In Which I Discuss The Substance

Oh, Demi BEEN Moore!

I’ve been seeing a guy for like a month and I took him to see The Substance. After a hearty lunch. Salmon was involved, avocado even. We sat in the first row and I have a terrible neck because of my gigantic honkers. Somehow we’re going out again despite my lack of logic. I have no common sense but good news, neither does my good Internet friend and fellow Substacker

Sam Runge

. We went to arts colleges! Sam has contributed to this blog before, if the name sounds familiar! Sam and I hopped into a Google Doc and got to discussing the most viscerally unpleasant (complimentary) film of the year. Spoilers abound.

Tara: To start off, Sam, there was less poop than I expected. I wonder what made The Substance director Coralie Fargeat say “eh, I think we’ve done enough with orifii (my fancy way of saying “holes) with this film, a Poop Chute Riot¹ may offend.”

Sam: Yeah, you can get away with lots of things these days but rectal leakage doesn’t seem to be one of them. I’d expect more from a slapstick comedy like this, but I enjoyed it overall and beggars can’t be poopsters. 

Tara: I guess The Substance doesn’t include MSG. I’d like to begin with the *puts on a little beret, leather of course because it’s me* mise-en-scéne. Tell me what you make of the visual: the Gatorade sunsets, the Requiem for a Dream m-eye-osis, the acid lighting. The most visceral sensation I had, besides my roiling stomach at the shelled prawns spewing from Dennis Quaid’s mouth, was the stiffness in my neck from craning for two hours and twenty minutes to watch this movie from the first row and even still, it is incandescent in its puerile perfect vision. What influences came to mind as you took in the sight of this thing? What poetism came to mind for you? 

Sam: It sort of reminded me of Mr. Creosote from The Meaning of Life without the explosion. The prawn-mouth-stuffing is the quintessential piggishness of Hollywood agents writ large. A lot of poetic meaning relies on the senses and can make delicacies disgusting. It’s difficult to make full sense of it, but it also made me think of the Akira singularity and the melting of all things into a morass of skin and wires and bones and nasty garbage. 

Tara: This movie was basically the fucking tumor baby from Akira doing a Jane Fonda Buns of Steel workout tape, yes. The end of Akira is far and away the most disgust I have felt watching a movie. Had to endure that ending through slitted fingers. This movie, probably the boob on a…uh…rope? is the near-apex of grossery. I felt that this movie reminded me of nothing so much as The Neon Demon, because Nicolas Winding Refn did that shit. Every frame of the film it’s printed on could be matted and hung on the wall. It’s gorgeous, like this movie is. Commentary on the lengths one will go for beauty. Eyes where they don’t belong. 👀 The feeling of synthwave, without even the noise of it. Death Becomes Her is an obvious cue for the plot, just like All About Eve would be, but this movie feels more a companion to something like The Hunger, even though it traffics in pink lycra where The Hunger is black latex. And it definitely lives in visual sistership with Demi Moore’s finest film, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. The color grading of that film may be, other than I don’t know, Singin’ in the Rain, the film whose LUT I’d most like to live within. (If you at home or you at Sam have not seen Demi Moore in that fur coat and the goddamn floss bikini with that golden gun…¦holy shit, hit pause and come back to this later. She was never good, say it with me now, she was great.) The replete immersion is there in Fargeat’s movie. The substance itself is radioactive of color, but so is the Pine-Sol we use to coat all of our furniture. We live in these colors more than we ever should, and this movie let them stand as repulsive yet craveworthy. You leave craving an orange windbreaker and a bouquet of Sour Blue Raspberry Bubble Tape - and an eightball of Pepto tablets. But, the grossness. What was the number one grossest thing, for you?

Sam: Yeah, when the boob on a rope(?) dropped straight out from the eyehole(?) of the ultimate Substance monster, it sounded like a wet ham slapping the floor. The boob rope kind of looked like the Twizzlers I was eating. I’m not particularly squeamish, but one thing I always feel on a visceral level is the breaking of bones. When she was initially turning into a goblin and sitting in her recliner, it looked like she had three kneecaps wedged against one another. I’m not totally sure what a rotting leg is supposed to look like, or whether she had a few tumors in there or something, but seeing the bone grind against whatever the fuck was in there wasn’t pleasant. I think what makes it even nastier is the fact that you know it’s going to happen, but it’s not going to happen smoothly. You feel the bones grating and popping until it snaps into place. 

Tara: My grossest thing didn’t even come to fissurian fruition. There’s a scene where Elisabeth is gritting her teeth, brittle down the browned middle, and I thought they were going to shatter in her mouth. I wanted to be dead. Then the teeth later (I’m trying not to spoil folks too much) made me want to be dead even more. More dead. Melted into the surface of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, even. 

