THE SUBSTANCE – SYMBOLIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILM
The myth of eternal beauty and youth.
Warning: contains spoilers.
The Substance is a 2024 body horror film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat and starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid. The film follows a down-and-out celebrity who decides to use a black market drug, a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself, unknowingly causing horrific side effects.
Synopsis
On her 50th birthday, once celebrated but now fading Hollywood movie star Elisabeth Sparkle is unceremoniously fired from the aerobics program she hosted for years, with producer Harvey saying her advancing age is the reason. While driving home, Elisabeth is distracted by a billboard of herself being removed, resulting in a serious accident. During a hospital check-up, a young nurse offers her a USB flash drive labeled The Substance, which explains that there is a serum that generates a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of herself. After some hesitation, Elisabeth orders The Substance and injects herself with the single-use activator, resulting in a much younger version of herself emerging through a slit in her back.
The Substance establishes a symbiotic relationship between the two bodies: Elisabeth must transfer her consciousness between the bodies every seven days, with the inactive body remaining unconscious. The other version also requires daily injections of “stabilising fluid”, extracted from the original body via a spinal tap, to prevent deterioration. The other version, who calls herself Sue, is quickly hired by Harvey to replace Elisabeth. Sue’s new television show catapults her to fame, and she is eventually chosen to host the network’s big New Year’s Eve show. As Sue, the actress enjoys a confident and hedonistic life, while living as Elisabeth, she becomes an insecure recluse.
After a night of sex, Sue extracts more stabilizing fluid from Elisabeth to prolong their sexual activity. The next morning, Elisabeth wakes up to discover that her index finger has aged rapidly. The supplier warns that remaining as Sue for more than seven days causes rapid and irreversible aging of the original body, and that Elisabeth must follow the change schedule to prevent this from happening again. Despite sharing a single consciousness, both personalities begin to see themselves as separate individuals and quickly come to hate each other. "Elisabeth" becomes jealous of Sue's beauty and success, and resents her frequent neglect of the change schedule, while "Sue" is horrified by Elisabeth's constant self-pity and binge eating episodes. After a particularly self-destructive episode as Elisabeth, a distraught Sue refuses to change back, deciding to remain permanently in her younger body.
Three months later, on the day of the New Year's Eve broadcast, Sue discovers that Elisabeth's body is completely depleted of the stabilizing fluid. The supplier informs her that the only way to replenish the fluid is to switch back to her original body. When they switch, Elisabeth finds herself horribly transformed, now nearly hairless and deformed with a hunchback. Desperate to stop Sue's abuse of the stabilizing fluid, which continues to degrade her body, Elisabeth acquires a serum designed to eliminate Sue. However, still craving admiration, Elisabeth hesitates before injecting the complete elimination syringe, proceeding to resurrect Sue, upsetting the symbiotic balance and leaving both of them fully conscious. Realizing Elisabeth's intention upon seeing the nearly empty syringe, Sue goes into a rage and brutally kills Elisabeth, repeatedly smashing her face into a mirror, stomping on her, and kicking her before leaving to present the New Year's Eve special.
Without Elisabeth, Sue's body begins to deteriorate rapidly, with three teeth, a fingernail, and her right ear falling out. In a panic, Sue runs to her apartment and attempts to create a new version of herself with the remaining activator serum, something expressly forbidden by the supplier. This inadvertently creates the "Elisasue Monster", a grotesque hybrid of the two forms.
Elisasue dresses up and goes live on the show wearing a makeshift Elisabeth Sparkle mask. As the creature takes the stage and begins to address the audience, the mask falls off. The horrified audience erupts into violent chaos; a man decapitates Elisasue before her body sprays and drenches the audience with blood. What remains of Elisasue escapes the studio and collapses into a mass of viscera. Elisasue's original face emerges, crawls up to her neglected star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, looks up at the stars, smiles, and melts. The bloody remains are cleaned up by a machine the next day.
