I can’t help but look at my own face. I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember.
At my high school in a small town in America, I was voted “the student most likely to be caught looking in the mirror” by the graduating class. It’s funny, a little embarrassing, but accurate. I still have a mirrored phone case to check my lipstick, skin, and hair. And as I get older, I notice that small changes, wrinkles, and fatigue are more obvious and permanent than before. So, if you’re like me, you start thinking about injectables. If you’re like me, you receive them on a regular basis, but with mixed reactions from your friends and family. If you’re like me, you really don’t want to quit.
Elizabeth Sparkle, the protagonist of Coralie Ferguito’s new feminist body horror film The Substance, knows a thing or two about the habits of self-surveillance that lead to oblivion. She spends so much time obsessing over her appearance that it detracts from almost every other priority in her life. The world around her told her to look out for her, but it was more than that. The phone call came from inside the house. Demi Moore plays Elizabeth, an anachronistic Oscar-winning actress in a cruelly patriarchal entertainment world who works tirelessly on a TV fitness show aimed at middle-aged women. However, she will reach 50 years old and be replaced by a more vibrant and radiant version of herself. There, Elisabeth tries a mysterious and incredible experimental beauty treatment known as Substance. This allows you to live your life as a young and attractive version of yourself for seven days, after which you will need to replace it again. .
There is a sense that this is a reckless choice. The product’s origins are murky, its headquarters are in a dingy basement downtown, and its color is a ghoulish neon green. And it is administered by injection, not by chance. It’s no coincidence that this treatment has little real effect or appears to be a bit of a scam. While Sue (Margaret Qualley, playing Elizabeth’s younger avatar) is behind the wheel, Elizabeth seems to only feel a shadow of the younger version’s experiences. It gets her tantalizingly close, pressing her face against the window to become a more perfect version of herself, which slowly drives her crazy with jealousy.
Many women, including those younger than Moore’s character, try new and promising beauty tweaks, willfully ignoring the risks to their health, mental health, and even life. After all, beauty has its own power, and if you have relied on it for a long time, feeling the loss of that power is significant. What The Substance emphasizes is how addictive and dangerous this urge to keep “fixing” imagined flaws really is. Even as Sue inserts a needle into the infected wound for personal gain, destroying what remains of Elisabeth’s body and life, Elisabeth can’t seem to bring the process to an end. She’s too caught up in the hope that she might finally find perfection.
Reviews of Substance often point to its emptiness, a frustrating lack of depth to its characters and their motivations. My contention is that it is precisely the superficial aspects that are important. This is a warning. Check out the production design of Elizabeth’s luxury LA flat. Huge photos of her, toned thighs in unforgiving latex, dolphin-smooth, silky black hair, and clay-perfect face fill her living room. There is little else to note. Big windows, sofas, dusty prizes in cases. There are almost no traces of inner life, books and paintings. The kitchen is small and the bathroom is strangely cavernous and stark white, like a laboratory. After all, appetite must be suppressed and the physical reality must be monitored and adjusted. It is never enough and requires constant and exhausting labor from morning to night. Nevertheless, the body continues to age. It causes sagging, dimples, and unwanted hair growth. If you cannot accept this fact, beauty treatments are no longer self-care. In fact, they may self-harm.
After several years of uneventful and well-received cosmetic injections, my body began to rebel on a cellular level. I developed an allergic reaction with swelling, itching, and pain that required all of the product to be dissolved. My face was noticeably mottled and asymmetrical. And like Elisabeth, I made a reckless choice. I went back and had a slightly different treatment and took quite an unwise risk in doing so. I couldn’t stand the idea of ββleaving alone. So please listen. The first time I saw Elizabeth’s back literally tear open and her perfect, vibrant, youthful avatar completely pop out of her body, I may have been horrified, but on some level I understood. It’s done.
After watching this movie, a friend of mine said to me: “This is for all the girls out there who at some point in their lives got frustrated and hit their head with a hairbrush while getting ready.” I don’t know if I’ve done that myself, but I’m sure you can resist that urge right away. I understood what I felt was driving it. The feeling that something isn’t quite right, even if you adjust your straps or reapply your mascara. There’s an anger that comes from that. In one scene, Elizabeth prepares for a date with a nerdy friend who clearly loves her. She looks very beautiful in a red cocktail dress. However, she cannot stop fixing her hair and plays with her appearance, comparing it to the rich image of Sue, with her 25-year-old mouth exposed. She wears too much makeup. Then she gives up. She doesn’t rub it out.
Some female viewers found the film’s message depressing, wondering if decades of feminism would turn women like Elisabeth into relics of a bad old era, or if the subject matter It’s understandable that some people may have come away expecting that the methods of expression in the movies they treated would be conventional and mechanical. Pressure on beauty standards. But as far as I can see, these standards are still very constant. Cyborg makeup, undetectable fillers, glass skin, TikTok ageism, and AI beauty pageants. All of these trends emphasize the same desire for thinness, femininity, facial conformity, and symmetry, which are only exacerbated by the thirst for technological innovation and capitalism. We are inundated with more perfect images (like Falgetto’s intentionally disturbing, Sue-peeping music video) and subjected to a normalization of aesthetic treatment that we, as good feminists, opt out of. facing more pressure. That’s before you factor in the fear that something will go wrong, which often does. Permanent bumpy or overdone lips that bleed and burst. And you will definitely be judged for it too.
Admittedly, my experience with injectables didn’t turn me into a slimy, blood-spewing, teeth-spewing mutant like Elizabeth and Sue. But Fergito’s cautionary tale is enough to scare anyone out of their wits. The urge to win the seemingly impossible battle against aging drives the protagonist of Substance to ruin. After all, she is trying to straighten her hair in front of the mirror, despite the extra eyeballs sprouting from her back. The vicious cycle of taming, glossing, and slimming women’s bodies is endless, so Fargeat chose to end it the other way around. There is a kind of retaliatory and violent expulsion of bodily fluids that brings the truth of the human body to a kamikaze-like conclusion. It’s disgusting, because we all have wrinkles and age spots and cellulite and are disgusted, but thank God for it. The alternative is a vacant luxury apartment. A wooden hairbrush that attaches to your head. A sharp needle stuck in my spine. Or you have a foreign object on your face that penetrates under your skin and makes you feel itchy. What could be more scary than that?
Matter (2024) pic.twitter.com/yGy9K3z9iM
β π€ ππππ ππ ππππππ π€ (@horrorlogy) October 6, 2024
Source link
