THE SUBSTANCE
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is preposterous, which makes perfect sense. We’re in the realm of showbiz, after all. Demi Moore is formidable as ‘Elizabeth Sparkle’, a fading star now fronting an aerobics show who is told by leering, vulgar producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) that once ‘you’ (if ‘you’ are a woman) reach fifty, ‘it stops’.
Which indeed it does for her when Harvey gives her the push and starts seeking a younger model to front a sexier show.
Then the titular substance comes her way, allowing her to ‘unlock her DNA’ and give rise to a ‘perfect’ (younger) version of her self (Margaret Qualley, equally formidable), who goes on to replace her in the revamped show, the snag being that Sparkle can only spend 7 days as her alter ego – known only as ‘Sue’ – before having to switch back to her ‘real’ self for the next 7 days.
Though continually reminded that they are ‘one’, Sparkle and Sue are soon at war with one another, with the former, oppressed by Sue’s image on a billboard outside her window, succumbing to depression, while Sue grabs more and more ‘me time’ – which has a knock-on effect on Sparkle, who starts to age rapidly and grotesquely.
Eventually, however, after various ‘misuses’ of the substance, the two really do become one – a monstrous creature whose various appendages include Sparkle’s features, mouth gaping in an ongoing silent scream, but situated at the back of the head, if this thing can be said to have a head.
The creature takes the stage at the New Year special that is intended to be an early highlight of Sue’s career, and instead becomes a blood-drenched debacle. Strangely though, neither character has been as sympathetic separately as they are here, condensed into one flesh. The notion of a sympathetic monster has already been raised in an earlier, jokey reference to King Kong – whose last line, in the 1930 version at any rate, was: ‘It was Beauty killed the Beast’.
Here, Beauty is the Beast. But this is not something the culture can accommodate. The oft-repeated mantra: ‘You are one’ is not just relevant to the heroine’s situation, it has an implication for the audience too. We have trouble seeing youth and old age as equally valid aspects of our experience, so being forced to see the starlet and the crone in one flesh is not something we can easily process. There is a sense in which it is our gaze that creates the ‘monster’.
And yet of course it’s all absurd: ridiculous that Sue gets her dream gig considering what she refers to as her ‘scheduling issues’ – effectively ceasing to exist every other week. And to what degree can she exist in the world anyway, with no history? Wouldn’t someone notice that she and Sparkle share an address? Why is an aerobics show such a big deal anyway?
Sparkle, who lives entirely alone in a sort of shrine to herself, seems to have as little connection to the world as Sue. A meeting with an unassuming man from her schooldays, dazzled by her stardom, with whom she arranges a date she finally feels unequal to, is a jarring admission that she does after all have a back story, though the incongruous banality of this encounter only seems to demonstrate how far from ‘reality’ she has drifted.
Though initially it might seem stretched a bit thin over two and a half hours, the film asserts – boldly, if ironically – the supreme power of the images cinematographer Benjamin Kracun presents to us, and the very absence of ‘content’ (or substance, if you like) actually makes it more convincing, because it works to convey the desperation behind the facade: a frenzied need for the show to go on even when, or especially when, there is nothing there to support it.
This mad frenzy, which is also tied into the psychology of its characters (in as much as they have a psychology), is the engine that powers the film.
Psychology is in any case less crucial here than biology. Where the film is grounded, it’s in the body: Sue’s emergence from Sparkle’s back in her clinical-white bathroom is a grisly process and both bodies continue to exist separately even when consciousness has temporarily abandoned them.
Cronenberg is a clear reference point, notably The Fly: ‘body horror’, which is essentially about our physical fragility, is contrasted with the monolithic power structures and forces invoked by Kubrick – a shot of a man’s hands encompassing Sue’s buttocks on her aerobics show is like some cosmic alignment of heavenly bodies out of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But the science here is closer (as in Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool) to magic. The film becomes a kind of fairy tale, bypassing rational considerations to touch powerfully on our terror of mortality, on addiction, celebrity, and male exploitation of women (as a hard fact of existence rather than something that might readily be overcome – I’m not sure that this is quite the straightforwardly feminist film that some have taken it for).
After turning New Year into a bloodbath (or shower), in a scene that brings to mind the ’80’s/90’s excesses of Troma, the ‘monster’ collapses and Sparkle’s face detaches itself on a starfish-like fragment of flesh to settle down on her star set in concrete on the Hollywood boardwalk; into which it melts, with apparent satisfaction. Here is the true desire behind the hunger for fame – not merely for adulation but for permanence.
But even this star is subject to wear and tear, as the opening scenes of the film (an overhead shot of it being trodden on and subjected to the elements) have already established. This hunger can’t be satisfied in any substantial way – it’s a spiritual hunger.
THE DRIVER’S SEAT (1974)
Novelist Muriel Spark delighted in playing God in her work – a tendency to ‘stamp on’ her characters is noted in the material accompanying this BFI Blu-Ray.
Her 1970 novel The Driver’s Seat – adapted into this interesting, if not entirely satisfying, film by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi – exemplifies this tendency with a story of a woman, Lise, who travels to Rome to meet her fate, murder at the hands of an unknown man. This is something the reader is aware will happen early on – as, so it seems, is Lise.
There is a sense of her soliciting her own death, eagerly searching for ‘the one’ who will kill her as if for a romantic partner; on the other hand, as a character created by Spark, she might simply be aware of her scheduled end and be trying, not quite successfully, to make the best of it – to ‘own it’.
The film isn’t quite as quick to reveal Lise’s fate as the novel is, but early on we are made aware that she is to become a person of interest to Interpol, as if she might be a criminal rather than a victim.
But she is a victim, just determined not to act like one. Elizabeth Taylor’s performance as Lise is deliberately off-key as Lise tries to assert herself on the world around her, often by being rude to shop staff, as in the opening scene where she has a meltdown on being offered a dress that won’t stain: she wants to leave a mark on her surroundings, not just vanish.
There is good support from fellow travellers Ian Bannen, who tries to bed her, plaintively insisting that his macrobiotic diet demands that he have ‘an orgasm a day’, and Mona Washbourne, whose nephew proves, in the end, to be Lise’s ‘chosen one’. Andy Warhol turns up too, as if to confirm my suspicion that, in the transition from book to film, the central subject has become (as it was in Spark’s previous novel, The Public Image) celebrity.
After all, this is Liz Taylor, acting like a temperamental film star. The alternate title of the film is Identikit, which – so the additional material affirms – was given Spark’s approval. The identikit picture is another kind of ‘public image’, as notoriety is one form of celebrity.
If identity has become a secular society’s version of the soul, celebrity is the canonisation of identity – the best way we have of offsetting our mortality.
Spark was a Catholic but the worlds she created bear no clear trace of a loving God hovering over them (any more than our world does). Whether Lise is setting up her own murder or being forced to accept it, she knows that imprinting herself on the world while she can, making a splash, is all she has left.
Yet at the end the police are gathered around the spot where Lise was killed, and her body isn’t there. Though there is a bizarre, massive, sculpture of stacked chairs nearby that seems obscurely significant – is it a sculpture, or just chairs stacked in a madly extravagant way? I like to see this as the film’s equivalent of The Substance‘s ‘monster’ – an elaborate yet shambolic construct, a meeting of chaos and design, the permanent and the ephemeral that serves to embody Lise’s plight, but in an offhand way that suits the film’s oblique chill.
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