The Substance - Symbolic Analysis of the Film
Elizabeth's 50th birthday celebration is met with a summary dismissal by Harvey, the director of her TV show. The casual manner in which Harvey fires her is one of the first shocking scenes, and sets the tone for the film. The name Harvey is a clear allusion to Harvey Weinstein, the American director and producer convicted of sex crimes.
At the restaurant, Harvey devours a plate of shrimp with sauce, chewing with his mouth open, dirtying the entire table, while at the same time telling Elisabeth how women should behave to be desired. This single scene would be enough to begin an analysis of the social standards imposed on women, that is, they should do everything to be beautiful, well-behaved and desirable, while he can behave like a caveman at the table, without any respect for the woman in front of him.
The abuse is in the details.
Disoriented and disillusioned, Elisabeth is driving her car when she sees a huge billboard with her picture being replaced by another advertisement, and she is involved in a car accident. When she is treated at the hospital, she is told that she has not suffered anything serious, but she is visibly destroyed. At that moment, a young doctor appears and suggests that she use a substance that will make her a better version of herself.
Even without receiving sufficient information about what that substance was, how it would act on her body, what the desired effects would be, and what the side effects were, both expected and rare, she goes to the indicated place to obtain the material necessary to achieve her goals of perpetuating her beauty and youth.
It is in moments of greatest fragility that we are most susceptible to falling for the siren's song!
Elisabeth receives a flash drive with superficial, yet seductive, information about The Substance, and decides to go to the indicated location. The location is as susceptible to suspicion as the approach of the mysterious doctor, and yet, Elisabeth ignores all the evidence that she is following the steps of a very dangerous, and clandestine, treatment.
How many women, and currently, how many men, have undergone aesthetic treatments with unqualified people, or using medications and interventions without any scientific evidence, suffering countless side effects, damage to their health, mutilations, or even death, when they let themselves be seduced by the promises of miraculous effects? Elisabeth is just one of them, acting on impulse, desperation, and giving in to the seduction that she was ready to receive an experimental, but very special, treatment!
We cannot forget the director of the TV show she hosted for several years, who tells her, quite matter-of-factly, that once a woman turns 50, she is naturally out. Her sense of individual importance and worth is destroyed in a matter of seconds, and she gives in to the pressure of the toxic patriarchy, thinking that the problem is her, not the system.
At the same time, she did not accept herself as an artist capable of doing other things, remaining fixated on an image of beauty and youth that were no longer compatible with her age.
Being young and beautiful is the only quality that matters, even though this is the essence of the program that Elisabeth hosted, a live exercise program, her entire value as a human being, as a professional dedicated for so many years, is not mentioned in this macabre conversation. What really counts for the program are the close-ups of the camera, the images extremely focused on the female body, almost obscene, which reveal that this was no longer the body of a young woman in her early 20s, and therefore should be replaced.
The film is all about the relationship between I and Thing , not I and Other , in which Harvey, the man, and his entourage of investors are the Subject , and the women are the Thing . The young Thing is desirable and generates profit for the program, the old Thing must be discarded, as an object must be replaced by a better one.
Elisabeth has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, as well as a giant poster with her photo advertising her show, and a portrait, also huge, of her in her own living room, where her beauty and success can be constantly remembered and celebrated, but the star on the Walk of Fame is also old and worn out, people pass by it without paying attention to the name written there, trash falls on it, in a cruel metaphor about the fleeting effects of success and fame.
The Star on the Walk of Fame is also an analogy to the use and abuse of artists in the spotlight. After all, this star on the sidewalk resembles the tombstone in some cemeteries. Here lies so-and-so, a renowned artist, whose importance will last as long as the freshness of the paint and the quality of the cement used there.
Hollywood, when chosen as the setting for this film, represents the current cultural self. Social media has done nothing more than reproduce in the reality of ordinary citizens the demands for image perfection and performance that the film industry has developed over the years. In an attempt to attract an ever-increasing number of audiences to television and film productions, the myth of beauty and youth has been exploited, along with its actresses and actors. A product is idealized, or the potential of someone as a product is recognized and invested in this standard until it is exhausted, until something new emerges.
