The Substance — We're all gonna die

If there was a drug that would create a younger version of yourself, would you take it?

This episode looks at The Substance (2024) and its portrayal of death anxiety via our obsession with female youth and beauty.

Mental Health is Horrifying is hosted by Candis Green, Registered Psychotherapist and owner of Many Moons Therapy.

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Show Notes:

Want to work together? I offer 1:1 psychotherapy (Ontario), along with tarot, horror, and dreamwork services, but individually and through my group program, the Final Girls Club. Visit my website to learn more.

Podcast artwork by Chloe Hurst at Contempomint.

Lem M, Pham JT, Kim JK, Tang CJ. Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Nonsurgical Cosmetic Procedure Interest. The American Journal of Cosmetic Surgery. 2024;41(3):189-195. doi:10.1177/07488068221141168

Taylor, J., Armes, G. Social comparison on Instagram, and its relationship with self-esteem and body-esteem. Discov Psychol 4, 126 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-024-00241-3 

 Interview With "The Substance" Director/Writer Coralie Fargeat, Next Best Picture Podcast

 ‘The Movie Is Fundamentally About the Violence of Control’: Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat Talks The Substance By Elissa Suh

Someone on Reddit Made a chart of Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriends — and it seems his cut-off age is 25 by Tom Murray

Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life by Sharon Blackie

Transcript

Welcome ghouls to today’s episode of Mental Health is Horrifying. I’m your Horror Barbie host of darkness — Candis Green— Psychotherapist and all around spooky bitch podcasting from my bat-filled cave in Toronto, Canada. 

On today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about one of the WILDEST movies I have seen in recent memory. I hadn’t heard too much about The Substance before I saw it in theaters, and boy was I glad for that because I got to enjoy this absolutely wild satirical body horror that asks the question – if there was a drug that would create a younger version of yourself, would you take it?

The important point here is that The Substance promises a younger version of yourself – not better. Younger. I’m talking stealing time here, cheating the clock, reversing time’s terrible march and hey – if that just happens to correlate with beauty, then that’s just a bonus, right?

Okay — so let’s get right into it. Let’s check out The Substance and its portrayal of death anxiety via our obsession with female youth and beauty. 

Movie synopsis:

How do I give a clear, succinct synopsis of this movie? It’s like one of those wild nightmares you have on the night of the full moon, times a thousand. But here goes…

On her 50th birthday, Elisabeth Sparkle, a mega celebrity with her own aerobics TV show is abruptly fired from her gig because she is now old and ugly. Distraught, Elisabeth crashes her car while driving home. At the hospital, a young, beautiful nurse covertly slips her a flash drive advertising "The Substance", a black market serum that promises a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of oneself.

Elisabeth is desperate to remain young and beautiful, so she orders The Substance despite knowing virtually nothing about it. She goes to pick it up in a sketchy back-alley warehouse that looks like a slasher movie filming location. I said she’s desperate!  She injects the single-use activator serum, convulses on the bathroom floor, and shortly thereafter a young woman named Sue crawls out of her back! The instructions from The Substance are very clear and are NOT to be messed with –  the two bodies must switch consciousness every seven days without exception, with the inactive body remaining unconscious and fed intravenously with a weekly food supply. Daily injections of stabilizer fluid, extracted from the original body, are necessary to prevent Sue from deteriorating. The most important thing to remember – you are one. 

Sue quickly becomes an overnight sensation as Elisabeth's replacement on the TV show, and is eventually offered the chance to host the network's prestigious New Year's Eve Show. During Sue’s week, she is livin it up! She’s partying, meeting guys, filming aerobic sequences for her TV show that have no fitness merit whatsoever, but who cares! She’s got a nice butt! Elisabeth on the other hand, during her weeks, becomes a self-hating recluse, unable to go out and enjoy her life because the world has told her she’s old and ugly and worthless, and now she believes it too. Sue is having so much fun that during one weekly switch, she is late, which causes Elisabeth’s finger to age rapidly and get all gnarly and zombie-like. Freaked out, Elisabeth contacts the mysterious supplier of The Substance, who tells her that not following the switching program leads to aggressive and irreversible aging of the original body. Despite their shared consciousness, Elisabeth and Sue begin to view themselves as separate individuals and grow to despise each other; Elisabeth resents Sue for her frequent disregard of the switching schedule, which further exacerbates her aging, while Sue is disgusted by Elisabeth's constant self-loathing and binge eating. Following a particularly destructive episode as Elisabeth, Sue stockpiles stabilizer fluid and refuses to switch back for three whole months. This can’t end up going well… 

