As vices go, maybe a little vanity isn’t the worst sin. A slight botulism risk is a small price to pay for shaving a few years off one’s forehead. (Shout out to the wonders of Botox, seriously.) More dramatically, we can partake of couture vitamin regimens. Six-figure full-body scans. Methelyne blue. But are there limits? How far will we go?
How about injecting a syrupy chartreuse goop that promises “a more perfect you?” That’s the construct of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, which opened in theaters last week after winning best screenplay at Cannes. The film turns a neon-hued lens on the price of pursuing physical perfection. The result is a disgusting delight, oozing Cronenberg-style goo and gore with an extra side of camp.
Of course, the narrative behind The Substance’s narrative is the triumphant return to the screen of Demi Moore. Superlatives for big, brash performances fly fast and furious at this time of year, especially among those of us who believe actresses capable of turning in said performances are among our greatest natural resources. (See: Natalie Portman in Jackie; Lupita Nyong’o in Us; Bette Davis in, well, pretty much everything.) Moore is spectacular to behold, and not only for her bare-it-all-at 61 bravery. Whether buck naked or bath robed, she brilliantly drives home Elisabeth’s isolation, loneliness and eternal yearning for the spotlight she’s aged out of. It’s all very Norma Desmond meets Dorian Gray. As for a fashion angle, who doesn’t love a great piece of outerwear? When not naked, Moore pulls off much of her magic in a striking yellow coat that she tosses on with super-hero gusto in some scenes and attempts to disappear into in others. It’s one of cinema’s great garment performances.
The film centers on Moore’s Elisabeth, once a celebrated movie star. She is let go from her gig as a celebrity aerobics instructor, to be replaced by a younger model. Devastated, Elizabeth turns to “the substance,” which she learns about from a remarkably youthful doctor during a post-car accident ER visit. The science-schmience here involves some DNA-splitting that brings forth a fresh-faced, fresh-bossomed younger version from the injectee’s spine. The young one has a week to move through the world while her older body languishes in stasis, in Elizabeth’s case, on a pristine white bathroom floor. (Why Elisabeth doesn’t opt for more comfortable repose is not addressed.) Elisabeth’s doppelganger, Sue, played by Margaret Qualley, eagerly dons her primogeniteuse’s legwarmers and leotard on the way to a meteoric rise to fame. That the relationship between the two women takes a sour turn hardly qualifies as a spoiler; “older woman exists copacetically with the nubile gollum she’s birthed” isn’t exactly a movie.
Moore brilliantly taps into Elisabeth’s pathological fear of aging, convincing even skeptical viewers of why a woman still so aesthetically blessed would resort to such a bizarre and harrowing procedure. (As an aside, perhaps I took the wrong lesson from this film. But should a serum become available that allows one a temporary look-like-Demi-Moore situation, I’m all in for the necessary spinal-column splitting.)
The Substance’s substance has a very of-the-moment marketing vibe. The product is available for pick-up in a DTC locker and comes wrapped in minimalist packaging with a bold sans serif font reminiscent of Instagram-friendly wellness brands. But such aesthetic modernity aside, the notion of taking the quest for physical perfection to monstrous ends is nothing new.
The real-life sixteenth-century Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory holds a special place among notorious bygone nobles. A legendary heroine of horror, Báthory was prosecuted for upwards of 300 murders. In 1729, the priestly scholar László Turóczi detailed the case in his Tragica Historica, ascribing a chilling motive for the killings. He claimed that the sadistic, toxically vain Báthory once beat a servant girl severely. The blood splatter covered Báthory, who became convinced that it enhanced her looks. She then slaughtered virgins by the hundredfold and bathed in their blood. While most historians regard this claim as dubious (and some debunk the murder accusations as politically motivated), all it takes is one Jesuit writer to suggest that you indulge in the occasional hemoglobin dip to get you labeled “The Bloody Countess” for all eternity.
Báthory’s unconventional skincare preferences inspired decades of vampire lore. In Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Carmilla, blood functions as a sort of collagen for the undead, helping to keep one’s face fresh post-mortem. The novella, which predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years, tells the tale of a beguiling vampiress with a penchant for seducing and feeding on virgin ingenues.
Typical of her kind, Carmilla hides her immortal status, returning to her coffin to rest between episodes of erotically charged villainy. The suspicious father of a potential victim links Carmilla to a woman who supposedly died 150 years earlier. He leads a search party to the woman’s tomb, determined to stop Carmilla’s horrors once and for all. When he opens the coffin, he indeed finds not a decayed, century-old corpse, but Carmilla, covered in blood and still “tinted with the warmth of life,” “limbs perfectly flexible” with “no cadaverous smell.” The morality of feeding on naive girls aside, from a beauty standpoint, results are results. As to whether the blood-magic approach to wellness is pure sci-fi fiction, there are some who believe otherwise. Consider real-life tech entrepreneur and freakshow Bryan Johnson’s obsessive anti-aging experimentations with “young plasma” infusions, including a batch from his teenaged son.
It’s not just tech titans, vampires, and aging movie stars who seek physical perfection, no matter the cost. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birth-Mark,” a “man of science” becomes both victim and victimizer in its pursuit. Aylmer is blessed both intellectually and maritally, yet too pigheaded to realize his good fortune. His wife, Georgina, is kind-hearted and gorgeous, perfect but for one small flaw, a hand-shaped birthmark on her cheek. He becomes obsessed with it. One night, he dreams of cutting it from her flesh with a scalpel, only to find that it connects to her heart. This subconscious warning does nothing to temper his distaste for the mark. Lest one think this an understandable sentiment in a pre-Marilyn Monroe/Cindy Crawford era, even the household staff consider Aylmer a prick about the whole thing. “If she were my wife,” quips one servant, “I’d never part with the birthmark.”
Georgina notes that the offending blemish can be covered “with the tips of two small fingers.” But she is a Hawthorne heroine, and too good for passive aggression. Ultimately, she gives into her husband’s desires and allows him to attempt to remove the spot regardless of the consequences. “Danger is nothing to me,” she proclaims, “for life, while this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and disgust,—life is a burden which I would fling down with joy.”
Okay, so that annoying selflessness is another imperfection. But it suits Aylmer’s needs. He proceeds with a series of experiments, sometimes without Georgina’s explicit consent, before finally concocting a “gold-colored” potion (a Substance, if you will) that he thinks will finally out, out the damned spot. Labeling the serum an “elixer of life,” he gives it to Georgina to drink. Shock of all shocks, it ends poorly. The mark fades away, but so too, does Georgina. She passes prettily into the great beyond, still attempting to kowtow to her terrible husband, saying, “You have aimed loftily; you have done nobly. Do not repent that with so high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the earth could offer.”
While “The Birth-Mark” has none of the flamboyant splatters and splurting of Fargeat’s stomach-churning movie, its account of an arrogant man preying on a woman’s insecurities is no less gross. His Aylmer may be even more villainous than Carmilla or the sensationalized Báthory. It’s one thing to get murdery for the sake of one’s own glow-up; to gaslight someone else into dying for beauty is even nastier work. Hawthorne attaches a moralistic coda; his story, he offers, reminds us to “find the perfect future in the present.”
Easy for a nineteenth-century moralist to say. He and his goody-two-shoes gals didn’t have to cope with today’s never-ending Instagram youth quake. Today, if an ever-gorgeous glam goddess a la Demi Moore can’t resist the siren song of a experimental injectable, can the rest of us hope to claim indifference to the promise of a syringe full of filler?