This message from Show Business, that artists exist to entertain the public, and, consequently, to be consumed, has expanded to ordinary people and their endless and desperate search for likes and followers.
Ideal beauty no longer resides solely in imitating today's great stars and sex symbols, who are always unattainable. Today, the goal is to be as perfect as one's own image, enhanced/manipulated by cell phone cameras.
As Harvey says, the public always wants something new!
The Substance is a mysterious homemade cloning process that causes an attractive young woman, Sue (Margaret Qualley), to emerge from inside his spinal column, like a puppy emerging from his back. The image of Elisabeth's body, lying on the cold floor, with her spine sewn together in an artisanal way, is shocking. This scene portrays the body as something disposable, an empty shell, as the soul now inhabits Sue's body.
The promise was that she would be a better version of herself, younger and more beautiful, but instead of her becoming younger and more beautiful, a clone of her appears, like an alter ego, capable of living and achieving everything she ever wanted, including getting her role back on the TV show.
They act like those people who have a second chance at life, but do everything exactly the same as before, making the same mistakes. Sue submits to patriarchal values, playing the game of exaggerated body exposure, now with much more incisive and sensual close-ups, generating excitement in the public. She has the beauty of youth, and a behavior that at the same time simulates naivety, and invests heavily in seduction. In short, she surrenders once again to the mechanisms of use and abuse of the female body in the toxic patriarchal society.
They are and are not the same person, because a clone is not exactly the same person that originated it, but rather another individual with a will of their own. They are not the same person, including because Sue does not have the same bitterness that Elisabeth experiences when rejected because of her age.
Sue enjoys all the success, fame, and flattery she receives, just as I imagine Elisabeth did in her youth. The problem arises when Sue begins to live her life as if Elisabeth did not exist, disregarding the 7-day period that was allotted to each of them.
But how to deal satisfactorily with the 7 days of life that each one would have, while the other's body is left lying around, like the discarded skin of a snake, or the cocoon of a butterfly.
While Elisabeth's body lies on the floor, Sue takes center stage, works, becomes successful, and is "loved" by everyone, just as Elisabeth had believed she was. The terrible blow culminates when Elisabeth takes charge of her week and sees that the huge billboard with her photo, in front of her window, is replaced by Sue's. The traces of Elisabeth's success quickly disappear.
On the other hand, Sue lived intensely during her period of fame and glory. Elisabeth had nothing to do with her time, as her whole life revolved around work and the illusion that she was loved by everyone. Her fans were no longer hers, but Sue's!
The trap she had fallen into when using The Substance began to bother her, but she did not yet realize the gravity of what was happening. She thought that the best version of herself would be herself, or really a version of herself, with which she could continue with the life she had previously led, but Sue was like a clone, another being generated within her, who was not a son or daughter, but a double, with a life, will and desires of its own, who began to despise her, hide her, and disrespect the rules of using The Substance – that each one would have one week to live.
Every 7 days, when she regained her life, Elisabeth was surprised by Sue's increasing success, the show being shown on TV, her billboard being replaced by Sue's, until the announcement that Sue would be hosting the New Year's special. The more successful Sue became, the more depressed and angry she became.
Elisabeth decides to open the birthday present that Harvey had given her on the occasion of her birthday/dismissal, a French recipe book, recommended by Harvey's wife, and starts cooking and eating compulsively, transforming the apartment in which they cohabit into a chaos of leftovers from preparation, dirty dishes, leftovers and accumulated garbage, making Sue even more furious with her.
Harvey, upon meeting Sue in the corridors of the station, says: - Smile, beautiful women should always smile! And Sue smiled, and played the game.
Women are never young enough, beautiful enough, or whatever else is required of us.
Harvey, and his collective of undifferentiated men are here to remind us what is expected of us women.
