I've Made My Bed, I'll Die In It

It seems besides the point to point out that The Substance is using a sledgehammer to deliver its messages about our culture, its impossible beauty standards, and the fucking nightmare it is just trying to go through a day in 2024 without wanting to tear your own face off in the mirror. Because what else could it use? Our culture is a sledgehammer itself -- The Substance is just meeting it on its own obscene terms. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat's second feature -- following the terrific blood-soaked rape-revenge movie Revenge from 2017 -- is as subtle as a beauty queen slamming into the pavement from fifty stories up, and that is its best asset. (And typing that just now strikes me that Fargeat would be the perfect choice to finally adapt Chuck Palahniuk's book Invisible Monsters -- oh my god we need that to happen. Although it might be a little close to The Substance for it to be her next movie. Next after next, then.)

I'd often wondered how the Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? horror sub-genre of Grand Dame Guignol could be updated to our current age where a lot of people at a certain point simply don't age anymore -- they just freeze in place. Wonder no more -- Fargeat found the way, the sweet spot through where Dorian Gray meets The Swan by way of Society. The latter influence seems especially on point to me -- when Brian Yuzna's 1989 body-horror class comedy came out it never even got a proper release here in the U.S.. But now our culture has evolved -- or perhaps devolved, but this movie counts as a perk of our devolution -- to the point where one of the biggest movie stars of all time will star in a body-horror freak-out comedy that goes every ounce as hard as Society did. And it will premiere at Cannes for fuck's sake!

And its leading lady will have a gleeful audience of admirers -- me included -- shouting, "Oscar! Oscar! Oscar!" from theirs spots in the sewers. To say this is the best performance Demi Moore's ever given isn't the most demanding of claims -- she's always been more of a movie-star than an actress. Which is fine! Great! We need movie stars. Sometimes those categories overlap and movie stars are also great actors, but they don't have to for a "movie star" to be important in itself. Having the presence and glamour and inherent fascination needed to hold an audience in thrall, that's rare and beautiful and it should be celebrated.  Not always with acting awards, mind you -- box office, success, fourteen houses including one for just your dolls. These are plenty just rewards.

That said, while I won't say I'll eat my shoe if Demi Moore is nominated for an Oscar for a movie where... well everything that happens in the last act of The Substance happens... I don't anticipate that happening. She'll have to make due I think with the praise of being the cool pick -- the one too cool and too too out there for the Academy, even if the Academy has proven itself a little riskier than in the past recently. But what am I even talking about awards for? The Substance is one fuck-ton of a movie, man!

An aria of self-loathing shrieked to the rafters, The Substance might be two and a half hours long but unlike its characters this thing has no filler -- the redundancy of its ritualistic self-abuse is methodical. Fargeat wants us to really soak in this chemical peel until our own skin stings and sloughs off; until we too can step out of our former self like a rubbery pink nightgown has fallen to the floor around our feet. It demands time for the hatred that Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) feels for herself to bake itself around us like a crust, hard and uncanny. We gotta sit in this shit and stew, man. And in exchange Fargeat makes the experience a pop-colored candy buffet of goofiness slamming up hard against the gore -- it's like spinning, starting off slowly, slowly, but by the end we're flying so fast we're dizzy, puking, elated and half-dead but never more alive.

The Substance is a movie I can see myself putting on in the background of my life for the entire rest of it. It's grotesque, obscene, hilarious, meanspirited, gorgeous, heartbreaking, exquisite. It's an M&M with a cockroach inside; a long trail of innards curled up like a golden crown. To hold its excesses aginast it is to deny the excesses of its targets. Sometimes a punch to the face is needed. And I want to marry The Substance, punches and all, if it will have me. I promise I will be good to you, movie! Punch me unto nirvana!