DEMI WEARS BOUCHERON EARRINGS, bracelet and dress, Both by 16 ARLINGTON, AND SHOES BY CELINE.
Transformation and tragedy go hand in hand for Hollywood’s new heroines. But their complex journeys are not in vain, feminist activist, scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Salamishah Tillet explains.
By Salamishah Tillet
Photographed at The Bentley Hotel, London by Zoe McConnell
In one of the earliest scenes in Coralie Fargeat’s latest film, The Substance, the gluttonous boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) warns Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a TV aerobics instructor, “It stops at 50.”
And because I was watching it as I was on the verge of entering my fiftieth year myself, my response was as deadpan as hers.
“What stops at 50?” she says with muted incredulity.
Over the next two hours, the film reveals the various ends precipitated by her mid-life: Her appeal. Her audience. Her proximity to power. Her body. Her soul.
All of this is possible because as much as The Substance is a movie about Elisabeth’s weekly transformation from her older, more self-conscious self into a younger, completely id-driven Sue (Margaret Qualley), it is really about the preciousness and precariousness of certain types of female beauty. It is a meditation on the violent lengths that media institutions, the beauty industry and the individuals that represent them will go to punish women for aging and, with that, pressure them against reveling in their agency and full range of humanity.
Even more tragically, to regain power and assert herself, Elisabeth resorts to injecting herself with a neon substance and enduring unbearable pain to swap places with her younger self. Through her and Sue’s constant swapping of bodies, we see her character physically transform without psychologically evolving. Rather than outwardly rejecting these standards of female perfection, Elisabeth ends up being a tragic heroine, freed only when her body is destroyed rather than deciding to find a way to live past Harvey’s cruel expiration date.
In a year in which Hollywood has produced a bevy of rich female characters on screen, Elisabeth’s outcome also made me rethink the fate of other leading ladies who have also undergone significant transformations: In Wicked, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) moves from reticence to revolutionary; Ani (Mikey Maidson) of Anora strives for a life beyond erotic dancing by eloping with the son of a Russian oligarch; the titular protagonist of Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón) reinvents herself from a sociopathic drug lord to a soigné society woman. And yet, despite each woman actively trying to change the circumstances into which they were born, they are only partially successful.
In other words, these movies ask a bigger question: Can women subvert societal expectations of gender norms and survive whole and intact?
With its two-part movie structure, Wicked: Part One ends with Elphaba finding her voice, embracing her “otherness” as green and being ostracized by the Wizard. We will have to wait until November to see how much power she can exert in exile as the Wicked Witch of the West. Likewise, Ani seems to be caught in an endless exchange of sex for money—so much so that her plan to flee the strip club puts her in more physical jeopardy, with no fairytale ending in sight. Finally, as a trans character, Emilia Pérez metamorphizes the most physically, and as a result of her gender-affirming surgery (the movie controversially implies), the most psychologically. But even with that great arc, Emilia’s finality always feels pre-determined by either the sins of her past life or the stereotypical tragedy that often befalls transgressive women, especially transwomen, in fiction and real life.
In The Substance, Elisabeth and Sue’s deadly bind has led some critics to applaud the film’s feminism, while others have argued that its progressiveness falls flat. In some ways, this debate is partly a byproduct of the horror genre, in which the grotesque is expected to be exaggerated; in this case, it manifests as a product of Elisabeth’s severe body dysmorphia. But a more generous read is that this is a case of form imitating theme. In a movie about surface readings, it should be no surprise that its main characters are denied any actual depth. Their flatness is the point.
In this sense, the ending of The Substance might better resemble another movie that focuses on the deadly toxicity of the American beauty industry—last summer’s Skincare, starring Elizabeth Banks as a famous middle-aged aesthetician who is so paranoid about losing her status and relevancy that she attacks an unsuspecting rival whom she blames for sabotaging her business.
Even though Fargeat’s main characters might lack substance, I found myself following the trajectory of her movies and her obsession with showing the difference between the impossible beauty standards imposed on us and the fatal consequences of embracing that gaze as our own.
Reality+, her 2014 short film, follows Vincent as his average self and in his altered state, whereby a brain chip allows him to see himself in his ideal physical body. The catch: There is a 12-hour time limit, forcing him to run home, Cinderella-like, to avoid detection by a woman he wants to date. Ultimately, Vincent can reject the technology that transforms him into Vincent+ and choose an even better path.
In 2017, Fargeat followed up with Revenge, her debut feature that grappled with the effects of patriarchal violence writ large on one woman’s body. Set in a secluded vacation home in the desert, the movie is about Jen, a young aspiring actress who is sexually assaulted and left for dead by a group of men, one of whom she is having an affair with. The ensuing plot is all about Jen’s self-rescue and how she takes back her narrative, her body and her life from those men she once trusted.
“As human beings in general, but especially as women, our body is such an object of discourse, of contemplation, of judgment, of transformation,” Fargeat said in an interview last September. “That it plays a major role in our lives whether we hate it, whether we take care of it, or whether we want to destroy it.” She added that The Substance enabled her to explore “in a visceral way how our bodies can be destroyed, but also how they can fight and survive that destruction.”
So while Elisabeth might remain limited, Fargeat, the director, rejects the cinematic male gaze altogether and shows how such a narrative confines our heroines on screen and us as the audience who is consuming their images.
Her auteurism is the best vindication she could give us. At the young age of 48, she seems to be just getting started.
Credits
Photographer: Zoe McConnell
Styling: Brad Goreski
Photo Director: Jennifer Laski
On-Site Producer: Dot Kyle at Ros Productions
Hair: Dimitris Giannetos
Fashion Assistant Amber Rose Smith
Makeup: Sofia Tilbury for Charlotte Tilbury Beauty
Makeup Assistant: Melina Bisbiki