We should note that Harvey is always accompanied by several men, all drooling over Sue, enraptured by her beauty. These men represent the collective male attitude, they walk in a group, behave in chorus, always agreeing with the leader of the group.
They represent the collective attitude towards indifference, an attitude that does not reflect on one's own actions, nor has empathy for those who are different, for the Other. Erich Neumann and Simone de Beauvoir agree that, for man, woman is The Other, the one whom man does not recognize as equal, and with whom he must avoid, at all costs, identifying himself, with the risk of being devoured by the Great Mother Archetype in its negative, devouring and castrating aspect.
All the dancers who participate in Elisabeth's program, and later in Sue's, represent, in turn, the collective feminine attitude of the sexualized woman/object, who adapts to the collective masculine attitude in search of acceptance and a place in the world.
In this sense, the film uses and abuses patriarchal and misogynistic clichés, some of which are widely accepted by society, such as the cultural premise that women should always be docile and smiling.
While Sue assumes this persona accepted by the dominant collective patriarchal consciousness, Elisabeth begins to get in touch with all the anger at the loss of privileges that being at the top of this game has given her, but without realizing that reflection was necessary.
Sue's elixir of life was drawn from Elisabeth's spine, a symbolic analogy to her structure, her support. Elisabeth's marrow allowed Sue to take over for a week, but a week was no longer enough, and more and more of Elisabeth's body was drained, worn down, so that Sue could live. It only took one extra day in Sue's week for Elisabeth to have a cruelly aged finger, and this makes her begin to realize that the deal was not being fulfilled, and that she would suffer accelerated aging, instead of the improved youth that was promised.
The conflict between the fantasy of eternal youth and the devaluation of aging women is shown in an extreme and dramatic way during the film's plot. When they called to talk about the problems they faced when using the Substance, they all received the same answer: - Don't forget, you are one! And that was the first thing they forgot!
They were one person, but each side hated the other. So that Sue could make the most of her youth, she abused Elisabeth's fluid, which instead of becoming a better version of herself, made her age faster and grotesquely. The older she got, the more Sue despised her. The more Sue abused her time in life, the more aggressive, depressed, and lonely Elisabeth became. The enemy lived inside each of them.
The difficulty in self-acceptance that Elisabeth faces is the result of an excessive adaptation to a social persona, in which women cannot grow old, as they lose market value. They lose value in the professional, sexual and emotional markets. However, in reality, this value is the same as that of an obsolete object that is replaced.
She was an object when she was young, and she continues to be an object when she gets older. Sue uses the energy of Elisabeth's body, just as the media used her image, falling into the same trap that Elisabeth had fallen into, that she was loved and had value.
When we remember that Sue and Elisabeth are one and the same person, the selfish behavior, the impulsive decisions, the aggressive and frivolous behavior were in the shadow of both characters. Sue could only be seductive, frivolous, selfish, aggressive, because this was Elisabeth's repressed nature.
All the hatred of being discarded as she grows old turns into Sue's desperation to not waste a single moment of the pseudo power that youth and beauty give her.
By identifying with the archetype of beauty, they lost the greater dimension of the feminine archetype, and the human condition of being a woman in a patriarchal world, in which relationships are formed through the maintenance of an unattainable persona.
They seek the beauty of Aphrodite, but Aphrodite is a goddess who, like Snow White's stepmother, does not allow anyone to be considered more beautiful than her. By wanting to identify with Aphrodite, they end up identifying with Persephone, the eternally young queen because she is in the kingdom of Hades, the realm of the dead.
Elizabeth seeks eternal beauty and youth, symbolized by the goddess Hebe, who served the gods the elixir from the fountain of youth, or ambrosia, the food of the gods of Olympus. The fountain of youth is the myth that permeates this film, because the search for the fountain of youth, through the use of the substance, is nothing more than a hybris, after all, only the gods could drink from this fountain.
As in myths, transgressions committed by mortals seeking to equal themselves to the gods are always severely punished.