Sam: The teeth came out so smoothly though, it was almost satisfying…

Tara: Bitch, for you. I spent too many years turning that stupid palate expander key my orthodontist put in my mouth to just watch teeth come unspooled like that. I’m not afraid of dentists, hygienists, bring them on, but my god, their ABSENCE? That was the actual worst of it for me.

Also you may enjoy this having enjoyed this movie we watched, but I once went to the ortho to get the mold done for my braces. The tray of Ursula’s-pussyhole-purple goo they slide into your mouth. I had had a full pancake breakfast and a gag reflex that made me a very late-in-life virgin and when I see my childhood best friend Chelsea who came with me for moral support she still makes fun of me for throwing up entire pieces of pancake on Dr. Perillo, who we all thought was super cute. That’s basically what The Substance is about: the ultimate ego death in the pursuit of beauty.

Sam: That’s so real. I had some fucked up teeth as a kid so I am very protective of my teeth. If they fell out like that I would just shove those boys right back in. I feel like if you’re an orthodontist and you get puked on, it’s kind of on you. 

Tara: I’d like to dive into the logic of the film a bit. How much awareness do Elisabeth and Sue have of each other? Does Sue retain Elisabeth’s memories? Is there a wordless communication between them? 

Sam: There’s definitely a deep fragmentation, but I think Sue functions as the un-Elisabeth in the sense that they are deeply intertwined, but Sue, sort of being the true manifestation of Elisabeth’s desire, is given an unwritten carte blanche to do whatever. Even if it comes at the cost of Elisabeth’s true existence, the idea of one more day of beauty and desirability is too intoxicating to pass on. It’s a Dorian Grey type of situation.

Tara: I really like your take. I am undecided about how the matrix and its offsiring work. In our moments with the chicken leg and some other twitchy glitches in their bodies, I couldn’t fully assess if these were dreams, hallucinations, or concrete transfusion, like a psychic enema from one body to the other. There are 100 ways Coralie Fargeat could have demonstrated the bond betwixt the women, whether a scene of masturbatory intimacy with one or the other resting body or screams of “Get out of my shell!”. But she doesn’t give us that. Perhaps she found those choices cheap, or left a deliberate mystery as well, here we are discussing how we feel about how the “characters” (quotes because THEY ARE ONE) engage. 

Speaking of Dorian Grey, do you think the painting is in fact talismanic? Or is that a cute gag for the folks who went to see this with a Powell’s Books tote bag in tow?

Sam: At times it was tough to parse the real from the hallucination. When she has to go back to her ancient, decrepit self, she’s in a constant state of panic and self-loathing, which seems to distort her reality in a fucked up way, to the point where it’s completely revolved around Sue. Elisabeth is obsessed with wanting to be Sue, Sue is obsessed with not wanting to be Elisabeth. The function of the portrait is multifaceted: At first it's a reminder to Elisabeth of her obsolescence; then to Sue it’s a reminder of the body she never wants to inhabit; then when Elisabeth goes full goblin mode, it’s almost idealized again. There’s definitely a talismanic aspect there. 

Tara: Now I know I’m asking a guy this, feminist readers, but relax. It’s actually good to ask a dude this: do you think the nudity, sexual suggestivity of the workout content, the clothes were shot and set to reward the male gaze, to lampoon it, or to reward the FEMALE gaze? 

Sam: As a certified male feminist, I think I’m qualified to weigh in on this. I think it’s telling the male viewer that any pleasure they might derive from watching Sue’s dances is totally fucked, since her existence is predicated on the societal structures which indirectly pushed Elisabeth to become Sue in the first place. If you’re a dude watching this and getting torqued, then your little boner is fueled by a woman destroying herself. This also lends itself to lampooning the male gaze, as you said, since it’s like a litmus test. If you’re a guy who can’t look past the obviously gorgeous woman dancing on screen, then it means you’re embodying the forces that lead to the production of something like the titular Substance. I can’t speak for the female gaze though, that is one of like three things on this earth I’m not qualified to do.

Tara: See I’m just over here being really gay but when I was not making sure my date, who only knew that this was a “body horror movie” wasn’t going to assume I was a sick freak for taking him to see this, which like I am but not in the “jerks it to the shit they write Cards Against Humanity decks about” way, more like the “cries every time she listens to ‘Be Our Guest’ from Beauty and the Beast” way, I was mouthing “Mommy? Sorry. Mommy?” at the screen in all directions. Demi Moore looks laughably perfect in this movie. They could not make that woman ugly until they brought out the Six Flags Venga Man prosthetic putty. Not only in the workout gear and the photoshop jobs done in the beginning with her head cut out of Star Magazine for her Sparkle Your Life posters, but the suits. That yellow coat. Stomp me, bitch!!! So you’re probably right but I am just a bit of a homo and that’s on me for not enjoying the larger commentary.

