The Substance has no substance

I caved and watched it after all the hullabaloo with Demi Moore winning a Golden Globe. I hated it.

When I first heard about the film “The Substance” I thought it sounded interesting. An over-the-hill celebrity desperate to recapture her youthful appearance and the attention and validation that came with that? Sign me up. A rumination on the way that we as women are valued more for our appearance than anything else, and internalize that? Sure, I’m interested! The way that Hollywood in particular is ruthless in valuing women solely on their looks . . . and the harm to women who aspire to those unwell starlets chasing an impossible beauty standard? Yup. Sure.

As a 55 year-old-woman, I think about these things. Some. In a fleeting fashion not obsessively. In reality, most of us normies aren’t out here obsessing over our looks. We’re busy. With kids and jobs and our work isn’t dependent on our looks and our partners like how we look and don’t care that we are aging all that much other than the fact that it means the years that lie ahead are fewer than the ones behind.

But it’s a subject of interest. As I’ve written here, I had an eating disorder as a teen and reading Naomi Wolf’s “The Beauty Myth” — a non-fiction book about how despite all the gains women have made, the beauty industry and societal ideas about female beauty keep us all trapped and wasting our time and hating ourselves as we reach for unattainable ideals — was life changing.

But, as I went on to read about “The Substance” it was described as a “horror film” and I lost interest. Actually it is called a “body horror film” and I don’t even know what that is but a quick Google search tells me it is “a horror sub-genre that depicts the unnatural or grotesque transformation of the human body.” Blecht. No thank you.

I don’t like gore as entertainment. Not since I had kids which sounds corny, I know. But it’s the truth. I enjoyed it sometimes in my 20s. I loved “Reservoir Dogs,” (which isn’t horror but it is undeniably gory) when I saw it in 1992. But somewhere around the birth of my first child in 2000, blood and gore and maiming held up as spectacle just felt like time wasted.

So I didn’t see “The Substance” when it came out, despite some interest.

I’ve liked Demi Moore since her brat pack days. I loved her as Jules in St. Elmo’s Fire. Though it came out in 1985 when I was still in high school, I proceeded to watch it on repeat (tapes from Blockbuster) into the 90s. When Jules sits in a room, drapes blowing, coming down off of we don’t really know what drug and says to Billy (Rob Lowe’s character) who is also a mess but attempting to rescue her “I never thought I’d be so tired at 22,” I related. The raspy voice, the exhaustion, all of it. I was tired for different reasons at 22 — a decade and a half of gymnastics, abusive coaches and the lot of it. When I went to college I felt like I was going to a retirement home. I loved Jules. And the movie.

And the latest Demi iteration has been intriguing. She doesn’t act much after a decade long stint as the highest paid actress in Hollywood in the 1990s with films like “Ghost” (1990), “Striptease” (1996) and “GI Jane” (1997). After divorcing Bruce Willis, she married Ashton Kutcher, 16 years her junior, in 2005. Which felt a whole lot like chasing youth in relationship form. That didn’t last — he was a stepdad at 26 to Moore’s 3 tween/pre-tween daughters, and they tried to have kids but Moore miscarried. A lot for any marriage to endure. He moved on to same-aged pastures and married Mila Kunis, his co-star in That 70s Show, and went on to have 2 kids of his own.

Reportedly, after their marriage ended, Moore relapsed into alcoholism, then recovered. And since before “The Substance,” it sort of seemed like Demi was content to be a mom to her adult daughters, the friendly and participatory ex-wife of Bruce Willis who now suffers from frontotemporal dementia and to make an appearance here and there in a film, including the documentary “Brats” by Andrew McCarthy, where she looks back on her rise to fame in her youth. I liked this idea of a contemplative Demi.

But, she also appears obsessed with her appearance. She doesn’t seem to have let that go. She looks stunning, don’t get me wrong. Whatever work she gets done is high quality. Not so overdone that she looks ridiculous. But make no mistake, it’s a lot of work.

And so to be positioned now — and position herself — as the hero for women abandoning the male gaze is preposterous. I mean, have you ever seen a headline more out of synch than this one in The New York Times? Sorry, that is not a woman done with the male gaze. That is a woman chasing it with all her might.

While I didn’t like the movie at all — I found it comedically gory (I guess not so weird she won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical) and wildly inconsistent, and in truth, kind of dated overall — I can’t really disentangle the movie itself from Moore’s person. While she is being celebrated for “teaching Hollywood a lesson” about not valuing women solely for their looks, she is the embodiment of conceding to a system that values women for their looks. She hasn’t fought back. She hasn’t let herself age. She is furthering the ideals of this fucked up system by surgically altering her appearance to the point of absurdity. Just because she is doing it better than Madonna doesn’t mean she is abandoning the male gaze.

