The Substance as Revenge Fantasy

Good for her.

Dear Fan,

Thank you for being here.

I watched The Substance. Me, a person who notoriously can’t handle gore or violence or horror. I watched the movie that has gained such a reputation for being violent and hard to watch that even my partner, who normally watches all the movies I can’t without batting an eye, is avoiding it. And you know what? I was totally cool with it. Because, here’s the thing, it’s not the actual gore that upsets me in movies, it’s the emotional weight that normally goes with it. The Substance, while being extremely violent and just plain gross, didn’t leave me feeling disturbed or sad for the protagonist as she underwent her monstrous transformation – instead, it had me rooting for her. That’s right, become so revolting that all the beautiful people cower in fear! You go, girl!

And that feeling got me thinking. On paper, The Substance sounds like a tragic cautionary tale. Beautiful woman makes it big in Hollywood. Hollywood rejects her as she ages. She takes matters into her own hands and becomes beautiful and youthful again through any means necessary. She goes too far. Beauty and youth are replaced by rapid aging and full-on grotesqueness of the body. Hollywood elites cower in fear and disgust. She dies. That’s a sad story, right?

Well, I don’t think it is.

I think it’s a really appealing fantasy. A revenge fantasy, to be exact.

The Substance opens with a drawn-out sequence that involves a close-up of a raw egg yolk, which then splits into two yolks. It’s creepy and it’s gross and it sets up the whole premise of the movie. For me, and likely for a lot of movie-watchers, it immediately brings to mind a famous quote from Alfred Hitchcock:

“I'm frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes … have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting.”

Hitchcock is king-daddy of insufferable Hollywood men. Talented, certainly. I love Hitchcock movies. But his whole thing was making scary movies with hot blonde women in mortal peril, and he apparently treated those hot blonde women very poorly, including intentionally traumatizing them in order to get real fear on film for his movies, and sexually harassing them offscreen. The opening of The Substance feels like an intentional “fuck you” to Hitchcock and the Hollywood old boys’ club he represents. It’s very much a “We are the weirdos, Mister” moment, like “we’re the pretty Hollywood girls you’ve built a career on terrifying and now we’re going to scare you, Mr. Hitchcock.”

The Substance is, unequivocally, a film for the girls. The fashion is great and bright and fun and not for the male gaze, even when it’s pretending to be. The aesthetic is drenched in campy ‘80s nostalgia and glitter. Even the gross parts feel tailored to the girl gaze – as Sue first emerges and barfs up a neon green liquid, I find myself muttering “brat summer” under my breath. The most difficult parts to watch all revolve around body mutilation for the sake of beauty, and what’s girlier than that?

The pressure from society to maintain our appearance (women in particular, but men too more and more) can feel like a chokehold you can’t get out of, and even if you did get out of it you’d surely be reviled and fired from your girlboss job. Everywhere you look there’s a new fitness trend that’s proven to flatten your tummy and tone your arms, a new product that’s finally going to tighten your skin enough for you to be worthy of love, a new medical procedure that will reverse all that pesky aging your dumb body keeps doing against your will. It’s gotten to the point where just to keep up with the expectations of what an adult woman should look like, your daily routine needs to include a Lagree class, hot yoga, a facial, manicure, pedicure,full-body wax, shapewear that feels like a boa constrictor wrapped around your midsection, full hair and glam (but opt for the no-makeup makeup look, we’re clean girls after all), subtle lip fillers, buccal fat removal, an arsenal of serums, retinols, and creams, and a cold plunge for good measure. It’s a lot, and if you’re opting into even a portion of this lifestyle, the idea of ditching the hyaluronic acid and tummy-control Spanx can feel like a delicious rebellion.

It seems to me that this type of rebellion is gaining popularity lately, especially among women, and it can be observed in The Substance as well as the everyday use of terms like “goblin mode” and the plethora of memes depicting sea hags and bog witches plastered all over the internet with captions like “icon behaviour,” “she is everything,” and “how your email finds me.” The monstrous feminine figures that used to scare little girls have become aspirational. You see a picture of a witch with warts on her face stirring a cauldron in her cabin in the woods (which she owns! She’s probably even paid off the mortgage) and you think “if only.”

When you’re watching The Substance, you’re most likely rooting for the aging Elisabeth (Demi Moore), not the perfect-and-perky Sue (Margaret Qualley). Elisabeth is at her most endearing when she enters what I have dubbed her “hag era,” when she has accepted the fact that her body is aging and decaying rapidly to provide Sue with eternal youth, and she starts taking her vengeance on Sue (and on herself, they’re the same person…it’s complicated, go watch the movie for yourself. But don’t if you have a needle phobia). The vengeance comes in the form of, basically, being ugly and gross. She messes up the apartment, cooks and eats fattening foods, curses at the TV while squeezing raw meat between her wrinkled fingers, and lets her coarse grey hair become a tangled birds’ nest. She is Baba Yaga, she is Strega Nona, but she is also kind of just me on a Sunday. She is going goblin mode.

This is the part of the movie where peals of laughter and cheers started to naturally occur among the group of friends I was watching with. We love a hag. She’s free, she’s powerful, she’s showing that pretty little twit who’s boss. And, later, when Elisabeth and Sue merge into their monstrous form, you feel a little thrill. Sure, this is her (their?) biggest fear, but now she can let go of the beauty standards that shackled her her whole life. She terrifies the casting directors who controlled her fate before. She is in control now, if only for a beautiful fleeting moment.

I’m not saying most people would genuinely jump at the opportunity to turn into a blobby monster with decaying flesh and tits growing out of your head, but I am saying it’s fun to fantasize about being so ugly and ungovernable it scares everyone who ever made us feel bad about ourselves and makes them cry and pee their mean little pants.

Or is it just me?

Vengefully,

Rose