⚠️ Spoilers ahead ⚠️
Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?
The Substance (2024) is a body horror film directed by Coralie Fargeat. This cautionary tale follows Elisabeth Sparkle, a film star past her prime who undergoes a de-aging drug called The Substance: an injectable serum that produces a younger, more “beautiful” clone named Sue. Although both bodies don’t outwardly appear the same, genetically they are one.
You must alternate through both bodies no more than seven days each. Only by following the rules will the process work, but for Elisabeth/Sue, the disrespect of the balance only produces grotesque results
The concept of the body will act as the vessel for this post in tandem with the film, commenting on the violence that occurs when the contemporary projection of what looks beautiful overtakes the body and embodied experience. While the film hyperbolizes this destructive process, the nature of Fargeat’s metaphor still rings true: the abuse of beauty never ends well, only in the degradation of self and body. I will primarily extract ideas from the perspective of Body, Bernadette Wegenstein’s chapter in Critical Terms for Media Studies, in conjunction with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the Grotesque Body.
Body by Bernadette Wegenstein
Wegenstein primes the chapter by establishing the body as a medium of experience, a site that is not merely a static object but a dynamic process (19). This point of the body as a process introduces the difference between “having” a body versus “being” a body, the latter of which becomes reframed as embodiment.
Embodiment is the first person perspective of living in a body, it is the process of how we experience it (Wegenstein 20). Elisabeth’s body, and women in entertainment at large, becomes spotlighted as an “object of aesthetic interest” that, once a certain age is reached, becomes “undesirable” for general audiences (Wegenstein 20). She gets terminated on her 50th birthday from her fitness TV show, thus eliciting an embodied experience of self-loathing after having a career built upon society’s beauty standards. The scene of Elisabeth getting ready for a date captures her physical, tormented embodiment as she aggressively wipes away at her makeup and literally tries to get out of her own skin.
Wegenstein also affirms that “when interacting in chat rooms, dating platforms, or massive multiplayer role playing games… we can take on personas that differ from our own mundane embodied selves” (28). In a way, Sue is Elisabeth’s mask that similarly ties to the digital platforms that Wegenstein lists. Through all of that bodily trauma of taking the Substance does Elisabeth find happiness in Sue, but only when she is living in Sue’s body. Sue’s embodiment is night and day from Elisabeth’s — she feels confident and respected whereas, in her own original body, she hides away in self-contempt. Elisabeth, as Sue, gets her old life on the TV show back from the same older, male producers.
“Whether in private or for the mass audiences of reality TV, people are undergoing surgical intervention… in the hopes of altering their bodies to… match their “inner body” expectations to the exterior body images circulated by the media. This cultural obsession with bodily perfection now transcends the actual procedures of surgical modification, shaping a “cosmetic gaze” through which we look at our own… bodies with an awareness of how they could be changed” (Wegenstein 29).
With the cosmetic gaze in mind, Elisabeth’s body becomes the very site of transformation from Elisabeth to Sue. Elisabeth’s cells split and mutate through a very graphic sequence in the film of her body convulsing in her bathroom after taking the Substance. The process concludes by splitting open a spine-length slit across her back to essentially “birth” Sue. Elisabeth has become a shell of herself to make way for Sue’s body. Elisabeth’s body lays dormant on the floor with the gaping tear on her back, symbolizing the drastic lengths that people will take to achieve the perfect appearance.
Grotesque Realism & Grotesque Body by Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher who authored Rabelais and His World, a book about the Renaissance and French writer, François Rabelais. The idea originates from folk culture, specifically from the carnivalesque and its everchanging, temporal nature. It’s expressed through a focus on the (grotesque) body, making this concept and Wegenstein’s text on body one in the same. It’s a process.
Within the text, Bakhtin coins the grotesque style (and by extension, grotesque body) as their own terms with their own fundamentals.
- Metamorphosis: “The grotesque image reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming” (Bakhtin 24). Once again, the film presents Elisabeth’s transformation into Sue as the young, hot counterpart — only this is a short-lived high for Elisabeth/Sue by the end of the film. Another fundamental is showing two bodies in one, “the one giving birth and dying, the other conceived, generated, and born” (Bakhtin 26). The story features numerous processes of rebirth (Elisabeth to Sue) and self-death (Sue killing the part of herself she hates, Elisabeth).
- Degradation: “The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (Bakhtin 19). Going against the seven day rule, Elisabeth’s body, once reinhabited, deteriorates into a severely aged version of herself. A desperate Sue, fresh from now killing Elisabeth, is also falling apart and resorts to creating an entirely new clone: Monstro Elisasue, a fusion of the two. She presents herself live in front of an audience showing the degradation occurred, a callback to the carnival origins. The film ends in a bloodbath that hoses down the audience as a true scene of horror, to Elisabeth/Sue’s final form: a fleshy blob that finally gets wiped out of existence.
- Exaggeration: “Exaggeration, hyperbolism, and excessiveness are generally considered fundamental attributes of grotesque style” (Bakhtin 303). Even aside from the exaggerated nature of Monstro Elisasue, there are portions in the film that feel extremely heightened, especially scenes concerning food. There’s Dennis Quaid’s shrimp eating scene using up-close visual and disturbing use of audio. Or when Sue pulls out a chicken leg out of her butt. These parts make up for a squeamishly exaggerated art style.
To age is an impending beast. But looking to the future we’re headed down, a future where bodies are easily modifiable and youthfulness is commodified, it makes us reconsider what it means to get older. Wegenstein’s Body and Bakhtin’s Grotesque Realism reveal how The Substance anticipates the risks. In the end, the film suggests that the journey forward lies not in transcending the limits of our bodies, but in reframing how we live with it.
Works Cited:
Mikhail Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World. Indiana University Press, 1984.
Mitchell, W. J. T., and Mark B. N. Hansen. Critical Terms for Media Studies. The University Of Chicago Press, 2010.
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