghostly specular image, or unexplained duplicate generally never arrives simply to help, but inevitably to replace, harkening back to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).
All of this is to say The Substance does not follow the model of Freud and the films I mentioned (though there’s a productive intertextuality between it and Dead Ringers). The emergence of Sue is indeed a body snatching, as in modification rather than capture. But her consciousness, identity, and experience all seem to be different from that of Elisabeth. Elisabeth is only left to her vicarious enjoyment of Sue’s experiences that she can only piece together retroactively, through the condition of their shared apartment and Sue’s TV appearances.
The duo, or split pieces of the one matrix, share something fundamental, however: their vanity. Both of them seek a form of wide approval, partially gendered masculine, in a way that defies coercion. The situation in which Elisabeth and Sue find themselves is a result of heteromasculine patriarchy, but the two make choices to maximize their value as objects within that hierarchy. They are not terribly sympathetic characters — though Elisabeth has a scene in front of a bathroom mirror that is one of the most pathos inspiring and incisive in recent memory. The arrangement of the audience’s sympathies is a feature, not a bug, however. Elisabeth and Sue are every bit the images the patriarchal society has molded them into. One particularly potent element showcasing their shared vanity, and the best argument for the claim that they are indeed one, is the absence of any other users of the substance. Elisabeth seems to only have one other compatriot who is using the substance along with her, the man who recruits her. And, of course, his gender is critical here: the vanity that patriarchy creates can possess anyone.
Though little about the substance is explained, how it functions in the logic of the plot is also a critical symbolic point. The substance has no monetary cost, Elisabeth never pays for it and is never asked to pay for it. It also, when used according to the instructions, is not harmful to one’s health. Conceivably, exchanging one’s body with the other at the seven day intervals that are dictated in the orientation, one would live a full life alternating between a younger, “more perfect” body and the original: the matrix.
Money, and the financial or logistical elements of the substance and its use, are something the film has no interest in. Returning to the theme of vanity, the film never shows Elisabeth to have any economic need to continue to work. Making money isn’t why she makes, or becomes, Sue. The substance itself is not a clinical trial exploiting the vulnerable to harm them. All signs point to it being painful, but relatively safe, when used as described. However, with shades of the monkey’s paw, it also appears that the incentives it presents invite transgression of the limits.
The substance isn’t an offer of eternal life. It isn’t even eternal youth. It’s youth for half of whatever one’s natural life would be. It is remarkable in that it presents something fantastical without explicit costs. Seemingly, the substance’s offering is an alchemic formulation that defies the laws of equivalent exchange. But it (the substance itself) never gets its pound of flesh. It never even wants it. It leaves the flesh to fight among itself, calling into question some of the ideological assumptions about the real life corollaries to it.
Seeking to elongate one’s youth, even through conventional means like plastic surgery or makeup, is represented in the logic of cinema as having a cost associated with it. Risk, pain, money, time, at worst the erasure of one’s “authentic” subjectivity. In The Substance, there is no authentic subjectivity. And using the substance presents the illusory possibility of youth without cost, relatively speaking. But the feminist strain of this film is in part one that endorses the notion of “women’s wrongs,” that the vain, facile, and self-interested don’t always have a price. Certainly, that’s more often the case when a man utilizes what is available to him to look or feel younger — not that he is ever really compelled to in the same way.
Coralie Fargeat’s direction and Benjamin Kracun’s cinematography are arresting and aggressive as the film weaves its way through these various ideas and symbols. Their formal flourishes, along with the plot, are evocative of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Tsukamoto is clearly a huge influence for the film. Even the sets are similar, as Elisabeth visits the alleyways and abandoned warehouses of Tetsuo to transform not into an atrocity of metal, but one of flesh. The cinematic texture of Fargeat’s work here could sustain endless easter egg youtube compilations, but the film is none the poorer for it. The Substance is required viewing for the students of psychoanalytic theory. It’s also one of the best movies of the year.
Weekly Reading List
https://www.shudder.com/series/watch/horrors-greatest/c5322fe848642faa?season=1 — Shudder is running a great series of commentary called Horror’s Greatest (2024) looking at a wide range of horror films from various angles. The episodes so far cover “Tropes & Cliches,” “Giant Monsters,” “Japanese Horror,” and “Horror Comedies,” with a fifth and final installment on “Stephen King Adaptations” coming this week.
I’m a huge fan of some of the critics and directors they brought in to talk about these films. Hearing Brea Grant and Ryuhei Kitamura talk horror is a real treat.
Lil Tecca, one of my favorite artists, has a new album out. If you like radio-tuned contemporary hip-hop, this is for you. The guy is a certified hitmaker. After a few listens, “24HRS,” “Homebody,” “Cold Girls,” “D1,” and “All the Time” are standouts. Train your ear on Nav, and you can appreciate Lil Tecca.
Until next time.