The Real Brilliance of "The Substance"
Turning the hag trope on its head.
When I first started to see ads for The Substance on the subway, the double pupil in Demi Moore’s eye was enough to make me shudder. Horror is not my genre. Nurses ask if I’m going to pass out while they draw my blood. Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore feature film is staunchly in the body horror camp, and I made plans to not only *not* watch it, but to actively avoid the marketing, which I found unsettling. However, there was no escape, and as someone who has decided that she wants to see beauty culture for what it is, I realized I was probably missing out by writing it off. The one thing that intrigued me to no end: the use of the hag trope.
As a child, I grew up on a steady diet of Disney movies, but one sticks out among the rest: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I can distinctly recall the evil stepmother peering into her looking glass, asking, “Magic mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” All is well because she’s the fairest—until she isn’t.
“Lips red as the rose, hair black as ebony, skin white as snow.” Though she has never so much as menaced her stepmother, who rules an entire kingdom, Snow White, by the default of being pretty, has made the queen a villain. And what do villains do? Descend into a jealous rage. The rage is so potent she orders, in contemporary parlance, a hitman to take Snow White out in the most gruesome way—heart delivered back to Her Majesty in a jeweled box as proof of death. When that fails, the queen resorts to drastic measures. A poisoned apple and a disguise as a ghastly, hideous and nightmare-inducing hag, on whom only Snow White could take pity. And in the span of an hour and 23 minutes, I learned, at age seven, that I could never grow old—because being old meant that this was how society would look at me. (I also had nightmares for weeks, the hag’s face haunting my unconsciousness.)
Since the release of Snow White—the highest-grossing animated film of all time—and for centuries before it, the “hag” trope has existed, framing old women as ugly, evil, murderous entities out to get the young, beautiful girl. From classic Disney princess movies to contemporary horror films like X, the archetypal hag has always been cast as a one-dimensional, malicious figure who, at her worst, is a plot device to kill, deceive and hurt.
In Hansel & Gretel, the witch attempts to cook the children in her oven. Snow White’s stepmother wants to kill the competition. Who’s casting the heinous spells to put Princess Aurora to eternal sleep, haunting Jack Torrance at the Overlook Hotel or trying to murder their pretty and more successful sister in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Washed-up, decrepit and/or ugly old women. In a 180-twist, this is what The Substance does right—and we’ve got the villain all wrong.
Heroine (or anti-heroine) in question: Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an aging Hollywood starlet who hosts a popular aerobics television show. Her work is her sole identity—she has no friends. On her 50th birthday, she is unceremoniously fired by the show’s executive, to be replaced with someone younger. (Really a code for: Someone hotter.) After getting into a car accident, Elisabeth is given the opportunity to try a black market drug, “the substance”. Its premise: “You. Only better in every way. Younger. More beautiful. More perfect.” The rule: You must switch bodies every seven days, no exceptions. She can’t resist, and activating “the substance” leads to the creation of her alter ego: young, pretty, sensual Sue. But Sue soon becomes greedy, disregarding the schedule, leading Elisabeth’s body to age rapidly. The culmination of the film is her complete transformation into an old woman. The figure is hunched, bones protruding, every joint stiff and swollen. Elisabeth’s face—it evoked that of the hag in Snow White so vividly part of me wanted to shudder, wondering how much sleep I would be losing in the coming weeks.
At first, it seems that Hag Elisabeth is the evil one. She is, after all, the one who attempts to terminate Sue. But, the key word here is “attempts”. In the end, Elisabeth cannot kill her younger alter ego, despite the fact that Sue’s flagrant disregard for the rules are the reason for Elisabeth’s horrifying transformation. Instead, realizing all the potential Sue represents for the both of them, Elisabeth panics and resurrects Sue with her own blood, despite the fact that she is basically dying herself.
Hag Elisabeth isn’t the villain—in fact, I would argue that she’s the real victim. Unlike other hags, the only crime she is guilty of committing is wanting to be seen, wanting to live—by any means necessary. To know that she matters despite her age. Throughout the film, Fargeat employs a motif in the form of Elisabeth’s vibrant yellow coat, which both she and Sue wear, underlining the fact that they are one and the same. Elisabeth is routinely ignored as she walks down the street; Sue never fails to turn heads. In watching how her world repeatedly dehumanizes her, culminating in a bloody beating to the death, viewers have no choice but to acknowledge Hag Elisabeth’s humanity and universal desires that we all yearn for.
So if she isn’t the villain, who is? At first, I was quick to say, Sue is. She’s the one disobeying the rules, and her overuse of “the substance” ultimately leads to a monstrous “ElisaSue” so grotesque it would give any vaudeville act a run for its money. However, I kept recalling to mind one chilling line repeated several times throughout the movie: “You are one.” So in some meta way, Elisabeth, through Sue, is doing this to herself.
We live in a world where beauty literally makes us human. At the end of the film, monster ElisaSue is able to fool TV executives and the audience because she covers up her distorted face with a photograph of the still-beautiful 50-year-old Elisabeth Sparkle. The illusion is unconvincing, but the presence of beauty makes us delusional. And that’s when I realized, we are the villains.
The studio employees, the execs, the makeup artists, everyone who cheered for monster ElisaSue while she was “covered” by a photograph of Elisabeth were the villains. Elisabeth/Sue took the desperate and punishing risk of activating “the substance” a second time because she felt that she had no choice. Be pretty and be human, or be ugly and be a literal monster. They go hand-in-hand—not just in this satire but in real life.
The one thing from The Substance that sticks with me is the commentary it makes at the beginning in the now infamous shrimp scene. “At 50, it stops,” TV exec Harvey (Dennis Quaid) declares. “What stops?” Elisabeth asks. “Um, you know, the, um…” Harvey trails off, unable to finish his sentence, all while grotesquely masticating a pile of shrimp. Hollywood and beauty culture will always tell us that to get old is to, at best, become irrelevant and at worst, to become a psychopath personifying death, scaring the living daylights out of the rest of us. But that’s the thing: As Harvey aptly demonstrates, your life isn’t actually over after a certain age—there is literally no good reason for it to be. And that’s the brilliance of The Substance, arguing that the “hag” isn’t the villain, she’s the victim who deserves her humanity. We’re the guilty ones.
Image courtesy of IMDb
What I’m Reading
Conversations With Friends, Sally Rooney
Persuasion, Jane Austen (Austen turns 250 this year!)
The Vegetarian, Han Kang
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
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The Real Reason Demi Moore Deserves an Oscar for "The Substance" (a version of this essay on PureWow)
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Genius!!!!