Sam: I can’t say I blame you, but I had to be a good boy and keep myself focused. Speaking of good boys, I’d like to touch more on Dennis Quaid’s horrendously fantastic performance. One of the craziest moments to me was shortly after Sue killed Elisabeth. At the New Year’s performance, her body began to rot, but Dennis was so fixated on the idea of his perfect starlet that he didn’t even notice her decaying right in front of him. That’s just one instance where he was blinded by his own ambitions and general horniness. In his urinal scene he’s talking about Elisabeth’s decline as an “aged” (yet fully capable and still gorgeous) woman, but eventually he doesn’t even notice that his ideal starlet, Sue, is literally falling apart in front of him at the New Year’s show. What do you make of this contrast, and what does it say about the greater Hollywood culture?

Tara: Dennis Quaid said y’all had your fun, but I am here to remind you that it’s Dennis Quaid’s Son, not Jack Quaid’s Father. It’s downright Buseyian, he might as well have started speaking in acronyms. Jack Nicholson could not have bodied this better. Honestly, and I feel heretical for saying so, but this wouldn’t have even worked as done by Nicolas Cage. Quaid is playing Vince McMahon at every stage of the meme. He’s playing Vince McMahon and quite possibly burnt a hole in his DVD of 1993’s Super Mario Brothers observing Dennis Hopper as Koopa. It’s Biff Tannen from the Trumpian second Back to the Future timeline but on happier uppers. I could have clapped with glee like a goddamn seal when he came out in that tangerine suit. God fucking bless. Although obviously YES, I would in another life like to see how RANDY Quaid chose to paint this character. 

To answer the question you actually asked me and not solely jerk it over how Dennis Quaid needs to be placed in a Brandon Cronenberg movie expeditiously, it’s that men are stupid pissbabies and will do anything to flick some chick’s nippytitties. I once told a guy friend that I had been through an extremely suicidal period of CPTSD, and he later told me that he had a semi the entire length of the conversation (meaning the semi remained intact for the duration of the chat, not that his dick was as long as the conversation itself. But good for him if that’s actually true.) It’s not a kind movie to men and I’m glad. The neighbor from across the hall, the studio executives, the source of the Substance, the VOICE of the Substance. The only kind man I feel we encounter is “Lizzie’s” high school classmate, and he is through no fault of his own stood up in the face of Elisabeth’s oppression by men. It would not have surprised me if she went to dinner after all, and he revealed he was married to an ill wife or that he had a Seinfeldian reaction to her looking a bit older in a certain overhead light. You’re wonderful, but men do not deserve rights and if I am a gender essentialist for that, y’all ain’t getting a Notes app apology for it. Fargeat said what she said with her whole chest and I for one clap my titties to hers in the highest of fives.

Sam: Yeah, I didn’t go into this looking for good boys, and aside from Frank, there were none to be seen. Frank got a raw deal, but would you say that his role was another sort of litmus test? He was a nice guy and everything, so you don’t necessarily want him to get stood up, but does directing your sympathies toward him and away from Elisabeth act as another veiled lampooning device for the boys in the crowd? 

Tara: I didn’t even consider that and you may very well be right. There were certain expectations I had that were shattered, such as where I with fervent confidence felt that the entire reality of this already warped movie was going to be molten and the New Year’s crowd at the end would not notice the misshapen menagerie of Elissuebeth’s final form and go crazy for her anyway like sheep, sold what is beautiful by a man in a shiny suit and too swept up to care. I can’t imagine you assumed the ending, who would other than the demented minds (complimentary) that greenlit this, but to end our conversation, how did you feel it might end?

Sam: I assumed that at the very least Dennis Quaid would die in some brutal fashion, but that didn’t end up being the case. From the preview, all I could tell was that there was going to be a lot of eyeballs bulging and stuff, but I genuinely had no idea what to expect. Even the spoilers didn’t tell me much of anything. I love what you said about the New Year’s scene, and the crowd’s reactions to her wretched form were so delayed that I also genuinely thought that’s how it was going to end for a little bit. Then they beheaded her. Then it grew back. All bets were off after that. The ending was perfect, even though I’m still processing it to this day. 

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Sam Runge

is a full time PhD candidate, poet and puppy parent. You can buy Intoxiating Sonnets from Bullshit Lit here.

1. Throw back a bottle of Tumsss! Poop chute riot, damn I’m sorry ‘bout your bum! 🎶