The day before the New Year's Eve telecast, Sue is forced to switch with Elisabeth because she’s run out of stabilizer, but when she does, Elisabeth emerges as a disfigured, thousand year-old looking hunchback and is super mad and attempts to kill Sue! Unable to do so because she loves the admiration that part of her is receiving via her fame, Sue’s like SUCKER takes the opportunity to kill Elisabeth and then doodles off for her New Year's special.

Without Elisabeth, Sue's body begins to deteriorate a whole bunch, with ears and teeth falling out right before she’s supposed to do the special. In a panic, she attempts to create a new version of herself using leftover activator serum, despite the single-use supplier warning. This results in the creation of a grotesque monster that has both Sue and Elisabeth's faces. Monstro Elisasue, she is named, dressed up in a mask cut from a poster of Elisabeth, claims her spot on stage during the live broadcast. The mask falls off, causing the horrified audience to erupt into chaos and attack her. A man decapitates her, only for an even more mutated head to grow back. There’s blood EVERYWHERE, people are screaming, and it’s absolute chaos. Elisasue flees the studio but collapses. Elisabeth's original face detaches from the monster, crawling onto her neglected star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She smiles as she imagines cheers from her beloved fans, before melting into a pile of goo. The next day, her blood is cleaned up by a floor scrubber.

Movie background info:

The Substance is directed by Coralie Fargeat, who rose to acclaim after the success of her film Revenge, a French film about a woman who is sexually assaulted and takes her revenge upon the men who perpetrated this violence against her. Fargeat began writing The Substance when she was in her 40s when she began to notice her own negative thoughts about her relevance and appearance, thinking “'Now your life is over. No one is going to care about you.”

Influenced by body-horror titans like David Cronenberg and John Carpenter, and referencing other horror classics like The Shining, Carrie, and Vertigo in The Substance, Fargeat’s film delves into themes of rebirth and hypersexualization. “At every age, we can find something wrong with ourselves, which can make us feel like monsters,” the French filmmaker says. “Your image defines you and your self-worth. But I thought that if I could create something meaningful about these issues, it could also serve as a form of liberation.”

The film stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth, and Margaret Qualley as Sue. Demi Moore, a woman who has been a fixture in Hollywood for decades, also has personal experience with the ravages of the industry on self-image, and its obsession with youth, saying “What really struck me [about The Substance] was the harsh violence against oneself. It’s not what’s being done to you, it’s what we do to ourselves.”

The Substance is actively campaigning the Academy for recognition during the Oscars. And rightly so – this movie is an absolute marvel. It’s original, and bold, and many have their eye on both Fargeat and Demi Moore for Oscar awards this year. 

Female Beauty and the Patriarchy:

As a psychotherapist, I am not satisfied with conversations about female beauty standards that conclude simply with “it’s the patriarchy”.

I’m not!

It feels like a bit of a thought terminating cliché at this point honestly to me, meaning that we’re not exploring what these impossible  beauty standards actually mean, or why we have them, and are just attributing them to “oh yeah, patriarchy” and not exploring what this all actually means any further. 

In the type of therapy work that I do, which is informed by existential and depth psychology, we say that we go deep and not wide. I’m not satisfied to just skim the surface, I want to get deep into the psyche of an issue until we’ve reached the very bottom and you’re completely sick of me – so let’s do that, shall we?

Okay so we know that there’s a prevailing system of power in the world called patriarchy. It means that societal and structural power, influence, and resources are largely controlled by a straight male ruling class, and in North America Caucasian.

And what do they want? Well they want a lot of things – they want to retain their power, they want money, they want influence, they want all the seats in government, they want cheap goods and labour via any means necessary, they want military choppers to fly over their football games so that they may feel ALIVE, and they want boobs. Young, buoyant, beautiful boobs, as full of life as they feel during Monday Night Football. 