In the myth, Hebe marries Hercules after the end of her heroic acts, forming a couple in which the creative attributes of the feminine and the masculine meet. However, neither Elisabeth nor Sue, her alter ego, seem to be interested in transformative affective relationships, as the search for eternal beauty and youth are an end in themselves, in a narcissistic regression of erotic self-identification with oneself, in which the Other is also objectified.
Elisabeth is unable to meet her old school friend and still admirer because she cannot be satisfied with her own image. Her focus is not on having a relationship with someone, but on being admired. And this man, who recognizes her but has never been visible to her, would not be able to satisfy her narcissistic need for recognition, because his opinion means nothing compared to the acceptance of the mainstream media, which first elevated her to the height of the Star on the Walk of Fame, only to later cast her into ostracism.
The same happens with Sue, who has sexual relationships, but not emotional ones. There is no scene in the film where we come across real relationships. Each person performs their role and is then dismissed, whether it be in the show, having sex, or cleaning the house.
Elisabeth, when comparing herself with the image of Sue, her idealized alter ego in accordance with the demands of patriarchal values related to the stereotypical feminine, becomes incapable of seeing her own beauty, and her value as an individual, as she does not recognize any value in herself that goes beyond the barriers of appearance.
Unlike Narcissus, who died young, Elisabeth cannot accept and admire her real image in the mirror, she is now identified with the Stepmother Queen, Snow White, and needs Snow White to die to feel the most beautiful again.
A great illusion, because they are one person, one does not exist without the other.
The only way for us mortals to remain eternally young is to die young. In this way, our image will be immortalized in the prime of beauty and youth.
Only the living have the privilege of growing old.
In a desperate attempt to reverse the damage caused by the misuse of the Substance, Sue ignores that the use is unique, and tries once again to become the best of herself, believing that by reversing the process, she would become the best of the two, but what happens is that there is no best of the two, the creation of the two is a monster, full of breasts and disconnected faces.
The shadow of patriarchy shows its harmful effects , creating the Elisasue Monster.
How many individuals, especially women, become unrecognizable after cosmetic procedures that steal their identity, to the point where they are no longer recognized. What is the limit between vanity and the acceptance that life is made up of phases, and one of them is old age?
Cosmetic procedures can improve someone's appearance, but they cannot make someone young again. The aging process never stops, and its effects are evident in details that are impossible to completely eliminate.
One of the film's messages is: - It is not enough to maintain a youthful and well-groomed appearance, the beauty of youth is inevitable. It was not enough for Elizabeth to remain fit and attractive at 50 years old, as Harvey said, at 50 years old she must give up her place to someone younger and, therefore, more attractive.
The way Elisabeth is surprised to be replaced by a younger woman gives me the impression that she didn't realize that time had passed for her, she became fixated on the advantages that youth gave her, and forgot to plan a life with meaning and lasting emotional ties. When she is discarded for being old, she loses her identity, completely fixated on the persona of the young and beautiful woman. Instead of taking advantage of this moment to reevaluate her own life and her choices, she sets out in search of a magical solution that would bring her back to her old life.
It is not possible to go back in time. Nostalgic fixation on the past is already something difficult to work through, but fantasizing that you can go back to being who you were in the past borders on delirium.
The increase in the longevity of the population means that we are faced with issues related to aging. The overvaluation of youth, or even childhood and adolescence, seems to have made us forget that these phases are fleeting, and that adulthood and aging last much longer than the previous ones.
In a society where aesthetic and performance values overlap, what is the social and emotional role of aging?
Archetypically speaking, it would be the stage of wisdom, but humanity seems to have moved absurdly far from the ideal of wisdom, let alone ethics.
We live in liquid, fluid relationships, where emotional relationships are disposable and easily replaceable by younger, more “Instagrammable” partners.
Elisabeth had her fluid used up until it was almost exhausted, that is, Sue tried to live her transgressive youth through the Substance until the last level.
