‘The Substance’, the Abzorbaloff, and the TV Show ‘Botched’
Rating: 4.5/5
This review contains spoilers for The Substance.
Have you tried The Substance? It's changed the lives of those that have, or at least those that are willing to admit to it. There's an element of stubbornness to the discourse over this film, with many turning their noses up at its repulsive contents. Reviews are mixed, filmmaker Coralie Fargeat has been clear with her intention, and there are echoes of a David Tennant era episode of Doctor Who to The Substance's third act. If you didn't quite understand the significance of Margaret Qualley's butt in this squelchy body horror, then the rest of its meaning is bound to be lost on you.
If you've ever watched an episode of Botched, then you'll recognise the campy quality of the reality programme's theme injected deep into the foundations of The Substance. "I wanna be sexy... I wanna be hot... Fix me make me beautiful... I wanna be perfect." Botched revels in its absurd vanity, from the title cards to the storytelling, which Fargeat adopts into her criticism of contemporary beauty standards. Clean, solid colours burst into almost every frame of The Substance, mimicking the tone of Botched's cheesy yet clinical cosmetic surgery misfortunes, with doctors Terry Dubrow and Paul Nassif fixing the negligence of the surgeons their patients visited before them.
In season 5 episode 6 of Botched, we learn Tomi's tale of butt injections gone wrong. She met with a retired nurse and a needle in a hotel room one day, and one year later that nurse was imprisoned for manslaughter. Tomi didn't die, but she did decide to get more injections from a different source:
We went to an apartment -- they started pumping me up. And, again, I just had no idea what they put in there. There was a big mirror in front of me and I remember looking up at the mirror and I had never seen myself so pale in my life... I was in ICU for 2 weeks.
The aforementioned procedures left Tomi with residual silicone travelling in her body, leaving her at risk of total kidney failure. The doctors tell her: "you're lucky to be alive."
To resolve this, Tomi is cut, the silicone is vacuumed from her buttocks, excess skin is removed, and she is stapled back together. Her story in itself is a body horror. Despite experiences like this, The Substance faces the following criticism from The Cut:
Why, I wondered, would anyone make that bargain? My inability to suspend my disbelief may be in part because Demi Moore, who plays faded star Elisabeth Sparkle, is one of the most beautiful 62-year-olds on the planet.
Now, for clarification: The Substance is a work of fiction, and within works of fiction you build a world that will allow for suspension of disbelief at the events that occur within it. As soon as we see Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) survive a car crash unscathed, there's a part of our minds that goes "huh?" because, obviously, that would not happen in real life. When we get to a strange young nurse touching up Elisabeth's spine and commenting "you're a perfect candidate," we think, along with Sparkle, "what a bizarre comment to make." The whole process of Elisabeth acquiring The Substance is shady. Tomi's experience of meeting with women in non-clinical rooms to inject silicone into her bum was also, likely, very shady. But she did it. And Elisabeth, who lives in Hollywood on shrooms, makes the same illogical decision. When you consider the choices real-world women make under the pressure of our beauty standards and you combine that with the plastic surgery Willy Wonka land Elisabeth Sparkle appears to be living in, this narrative choice really isn't that implausible.
But the discourse doesn't end there; as we progress into the second act, we meet Sue (Margaret Qualley), who is quickly wrapped up in a shiny pink leotard and cast as Elisabeth Sparkle's replacement on an aerobics show named "Pump It Up". Little White Lies clutched their pearls at the sight of Qualley's derriere, which we see not once, not twice, not -- well, you lose count of how many times you see it, and it gets a little ridiculous. In an interview with Letterboxd, Fargeat justifies this:
Her intention with the copious butt shots was to show two things: the first was to think about “how much it is the focus of so many different gazes that we have to live with, that we have to take into account, that we have to endure. That’s something that has defined the way we can inhabit the public space. [That] shapes a lot of our behavior.
But Little White Lies counters this with "replicating images doesn’t make them implicitly subversive, and The Substance’s presentation is as shallow as the very thing it’s critiquing." And yes, for an image to be subversive a level of self-awareness must be applied within its context for the point to land. But considering the events leading up to the birth of Sue and her casting in "Pump It Up", it is difficult to look at these images and view them as anything other than laughable. If this use of the ass shot is shallow, then what is to be said of all the ass shots on Instagram? In pornography? It somewhat condescends the thoughtful direction Fargeat has placed upon Qualley's bum.
Fargeat's second reason for this anal fixation was to
[represent] the way a woman should be totally free and entitled to use her body the way she wants, to show it if she wants, to be as sexy as she wants, to be totally at ease and happy, to be whoever, however, whatever she wants.
And so, the intention is not necessarily just to subvert, but also to celebrate -- what if a bum isn't a bad thing? What if there's duality to a derriere? What is The Substance without outlining the desirability and absurdity of Margaret Qualley's ass? Sometimes it's not sexual objectification; sometimes it's subjectification. If Fargeat has produced this much discussion over one woman's bum, then perhaps we owe her more credit than labelling her work as "shallow".
If The Substance wasn't preposterous enough, the third act will hammer the point hard and fast into your skull. After ignoring the one-use-only label on The Substance's packaging, Sue and Elisabeth transform into a creature which echoes season 2 episode 10 of Doctor Who, "Love & Monsters". Monstro Elisasue is essentially the female version of Peter Kay's Abzorbaloff, who absorbs humans into his body to maintain his lifeforce. As with The Substance, once consumed, a person cannot return to their original form. There is no returning to Elisabeth or Sue, except in the film's final moments when Elisabeth's sloppy face melts into the pavement slab holding her Walk of Fame star; similarly, in "Love & Monsters", the Abzorbaloff melts into the concrete once defeated. It's a comparison that holds contradiction to the criticism that Fargeat is insulting women's fear of aging, as pointedly phrased in Paste:
The idea that only women are subjected to fearing age is as antiquated as the concept of aerobics television, and to further insinuate that our insecurities are fully our fault by making Elisabeth the ultimate punchline is insulting.
Fargeat isn't saying that women are afraid of aging. As she says in her interviews with Rue Morgue and British Vogue, Fargeat has built a "jail of self-hatred" for Elisabeth and dismantled it "in a violent and uncompromising way."
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.
The Abzorbaloff disguises his true form to consume his prey, same as Sue hides away Elisabeth and injects her spinal fluid to maintain her youth. It's when their secrets are revealed that they feel liberated to pursue their desires (the Abzorbaloff to absorb The Doctor, Elisasue to present the New Year's Eve Show) without the limitations of presentability.
If this sounds like a reaching conclusion, then consider how The Substance weaponises its sci-fi elements to deconstruct beauty standards with similar violence to how these procedures are performed. Botched tells the tale of how in order to achieve the perfect butt, a woman is willing to follow a stranger into a hotel room and be injected with a life-threatening substance. To prevent outright kidney failure and reverse the effects of this procedure, parts of her body are removed and stapled back together. Elisabeth and Sue make the grave mistake of trusting one another with each other's bodies in a culture obsessed with perfection, transforming them into the most imperfect, repulsive being imaginable, á la Doctor Who. In their duality as Elisasue, they accept the point of no return, the absurdity in their pursuit of vanity rejected by their body in an explosive finale which is as ridiculous as a man having a sexual relationship with a pavement slab. It's not Elisabeth that's the punchline -- it's the culture that's been created.