Penny at the Movies: The Substance

i made this lol do u guys like it i like it very much

Overall, I liked The Substance. It was very gory, funny at times, and had a ridiculous, over the top ending that made my friends and me feel exasperated and euphoric walking out of the theater. While it was very much a mainstream movie that covered the classic woke feminist talking points (which are perhaps just a little bit overdone at this point), I felt like it put a fresh, self aware spin on many of them and added in some new elements that many other movies of the same ilk (*cough cough* Barbie) may not be ready to tackle yet. 

One major deviation that the Substance made from the kind of watered down feminist takes that I begrudgingly love and accept (but am ultimately unsatisfied by) was its focus on Elisabeth feeling invisible to men and hating it. So many modern pieces of media show women who are barraged with male attention despite their every effort to avoid it. I liked how we saw Elisabeth genuinely suffering from her invisibility and pursuing the male gaze, even while she demonstrated no desire for any particular man. 

I was impressed by The Substance’s nuance in showing various versions of the same woman pitted against herself in different ways, depending how her body looked, how it was treated by men, and what it could do. I liked to see these two experiences, “I am desperate to be seen and wanted” and “I am burdened by the way that I am sexualized” each taken seriously and then related back to a larger feminist framework. It was refreshing. I was also pleasantly surprised by the way disability was integrated into this framework.

All that aside, what I really want to talk about is the camera angles. I have thoughts about this, and I’d like to know what you guys think.

So there are three iterations of our protagonist: Elisabeth, Sue, and Monstro Elisasue. Elisabeth is filmed pretty normally. There was nothing about the camera angles on Elisabeth that drew my attention. Sue, on the other hand, is filmed in a very ass-focused, male-gazey way, especially when she is performing. She is pieced apart by the camera into plump lips and young body parts, which are then themselves thrown up onto various screens and ruthlessly observed. This sexual, commodifying perspective makes sense, because Sue’s whole thing is that she can access all the male-gazey attention that Elisabeth craves (without appearing to fully understand why she craves it in the first place).

Then comes Monstro Elisasue. Without spoiling too much or getting too into the details, I will say that there is one scene near the end of the movie where Monstro Elisasue spins in circles in a crowded theater and paints the audience with her blood. This scene is shot from the ceiling looking down. Music plays.

I propose that all three iterations of Elisabeth are actually perfect aesthetic specimens, but they are each correct according to different aesthetics. I see them each as representatives of the framework to which they appeal.

Elisabeth is aesthetically correct from the Natural perspective. She is a nice human woman with a lovely functional body that does everything it needs to do and then some. Elisabeth might not like herself, but her body is a perfect natural design. That’s the irony and the tragedy of the whole situation.

Sue is aesthetically correct in the Capitalist and patriarchal context in which she lives. She’s not exactly a totally natural design, but she is Nature-adjacent, and she is uniquely open and available for shameless objectification. She has the perfect body to split apart and throw up onto a hundred little screens, and she has worked hard to get it.

My dear Monstro Elisasue is a perfect specimen of an alternative aesthetic. That is, she is correct according to an aesthetic syntax that is not human, and which may or may not even be Natural. While Sue has a body which is optimized for the screen, a perfect blank canvas for the structurally-unsound male gaze to manipulate according to its arbitrary whims, Elisasue embodies the imagined intent of this manipulation in real life. She’s a real artifact of the nonexistent set of aesthetic rules that the male gaze implies.

Our Capitalist patriarchal aesthetic framework is actually not coherent. This is part of how sexism functions. The male gaze aesthetic is not a real, intuitive, embodied grammar, and that’s how beauty standards can be perpetually elusive and why cosmetics continue to sell. Monstro Elisasue is what the male gaze might validate if it were structurally coherent. She really is so many lips and so many plump body parts side by side – no wall of TV’s required. In our protagonist’s relentless pursuit of an impossible goal, Monstro Elisasue ends up adhering to an aesthetic framework that isn’t intelligible to us. She noclips off the map of human aesthetics and ends up somewhere else. Depending on your beliefs about divinity, humanity, and unfathomable forces beyond our social world, you might even consider Monstro Elisasue a kind of divine being; a biblically accurate angel whose very construction defies human comprehension.

The irony of Monstro Elisasue’s literal adherence to societal beauty standards, alongside her practical departure from what we actually find attractive, is played up for laughs throughout the ending of the movie (for example, when she vomits up a breast on stage). Monstro Elisasue is the result of abandoning Nature in pursuit of a social aesthetic, without understanding that the social aesthetic is a distortion of Nature and not the other way around. She is too big and too small, too many and too few, too sick to just live and too robust to just die, and every time she is injured she just regenerates more of her impossible self – recursion bastardized, an unearthly mathematical wonder. She is ethereal in her monstrosity, cathartically disgusting, the product of impossible contradictions made real.

Like aesthetic icons before her ([spoiler] from the Secret History, Nina from Black Swan, etc.), Monstro Elisasue pursued an aesthetic beyond human aesthetics and followed it right up off the mortal coil. When she dances her agonizing bloodbath spiral she is filmed from above as if only a divine perspective could see the pattern and the beauty in what everyone on the ground can only witness with disgust. Down there she’s a monster, but from up here she’s the most beautiful creature in the room.

One of the very last scenes of the movie shows the Hollywood sky through our protagonist’s eyes. I like to think of this as a kind of return to personhood after a nasty journey through everything else. I’m reminded of Clementine Morrigan’s essay “The Eyes Looking Back”, and of the Zen parable about the Tiger and the Strawberry, and the Laura Gilpin poem about the two-headed calf, and this meme I saw many years ago and could never find the source of:

After a long and gruesome journey through various aesthetic iterations, finally our protagonist remembers that she has a perspective too. She isn’t just an object for other people to look at, she is also a precious consciousness who observes and parses. If you’ve snooped on my other Substack essays you might know that I care a lot about aesthetics and linguistics, because I think that the way that human beings parse our world is unifying and sacred.

To reduce a woman’s body to an object is disrespectful to her personhood – sure, we all know that – but it’s actually also disrespectful to the universal construction of the human mind in general, which is so much more beautiful and complex than the male gaze would lead you to believe. It’s a kind of sacrilege to me to pretend like the bullshit, manmade, exploitative pseudo-aesthetics of the American cosmetics industry are even in the same ballpark as the divine (to me) aesthetics of Nature. It would be like showing a “no shoes, no shirt, no service” sign to a devout Catholic and seriously referring to it as holy scripture. Like, you think these two things are equivalent? What are you talking about? There are rules to what we find aesthetically correct, and those rules are not up to the people on TV. Nature is larger and scarier than the patriarchy but it is also more real, less bullshit. This is what I think, anyway, and it’s why I was so interested in that shot of the Hollywood sky.

The Substance is a movie about sexism, the violence that we do to ourselves, and the consequences of desecrating divine and irreplaceable miracles of Nature. It’s about pain. It’s about hotness. It’s about aging with grace and then some. It is a goofy bloodbath mess with an ending that is so cartoonishly bloody and tragic that you just have to laugh. If you’re brave about gore, go in without watching any trailers. If you don’t do well with needles, stitches, botched births, horrific injuries, food related body horror, brutal violence, and guttural cries of pain, you may need accommodations (hands over your eyes, a little treat, regular breaks) if you intend to stomach this movie at all. Of course, there’s no shame in sitting this one out. There were certainly a few images in there that I will simply never unsee. If you watch it, or if you just read this essay and have some thoughts of your own, you’re welcome to leave a comment.

-Love Penny