By not accepting aging as a natural condition of life, she went to war against her own nature, and her own nature, personified by Sue, was selfish, futile, violent. She embodied the patriarchal ideals of objectifying the female body to the utmost degree, becoming a monstrous caricature of herself, not only in the Monster Elisabeth, but in the perverse monstrosity of one in relation to the other, but, remember, they are the same person.
In the end, the New Year's party turns into a party of horrors, and the Monster Elisasue is decapitated by a man in the audience. She was already decapitated before that, because her cognitive and emotional capacity was already disconnected from her body, which only existed to fulfill the patriarchal seduction rituals, packaged in a docile, well-behaved persona, always beautiful, always attractive, pleasing to the eye, with a smile on her lips, like the one in the photo with which she covers her monstrous face to present the New Year's special.
At this moment, the Monster Elisabeth shows a personality dissociated from reality. Just as Elisabeth does not connect with the body of a 50-year-old woman, the Monster Elisabeth is not aware of the monstrosity she has become.
The film begins in the same way it ends. First, we see the Elisabeth Sparkle Star being installed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame , with all the glamour that this represents. But over time, the star that honors her cracks and is damaged. It is trampled on and ignored. A man walks by it, drops his hamburger and the star gets dirty with ketchup. In the end, it is the remains of the Elisabeth Monster who returns to her star, as if in an attempt to regain the importance she once had, but is swept away by a machine in the same way as the hamburger remains that were previously cleaned.
She, like the memory of her existence, is swept away like trash. This is the price we pay for identifying ourselves as Objects, not as individuals.
But life, as in the movie, is like that. Individuals pay the price for excessive and unquestioning adaptation to a sick society.
The public attacks Elisasue for her monstrosity, just as they attack and criticize women's appearance, but this monstrosity is a portrait of the psyche of a society that repeats collective and superficial patterns, avoiding coming into conscious contact with the questions necessary for our time.
The denial of the social shadow affects individual psychic development, and we still run the risk of looking for new scapegoats to carry the monstrous ills of this collective shadow.
Elisabeth is one of the many results of personal tragedies generated by cultural pathology. We all come from a society that affects us, and by not realizing this, we may be treating sick individuals without understanding the larger context in which we are all inserted.
And you, how far would you be willing to go in search of beauty, acceptance and recognition?
References
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JUNG, Carl G. Man and his Symbols . [Ps]: Nova Fronteira, 1964.
JUNG, Carl G. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology . Petropolis, Rio de Janeiro: Editora Vozes, 2014.
JUNG, Carl G. The Stages of Life . [Sl]: [Sn], v. 8.
LEVINAS, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence . London: The Alone Press, 1999.
NEUMANN, Erich. The Fear of the Feminine - and other essays on feminine psychology . ISBN 0-691-03473-7. ed. New Jersey: Bollingen Series LXI 4, 1994.
NEUMANN, Erich. Fear of the Feminine - and other essays on feminine psychology . São Paulo - SP: Paulus, 2017.
SKREFSRUD, Thor-André. The Buber-Levinas Debate on Otherness: Reflections on Encounters with Diversity in School. Inland, Norway: [Sn], 2022.
WOODMAN, Marion. The addiction to perfection: understanding the relationship between eating disorders and psychological development. [Sl]: Summus Editorial .
[1] “It’s literally impossible to be a woman. You’re so beautiful and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we’re supposed to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.”
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but you also have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's rude. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't crush other people's ideas. You should love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the time. You have to be a career woman, but you also have to be taking care of other people. You have to answer for bad behavior from men, which is crazy, but if you point it out, you're accused of complaining. You have to look pretty for men, but not so pretty that you seduce them too much or threaten other women because you're supposed to be part of the sisterhood.
Always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that, but also always be grateful. You should never age, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall, never fail, never show fear, never step out of line. It's so hard! It's so contradictory and no one gives you a medal or thanks you! And it turns out that in fact, not only are you doing everything wrong, but it's also all your fault.
I'm so tired of seeing myself and all the other women tying ourselves up so people will like us. And if all of this also becomes true for a doll that only represents women, then I don't even know anymore . ”
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