TALES OF LOHR: "THE SUBSTANCE"
Thoughts on Coralie Fargeat's gnarly satirical horror; plus, Viva "Factory Roll Call"!
Quite appropriate, really, the number of inspirations coursing through the narrative and visual DNA of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. This caustic, gruesome satirical horror film bears the scars of Jekyll and Hyde, Faust, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, and the twinned 1950 famous-women-in-twilight-extremis classics Sunset Blvd. and All About Eve. The film’s visual design hearkens at various moments to the sterile dystopia of George Lucas’ primordial feature THX-1138, the fussily oppressive schematics of Stanley Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel in The Shining, the weaponized priapic mania of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, and, in its concluding moments, the prosthetic phantasmagorias of David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and John Carpenter’s The Thing. And down deep, throbbing at the heart of it all, is every nightmare-draped fairy tale that starts with a haggard crone gazing into the mirror and being as disgusted by what she sees as the world around her insists that she should be. Yet somehow, The Substance still feels bracingly original in the midst of all this. That unexampled affect is a testament to the skill of Fargeat’s filmmaking (she received the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes this past spring for her work here), and to the purity of the justifiable bitterness and rage that animates her story, a fury that has begun to redound, in increasingly palpable and volatile registers, through popular culture, politics, and the day-to-day give and take between men and women.
At the center of the roiling cauldron of The Substance is Elisabeth Sparkle, a one-time Hollywood megastar of a certain age, portrayed by one-time Hollywood megastar of a certain age Demi Moore. Years ago, Elisabeth was the golden goddess of the Dream Factory, winning an Oscar (a prize for which Moore herself has never even been nominated) and earning a star on the Walk of Fame, a monument that we watch, in the film’s succinctly cutting prologue, succumb to the vicissitudes of time and public indifference. The now-turning-50 Elisabeth is the host of a Jane Fonda-style TV workout series, but the network president, a slavering ghoul with the toxically suitable sobriquet of Harvey (Dennis Quaid), informs her, on her birthday, that she’s being put out to pasture. The network wants younger, hotter, better. Doesn’t, it seems, everyone? But a chance encounter offers Elisabeth a glistening apple of a solution: The Substance, an off-the-books miracle drug that uses genetic replication to sprout from your body a streamlined reboot of your own most beautiful self. Desperate to reclaim everything the world told her she was meant to and should want to be, Elisabeth doses herself and conjures forth the slinky, tight-bodied Sue (Margaret Qualley, in an astute bit of nepo-baby casting), who quickly grabs Elisabeth’s old hosting job and begins her ascent to the top of the Hollywood sludge heap.
The Substance, like every devil’s bargain, comes with a few seemingly simple rules attached. Once a day, Sue has to “stabilize” with an injection of Elisabeth’s spinal fluid. Every week, the two soul-linked bodies have to switch off, one week as Elisabeth, one as Sue. And no matter what, “Remember You Are One.” But once Sue tastes the bright lights, she becomes increasingly unable to bear the idea of even a moment back in the shadows. So…a few extra hours. A couple more days. A stray month or three. What could it hurt? Elisabeth. That’s what it could hurt, and as Sue increasingly abuses the “blessing” of The Substance, her other self plunges down an increasingly graphic rabbit hole, one she will have to literally claw her way out of if she ever hopes to be fully herself again.
Many critics and commentators have noted The Substance’s almost jarring lack of subtlety, Fargeat’s baldly blunt-force deployment of her story’s trappings of social commentary. But the filmmaker seems to have seized on a reality that is ever more apparent in our contemporary landscape of social media saturation and mountingly reactionary pop-culture-infested politics: Sometimes, the indirect approach simply no longer cuts the mustard. We have arrived at a moment where major-office political candidates are openly advocating the rollback of women’s suffrage; when women who choose to wait before having children are being branded as cultural criminals; when leading ideological figures, in just this past week, are flatly telling women, in the midst of campaign speeches, what they will or will not think about certain critical issues of relevance to their own lives. The dog whistles have been chucked into the sea. Misogynists are now just angrily grabbing women by the figurative throats and telling them, Do this or it’s your ass. Fargeat gets this message loud and clear, and is answering this unmasked authoritarian bigotry the only way you sometimes can: By showering a roomful of representative fictional woman-haters with a tsunami of point-making gore. It’s no delicately worded New Yorker editorial, but no one with any sense will walk away from The Substance oblivious to Fargeat’s overarching points about the literally monstrous ends women are often pushed to in order to meet the demands of the culture that alternately caresses them and shoves them aside.
