Notes on The Substance
Spoilers, as usual. If you haven't seen this movie, please be warned that it is full of body horror and is, to be blunt, gross.
There has been a lot of ink spilled about last year’s film The Substance, directed by Coralie Fargeat, and nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Demi Moore. Moore portrays Elizabeth Sparkle, a former A-list actor who hosts a Jane Fonda-style exercise show and who, on her 50th birthday, is sacked by the slimy, if cartoonish, producer that runs the show (portrayed by Dennis Quaid). Upon her exit, a nurse presents her with an option to replenish her youth: an injectable treatment called “The Substance.”
In fact, it does not replenish her youth as much as reproduce it. Through a series of gruesome images, which I will not describe in case you are reading this over your lunch, Sparkle uses The Substance to create a younger and more beautiful version of herself, who names herself Sue (played wonderfully by Margaret Qualley). Critically, though, the procedure requires that Sue and Elizabeth switch roles every seven days: only one can be conscious at a time and never for more than the allotted seven days. Sue, obsessed with her youthfulness and beauty, violates this rule time and time again, resulting in some of the best (read: most disgusting) body horror I have seen.
The movie is primarily about issues with gender, body image, and our cultural obsession with youth. However, I think crucial to these issues is Sparkle’s inherent loneliness. Watching the movie, her lack of community struck me. It depicts her as having no real friends or family. At one point, she runs into a classmate from high school and sets up a date with him. In perhaps the most impactful scene of the movie, she goes through the agonizing process of getting ready for the date, constantly changing her makeup and outfit, and ultimately decides to stay home. This scene, a testament to Moore’s talent, happens after Sue is brought to life and shows her to be completely alone.
Loneliness, of course, is all the rage right now. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned Americans about the “epidemic of loneliness” in 2023, arguing that the high rates of loneliness amongst all Americans, especially younger ones, is closely linked to significant physical illnesses. Just last month, The Atlantic published a piece by journalist Derek Thompson criticizing our anti-social preferences for alone time. As Thompson points out in an interview on Fresh Air, loneliness may not be the problem, when defined on technical terms. Loneliness is the emotional gap between the amount of social connection you have and how much social connection you desire. This gap can be healthy and is in fact pro-social: it leads you to get off your couch and go outside to meet people. More problematically, he claims, our neighbors and compatriots simply do not desire the same amount of connection we once did: we are ever more comfortable with solitude and often prefer it.
Why does this matter? If people prefer to be alone, shouldn’t we let them?1 I certainly don’t think we ought to coerce people into socializing.2 But we should be concerned nonetheless. Murthy points out the effects on our physical health: “The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.”
Moreover, students of the social sciences will be familiar with Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’s groundbreaking research on the decline of civic institutions in the latter half of the 20th century. Putnam’s research shows that there is a strong link between our decreased social connection and an increase in material inequality and political polarization. He is careful not to say that one causes the other or vice versa; rather, he argues that these are phenomena that reinforce each other.
What has all of this got to do with The Substance? As I suggested earlier, I was struck by Elizabeth Sparkle’s significant aloneness. The one real attempt we see at social connection fails, largely because of the felt pressures of unrealistic beauty standards. Sparkle does not have anyone to rely on, nor anyone to help bolster her own self-confidence and self-esteem.3 Loneliness, it seems, makes her even more susceptible to the evil of these pressures.
In thinking about this film, I have not been able to stop thinking about 20th century German political theorist Hannah Arendt.4 In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she delves into the history of totalitarianism and how it can be the case that societies fall victim to the worst abuses a government can commit. Her answer, as Samantha Rose Hill understands it, was loneliness. For Arendt, loneliness creates the conditions for totalitarian states to come into power and in return these states find “a way to crystallise the occasional experience of loneliness into a permanent state of being. Through the use of isolation and terror, totalitarian regimes created the conditions for loneliness, and then appealed to people’s loneliness with ideological propaganda.”
Arendt’s loneliness is a much stronger concept than our working concept of aloneness. She understands it as a radical lack of human connection. Aloneness, as we have thus far used it, is much closer to Arendt’s isolation, which is merely the fact of being unable to act because there is no one to act with. That said, The Substance goes the distance in connecting the extremities of loneliness with the problem of solitude.
I wonder if Elizabeth would have been more resistant to the pressures of the authoritarian gender structures that force those unrealistic beauty standards on her if she had had a community that loved and supported her. I wonder how she would have faced the pressures of The Substance if she had friends and family to tell her, “Hey, this seems sketchy, and you don’t need it!” Maybe nothing would have been different. I know I have looked at myself in the mirror countless times and felt how Elizabeth felt when getting ready for her date and I do not feel lonely all that often.
And yet, I think Arendt is right. I think loneliness—or solitude, or aloneness, or whatever we want to call it—is the perfect breeding ground for the worst of our social ills. From the most concrete political problems, like the totalitarianism Arendt explains, to the most abstract ones, like gender and beauty standards, I suspect that our greatest hope for resistance lies in community. Building deep relationships with the people who inhabit our world is critical. And not just texting them or emailing them or calling them on the phone. Build real, in-person connections. These are the food of resistance and the nutrients of justice.
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Something I’ve seen: It’s Oscar’s season! I have been trying to catch up on as many of the nominees as I can. There are some I can recommend (and many I am sure I cannot) but for now, I will suggest you go watch The Wild Robot on Peacock. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it is also about building community even (especially?) when it is hard in order to resist a coming onslaught. It is also very funny.
Something I’ve read: James Baldwin has come to mean so much to me in recent months. I recently read his essay “Nothing Personal” and it has much to say about the importance of human connection. I’ll share the last couple of paragraphs here, which I haven’t been able to get out of my mind since I first came across them:
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.
Something I’ve listened to: Recipe Club is back! A lighthearted podcast about cooking, it has been a favorite of mine for years. I am excited to see how this new format plays out.
Thompson: “He [Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia economist Enghin Atalay] categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are ‘the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone’ or in front of a computer.” I will follow Thomspon’s understanding here.
Forced to be free? I think not.
It’s crucial that Sparkle’s character is representative of the once-highly coveted Hollywood celebrity. Moore herself has written and talked about how even when she was considered the peak of beauty she hated how she looked and felt so pressured to have a more perfect body. We think of these folks as paragons of self-esteem and confidence.
You might remember Arendt from her renaissance in 2017 after President Trump’s first inauguration.