Yes, it seems that the beauty standard for women set by the patriarchy is that women must be thin, with large breasts, and a small waist, and a physique that either is or suggests that they are perpetually 25. At least that is the preferred age of Leonardo DiCaprio’s, exhibited by a graph that some glorious soul made charting one line, showing that as Leo’s age increases over time, that the age of his girlfriends seems to perpetually be 25 and under, and that they actually seem to get dismissed once they reach the ripe age of 25 and are legally able to rent a car.

(This chart is one of my most favourite things in the whole world and I have put a link to it in the show notes.)

ALRIGHT – so we have determined that the beauty standard for women is to remain perpetually 25. Great. This is what the patriarchy wants. But why do we adhere to it? Why do we, as Coralie Fargeat and Demi Moore say, do this violence to ourselves?

Well, as Elisabeth demonstrates in The Substance, there are very real consequences for not adhering to the standard. She is dismissed from her job on her 50th birthday, like an alarm clock went off declaring YOU’RE DONE GIRL, exiling her to somewhere where no man, or woman for that matter, would ever have to gaze upon her again. Where is she supposed to go? What is she supposed to do?

The fact that the standard even exists at all is this constant existential threat staring women down through all the years of their lives, brings on a host of mental health conditions. Take your pick – body dysmorphia, disordered eating, disordered exercising, fertility pressure, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, isolation, and even potentially making risky choices as it pertains to anti-aging solutions.

It is shocking the way that Elisabeth decides so swiftly to get and ingest The Substance, while knowing virtually nothing about it. Like yeah sure I’ll just inject this mysterious green goo into my body it’s probably fine. She is willing to go to some sketchy murder location in a back alley just for the chance at being a younger, more beautiful self.

We see Elisabeth’s self-loathing throughout the movie, and we can notice that she is completely isolated in this self-soathing as she becomes aware that she is yesterday’s news. She has no visitors to her home, and one of the most poignant scenes in the movie is the one with her high school classmate, Fred. Fred, like in Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol; a character who is able to see the beauty in life amidst a harsh, pessimistic world. Fred runs into her during a chance encounter, affectionately calling her “Lizzie”, a nickname from their school days together. He is dorky, and normal, and sweet. When he sees her, he says “​​You haven't changed a bit! You're still the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world!” She decides to accept his invitation to catch up, and when she tries to get ready for their date, she is racked with self-loating, angrily and disgustedly fussing with her appearance in the mirror over and over again, pulling on her face and hair, trying to manipulate it to look something more like Sue’s, that she ultimately abandons the date, not even having the guts to text Fred to let him know. Sorry, I can’t come out tonight, I hate myself. That night was an opportunity for genuine connection with an old friend, a person who liked her for her and still sees value in her, but the problem is that she can no longer see that value in herself. 

Sue haaaaaaaaaaates the suggestion that there is an older self. She shouts at her, telling her that she must control herself when she over-eats, she calls her gross, old, fat, and disgusting. She steals time from her older self, abusing her body. Sue wants to be forever young – literally – and even goes as far to kill her older self in a scene that actually made me cry, because it encapsulated so well this violence that we do to ourselves, the pain we inflict on ourselves, how we hate our own vulnerability, our own humanness, and we kill off parts of ourselves in the process. 

The beauty standard is a trap. Because you can’t be 25 forever. But why do they want us to be? What is it really about? We must go deeper. 

Young female bodies and the promise of eternal life:

As Sue continues to steal time and energy for Elisabeth, fuelling her quest for eternal youth, Elisabeth rapidly ages in horrifying ways. The aggressiveness of her aging, its grotesquerie, is so harsh so as to remind us what this is all really about. Her zombie-like finger, the massive hump on her back, her hair loss, her decreased mobility – she begins looking like a corpse. 

The beauty standard represents a promise of eternal life. Young female bodies represent hope, and promise. Bodies that we may impose all our hopes and ideals on to, that may bear our children, ensuring that a part of us may continue to live long after we have passed. These young female bodies offer the promise of time, and when these women entertain, accept, and cater to men – much older men, disgusting, leering and exploitative men as portrayed by Dennis Quaid, or the group of all white, grey-haired executives witnessing Sue’s breakdown  – they may feel younger too. They may feel vital, youthful, that they are strangers to death and ticking clocks. 

I’m thinking about someone like Al Pacino, who recently at age 84 fathered a child with a woman aged 30 – making her 54 years younger than him.

Young women are so much more valuable to a man than a woman their own age, who cannot promise them this type of immortality. 