Demi Moore has been pushed to a few extremes of her own in the back-and-forth celluloid discourse at which her body has found itself at numerous junctures throughout her career. In a recent interview on CBS Sunday Morning, she discussed the long early-morning weight-loss-motivated bike rides she inflicted upon herself every day during shooting of 1993’s Indecent Proposal, despite being a newly nursing mother at the time. (Did I mention that the film in question is about a desperate couple banking their financial future on selling an aloof millionaire a night of sex with Moore?) The fact that comments sections under social-media shares of this interview are riddled with accusations of hypocrisy on Moore’s part fully illustrates the no-win position into which women like her are placed: Be as beautiful as we demand you be at all times, and we will hate you for having later regrets about what that beauty cost you. You can feel every iota of pent-up anger at these double standards seething through Moore’s brutally sympathetic performance. The 61-year-old actress’ obvious charisma and still considerable beauty are on ample display in her early, better-days scenes, but when it is time to bare body and soul in service of Fargeat’s resonant story, Moore taps into necrotic places some might never have suspected she had in her. Nobody defined by vanity would allow themselves to be deformed and warped the way Moore is before Fargeat’s camera, and the power of her performance even behind Pierre Olivier Persin’s remarkable prosthetics is shockingly effective. The fact that Elisabeth’s plight lands as hard as it does once her degeneration reaches its climax is a testament to the humanity with which Moore has infused her character prior to these moments. The desolation of her lonely, no-calls-coming-in mornings following her firing; the almost pathetically grateful warmth of the smile she flashes an average-joe former classmate who still carries a torch for her; the sheer self-hatred she exudes when, preparing for an ego-salving drink date with said admirer, she traps herself in her bathroom in a coruscatingly futile attempt to make herself look as perfect as Sue. It’s easy to brand Moore’s performance brave, but more to the point to simply savor how good she is here, near career-best work.
Margaret Qualley’s character is, by design, more opaque than Moore’s, given that she is literally birthed out of a slit up the veteran actress’ back. But she surpasses the intentionally objectifying glare of Benjamin Kracun’s cinematography (at times, it seems like an entire second unit may have been deployed simply to film Qualley’s backside) with a trickily satisfying turn. In her early scenes, she undulates with the pitiless confidence of someone who has gleefully slurped down everything the phallocracy has given her to swallow, grinding her groin for the exercise show studio’s notably crotch-level-mounted cameras and soaking in her own sexuality like even she can barely comprehend her own hotness. But when she, like Elisabeth before her, commences a descent into the maelstrom of feminine decay, Qualley’s reactions have an arguably angrier edge than even Moore’s, as one would expect from someone still too young to realize she’s bet all her chips on a hand in a rigged game. As the stand-in dealer of those cards, the film’s only other character with a substantial amount of screen time, Dennis Quaid makes a frothing meal out of his incessantly fish-eye-lensed action painting of greed, lust, prejudice, and power hunger (a portrayal, in other words, of the type of person Quaid apparently thinks should be president of the United States).
Like her writing, Fargeat’s direction lets it all hang out, and then some. She and Kracun sheathe Sue’s scenes in shimmering, wrinkle-obliterating soft-focus gloss, a pointed contrast to the colder, harder light that assaults Elisabeth’s progress through nightmare. The abstraction of The Substance’s provenance, with its robotic drone of a customer-service phone voice and grimy back-alley dropbox pickup procedure, bolsters the sense that this monkey’s paw has all but dropped from the infernal clouds into its unwitting mark’s lap. Indeed, Fargeat presents much of her world in this oblique fashion (Sue guests at one point on a vapid talk show literally just called “The Show”), giving the entire affair a paradoxical patina of allegorical clarity. Production designer Stanislas Reydellet encases Elisabeth and Sue in a world alternately opulent and forbidding, with mysteriously deserted TV studio corridors, lush yet off-puttingly sterile living spaces, and the frigid white tile of Elisabeth’s bathroom becoming nothing less than a one-spirit-two-bodies battle chamber. The ambient-electronica musical score by Raffertie pulsates like a palpitating artery, and Persin, who stands alongside Moore, Qualley, and Fargeat as the movie’s tech MVP, crafts all manner of scabrous horrors, transforming Moore into a viciously withered fairy-book hag before twisting both her and Qualley into the film’s climactic aberration. I will leave that being undescribed here, as Lovecraft would. But if you are of sensitive constitution, brace yourself. It’s going to be rough for you to bear.