Back to the movie.

Moore spends half the movie naked and unnecessarily so, in my opinion, and it feels like she (and the director) are saying “look at how hot she is. You don’t look like this at 42, let alone 62.” And it leaves us all feeling inferior as we look like Gollum by comparison and it ends up furthering that same system the director and Moore claim to be criticizing.

So that is my main fault with the film, which I realize is caught up in the star and the aura surrounding her and not the film itself but it’s all part of the story of this film, especially now that she has won a Golden Globe for her role and is predicted to be the lead contender for an Oscar.

It’s all bullshit. Moore is the system. Moore is the problem! While pretending not only to be the solution but also the victim. Make it make sense, please.

But here are some of the reasons I didn’t like the actual movie:

1. It doesn’t make any sense. The premise is that Moore’s character — a former Hollywood star and now fitness guru ala Jane Fonda in the 80s, replete with leg warmers and everything, named Elisabeth Sparkle — is being cast aside by her network for being too old. She accepts a mysterious syringe from a stranger which she is told will recapture her better, younger self and all the fame and adulation that comes with that. She accepts. And thus “Sue,” her younger alter ego is born. They are meant to alternate every other week in the world. The one not in the world for her down week lies motionless on the bathroom floor awaiting her turn. Is Sparkle conscious as Sue? Does Elisabeth get to enjoy the spoils of Sue-ness? If not, what’s the point of the whole affair? It’s not clear, as Sue seems surprised at how Elisabeth has spent her time when it’s her turn (she is left to clean up a chicken-eating binge). Wouldn’t that mean Sparkle is also not conscious of Sue’s experiences and if so what is the point of any of it!!??

2. The whole thing has an over-the-top dream like quality. But there is no consistency. Elisabeth Sparkle feels like Jane Fonda fitness lady from the 1980s. But there are elements that actually feel straight out of the studio system which “owned” its starlets in the 1930s and 1940s. And “Sue” who emerges from Moore’s back on the bathroom floor feels straight out of the 1990s with her Girls Gone Wild dance moves. Maybe none of this matters. But it annoyed me.

3. The film doesn’t feel relevant to now. If the visual and aesthetic reference points are all from the 80s and 90s, does any of it still apply today? Yes, in a sense. But now I feel women are their own worst enemy. As stars buy into a system that insists they must be young and beautiful to work, if they concede by altering their appearance relentlessly they are part of the problem. And to be clear, there are those who resist. They are not Moore or Nicole Kidman or J.Lo. They are Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Kristin Scott Thomas and Olivia Coleman. Coleman is 50 — a full 12 years younger than Moore — and looks her age. And she’s won an Oscar, 2 Emmy’s and 3 Golden Globes. Isn’t Coleman sort of proof that this whole issue of women aging in Hollywood is less of an issue than it used to be? She looks her age, gets amazing roles and wins tons of awards.

4. Sparkle seems to have no friends, no children, no family. And perhaps this is the key reason she isn’t grounded in anything real. It feels relevant and, frankly, unrealistic. Though I guess the film isn’t based on anything “realistic.” So whatever.

5. It’s just stupid. I can never get the last twenty minutes of my life back having watched this gore fest. To the surprise of no one, Sparkle prefers being Sue — despite us not knowing whether or not she is conscious and actually experiencing being Sue while she lies motionless on the bathroom floor on her week “off” — and violates the “rules” of The Substance, spending more and more time as Sue. The punishment is becoming a disgusting, deformed creature who ultimately makes its appearance on Sue’s big New Year’s night TV debut. The hunchback, earless, toothless beast has Moore’s face poking out of its side and spews blood onto the audience for what felt like an hour. That is the punishment for chasing youth. You become even more disgusting than if you’d just accepted aging. While true, the message lacked some nuance.

I guess I don’t like fantasy or fanciful or anything serving as a simile or metaphor. I like real stories with real people with real problems and real, nuanced messaging.

A more interesting film would have been about an aging former starlet who realizes the folly of chasing youth, but does it anyway. There is internal conflict with presenting an image of confident aging while secretly chasing youth in surgical form and pretending otherwise. And Moore would have been a perfect fit for that film. Life meeting art.

But that would require an acknowledgement of weakness rather than repositioning herself as the hero fighting back against an unjust system. And that is not something any Hollywood star is likely to do. It’s all image in the end. And the “image” now being projected by Moore, however false (like all images), is as feminist icon/hero embracing aging (ha) and all that is real and rejecting the system that would have women believe they are only of value for their youthful beauty.