It is an existential given that we are all going to die one day, and we spend a lot of energy trying to cheat or escape this fact. In that avoidance, we are missing our lives, not enjoying and embracing the very thing we are so fearful of losing. Anxiety is the thief of the present.

One of my all time favourite movies of all time is Moonstruck starring our collective goddess, Cher, and it has one of my most favourite scenes in it. Rose Castorini, played by the incredible Olympia Dukakis searches for the answer to a question throughout the movie – why do men chase women? She searches and searches, unsatisfied with all answers proposed to her, until she finds her answer – men chase women because they fear death. 

Fear of the hag

Death is a scary prospect. We want to believe that we are constantly fertile not only in our ability to perpetuate the human race, but to live, to thrive. It is no wonder that Elisabeth is portrayed as the Hag in The Substance, an archetype that encapsulates our fears of female aging represented in countless stories like Hansel and Gretel, Baba Yaga, Snow White, or even in Hagsploitatian or Psycho Biddy films like Pearl, The Taking of Deborah Logan, or What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Women’s bodies are sexualised and only worth a damn only when they suggest fertility; the minute we can no longer reproduce, we become monstrous.

The archetype of the hag is one that evokes fear, banishment, terror. According to historian Louise Yeoman, 51% of those who were killed during the Scottish witch trials were women in the menopausal range. Many were over 60. What’s more, is that many were single or windows, becoming dangerous because they were no longer under the control of men. 

And what of women who weren’t interested in men at all? We don’t actually know Elisabeth’s sexual orientation in The Substance, but it doesn’t really matter at all to the men who consume her. She is a mere object to them, upholding their highest ideals and aspirations. And as she ages, she betrays them.

Hatred of older women is something that already existed among Greek and Roman philosophers, and witch hunts is something that was reinforced and pushed to an extreme that we still channel today. The old woman is no longer useful, no longer childbearing. There is a higher chance that she may become untamed, and less inhibited than younger women.

The hag has lived a lot of life, and has gained self-confidence. She is less inhibited, less easy to control, and this, as we have seen throughout representations of women throughout history and culture, evokes an enormous amount of fear.

Older women accused of witchcraft were essential members of their societies. They provided essential functions and were often known to be healers, serving as midwives, tending to the health and wellbeing of their community members. They were knowledgeable, caring, and wise.

In her book, Hagitude: Reclaiming the Second Half of Life, author and psychologist Sharon Blackie says of the hag – “They are not defined by anybody. They’re not somebody’s mother, or grandmother, or wife. They are kind of sufficient unto themselves, and they stand outside the culture. The confines of the society that they’re often criticizing. They’re powerful elder women that have come into their own. Women in general need new ways of imaging what an older women can be that isn’t ridiculed, reviled, or silenced. We are fertile creatures for a very small percentage of our lives, and by the time menopause comes along, and if we’re lucky we have another 30 some odd years to live. What are we going to do with it? Menopause is a process where everything superfluous is burned away, and we’re left with the core of who we are.”

Rise in cosmetic treatments

It makes us so happy when we see famous women who look young — likely from good cosmetic work that is largely undetectable. It reassures us in a way, that aging doesn’t have to be a horrible, ugly nightmare, that we can ellude death even longer if we just try hard enough, or spend enough.

We are seeing so much more cosmetic work too, it’s become so accessible. There are many contributing factors to the rise in cosmetic treatments accessed by women – neuromodulators like Botox, fillers, biostimulators, lasers – you name it, they can shoot it into your face – and one big reason for the rise in these treatments, is actually the pandemic.

The pandemic gave rise to a new human enmeshment with the digital world. We began seeing ourselves so much more on screen – from Zoom meetings, to Instagram, to TikTok. We began to examine, and over-examine ourselves, and even question if we were good enough with the introduction of filters convincing us our regular human faces weren’t good enough. 

And thus we created our own episode of Black Mirror. 

I mean, I am positively INUNDATED with those posts that have a before and after of a celebrity – showing either the cosmetic treatments they’ve had, with people breaking down or speculating what they’ve had done, or ones showing how certain celebrities haven’t aged in 20 years, or ones with before and afters showing how the “after” body – usually a skinner one – is better. As I was getting the trailer off YouTube for this podcast, there was literally a video underneath it showing Demi Moore’s before and after. If we’re not in a satirical episode of Black Mirror, then I don’t know what is going on. 