The Substance is the kind of movie specifically designed to polarize those who experience it. Plenty of people sympathetic to its sociocultural commentary will nevertheless be repulsed by its heavy blood and guts quotient. Others may blanch at the film’s assaultive audiovisual texture and admittedly protracted 140-minute length. And all you have to do is look at current presidential polling figures to know that far too many potential spectators will look at the plight of Elisabeth Sparkle and either not get what the problem is, or unhesitatingly declare that she brought it on herself. But Coralie Fargeat has carried on a proud genre tradition in the spirit of the aforementioned Cronenberg and George Romero, using the most lurid extremes of horror cinema to tap into the social, political, and interpersonal horrors that genuinely menace us all. The Substance may likely not flush any of the woman-hating poison out of the collective bloodstream. But at the very least, it grinds our noses with gusto in the piteous muck of what we’ve all created.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
VIVA (1938 - )
In evaluating the virtues of his extended entourage of “superstars,” Andy Warhol would broadly classify the members of his retinue as either “beauties,” largely compelling due to their striking characteristics of physicality, or “talkers,” people he found fascinating mostly as a result of the expulsions that issued forth from their febrile, often chemically tickled brains. Arguably straddling those two poles as efficiently as anyone in the Warholian dramatis personae was Susan Hoffmann, the actor, artist, and writer known to the world of avant-garde legend as Viva.
Born and raised as a strict Roman Catholic in Syracuse, New York, Hoffmann first flirted with joining the nunnery until segueing into more secular pursuits, via early stints as an artist and model. She eventually let her painting fall by the wayside, asserting (as Warhol himself had some time earlier) that canvas-borne art was essentially dying, and soon found herself before motion picture cameras for the first time, as a featured player in the torturous production Ciao! Manhattan, which would be the final film featuring ill-fated Silver Factory glamour idol Edie Sedgwick. Perhaps inevitably, this film’s Factory-related connections brought Viva to the attention of Warhol. She approached him about possibly appearing in one of his own films, but he offered a challenge: You can be in the film, he said, but only if you bare your breasts. Hoffmann obliged, with a strong assist from a pair of nipple-concealing bandages, and once she was in front of the camera, Warhol was knocked out by the turbocharged speed and nimble wit of the improvised dialogue pouring from the woman he would soon christen as Viva.
She would become a fixture of Warhol’s films for the latter years of the 1960s, often paired with the equally loquacious Taylor Mead, an impishly fey counterpart to her imperiously erotic hauteur. Her Warhol filmography includes Bike Boy (1967), in which she shares a marked chemistry with the charismatic greaser vibes of Joe Spencer; The Nude Restaurant (1968), presiding over a countercultural eatery in a skimpy thong and nothing else; and the same year’s Lonesome Cowboys, as the doyenne of a western town overrun by polysexual cowpokes. By far Viva’s most notorious work in a Warhol production was in the final film helmed solely by the artist himself, 1969’s Blue Movie. In this production, Viva and co-star Louis Waldon, amidst an extended conversation about relationships and current events, have an unsimulated sexual encounter on screen. The presentation of this film at New York’s Garrick Theatre resulted in the arrest, on charges of possession of obscene materials, of the Garrick’s manager, ticket salesperson, and projectionist.
When Valerie Solanas entered Warhol’s studios on June 3, 1968 and inflicted a near-fatal gunshot wound on the artist, it was Viva with whom he was on the phone when Solanas opened fire. She was part of the retinue that kept a steady vigil outside Warhol’s hospital room as he fought his way back to life, and she filled in for him as “The Underground Filmmaker” in the Factory-pastiche sequence of John Schlesinger’s Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy, shot during Warhol’s recovery period. This was the first of several major film appearances Viva made in works by filmmakers other than Warhol, including the same year’s Lions Love, by seminal French New Wave director Agnès Varda, and Herbert Ross’ Play It Again, Sam, in which she played alongside the film’s leading man and writer, Woody Allen. (She would also appear on a 1968 Tonight Show episode guest-hosted by Allen.)
Viva would not perform in any of the Warhol films of the post-shooting, Paul Morrissey-dominated era, and she turned her major attentions to writing, becoming one of the most notable scribes to emerge from the Factory scene. Her 1970 memoir Superstar offers particularly biting observations of the Warhol world, and her work would also be featured in New York Woman and The Village Voice. She would expand her artistic practice throughout the 1970s, partnering with Shirley Clarke as part of the filmmaker’s pioneering Teepee Video Space Troupe video pieces.
Since her time at the Factory, Viva has lived a sometimes fraught, often peripatetic lifestyle. With her ex-husband, French filmmaker / photographer Michel Auder, she has two daughters, Alexandra Auder (whose own memoir of her upbringing, Don’t Call Me Home, was published last year) and Gaby Hoffmann, a one-time child actress who received three Emmy nominations for her work on the TV series Transparent and Girls. Today, Viva resides in Palm Springs, California, where, contrary to her early reports of the death of painting, she has taken up landscapes.