The Aesthetic Plastic Surgery National Databank reports that the demand for Botox has increased by 54% and filler treatments are up by 75% from 2019. 

What’s more, the people accessing these treatments are getting younger and younger. Turn on an episode of a show like Love is Blind to see women in their 20s with faces filled with injectables they convinced themselves they needed.

These treatments are like trying to inject hope into ourselves – hoping that we may remain not only desirable, but young for just a little longer. We are injecting relief, we are buying time until we are due for the next round. 

But we shouldn’t judge these women, or ourselves, or this podcast host. Many people have suggested that I video record myself when I do this podcast, but what I say to them is that I look like a gremlin when I record these episodes, and I reserve the right to be ugly in peace. I really do – I get a lot of comfort from looking ugly in peace. And I’m also worried that people won’t like me if I don’t look nice. 

Like with anything involving the human psyche, how we present ourselves to the world and why is an incredibly nuanced issue. On the one hand – it’s your body and face so do whatever you want with it. And on the other hand as Sinead O’Connor said – fight the real enemy! She was, of course, referring to the Catholic church when she said this while ripping up a picture of the pope on SNL, but in this case, the real enemy is fear of obsolescence/death. 

Conclusion:

Folk tales, fairytales, and horror movies like The Substance help us to reimage ourselves, and reclaim parts of ourselves that the world tried to take from us. We need new ways of imagining women’s freedom, of what aging can look like, and I like the Substance for how it portrays this in it’s over the top, final scene. 

And if you’ve seen the Substance, you know. 

The final scene reminds me of a practice in Pagan practices called a Croning Ceremony. It’s a ceremony for women passing through menopause, celebrating their age and role in the community and this phase of life. It is when all pretenses about who society throught she should be, wanting her to be, or wanted from her can be let go, allowing her to reclaim herself as her own home, reclaiming the word crone or hag as one filled with pride.

The conclusion of The Substance is explosive, and unexpected, and extreme to say the least. It went ALL the way, and then some. Of this final scene where Monstro Elisasue takes the stage, ready to perform and show herself proudly to the audience, Director Coralie Fargeat says “The Substance is fundamentally about the violence of control—how we’re told to be delicate. Think of the past when women had to wear clothes that tightened everything up. I really wanted to [exhales] let it out. I wanted to explode and shatter everything in a violent and uncompromising way because to shake this, we need an earthquake, a tsunami. When the final transformation arrives, it felt quite intuitive to bring the character ultimate relief. Ironically, it’s when she’s totally deformed and monstrous that she doesn’t care what she looks like. In fact, it’s the only time she looks in the mirror and kind of likes what she sees. That’s the moment when she finally feels like she deserves to go out in public, no matter what she looks like. We hide behind our polished smiles, and I wanted the character to unleash those hidden anxieties. The audience [in the film], which stands in for all of us as a society, screams and hates her for this, and I wanted to portray how violent that reaction can be. That the only real moment of relief that she has is when she doesn’t have a body anymore, I think, says it all.”

Outro:

And that my ghouls is the story of The Substance. In researching this episode, I learned of a place in France called the House of the Baba Yagas where senior women live out their lives together in peace, sort of like a spooky Golden Girls. So this is my petition to start such a place in my neck of the woods, who’s with me?

Mental Health is Horrifying is entirely researched, written, edited, and produced by me, Candis Green, Registered (and spooky) Psychotherapist, with artwork by the ghoulishly talented Chloe Hurst. If you like this podcast, please consider rating and reviewing on your preferred listening platform. It really helps the show to reach all the other spooky ghouls out there and I will be eternally grateful – and an eternity is a very long time for a vampire, okay? 

If you live in Ontario and are interested in psychotherapy with me, I offer therapy for Final Girls who want to make sense out of the guts of their lives. I specialize in grief and trauma, and incorporate both tarot and dreamwork into my practice as tools to delve deeper into fields of psychic terrain. I offer other services as well which include tarot, horror, and dreamwork. You can follow me on Instagram at @mentalhealthishorrifying and you can also learn more about me and my services through my website manymoonstherapy.com.

OR you can also howl at the moon and I will hear your call.

Bright blessings.