What if you get a chance to live as a younger, fitter, prettier version of yourself?
In The Substance, the prospect tempts Elisabeth, an aging actress with fading stardom.
Wishing to relive her glory days, she takes extreme measures to retain her youth and beauty, but ironically, ends up becoming a monster. The younger version destroys the older one through increasingly damaging self-sabotage, even though she knows she has to face the deadly consequences herself.
While exaggerated for the movie, her story is not very different from our own. Most of us enjoy our present moments at the expense of our future well-being.
Our momentary joys often lead to ghastly future consequences. The delicious pizza gives you heart problems, the drinking leads to liver disease, the binge-watching worsens your eyesight, the sedentary lifestyle, with most of the day spent in front of screens, destroys the spine, and the quest for endless entertainment and instant gratification puts your career in jeopardy.
But are we going to stop? Mostly not. We think: All these are problems for our future self. Let’s just have fun for now.
The Substance shows this as the younger self extracting the life force from the older self. Is what we’re doing any different? The unhealthy choices we make today are drawing out the health from our future bodies.
It’s tempting to think, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that, I’d respect the balance.’ But how many of us are doing it? How many of us are giving our bodies the required nutrition and restorative rest? Seriously setting aside procrastination and focusing on our important goals? Willing to deny ourselves the instant gratification and inculcate discipline for making the hard choices?
Most of us (if not all) would—and do —end up acting like Sue, destroying our future for a few moments of pleasure in the present. The Substance is an excellent metaphor for self-sabotage and how it spirals to the point of complete self-destruction.
The Substance highlights this point several times, right from the first few minutes of the movie, when Elisabeth says ‘take care of yourself’ during her workout video. A cliché phrase that we don’t pay much attention to, both in the movie and in our real life.
Hating yourself to the point of self-destruction
Most of the self-sabotage in The Substance happens because Elisabeth hates herself and has no regard for her well-being. The longer she remains in Sue’s younger, conventionally attractive body that receives social validation, the more she begins hating her older body. At one point, she hides it behind the bathroom in the darkness, in an attempt to get rid of it.
When Sue draws excessive life force out of the older body and it begins decomposing, she pushes it away and covers it up so she never has to look at it again.
Later in the story, Sue literally kicks the old body to death. Even when Elisabeth is already dead, Sue continues beating her up with immense vitriol due to the years of accumulated hate and resentment.
Again, while exaggerated for the story, it’s an apt depiction of self-hate, body dysmorphia, and the violence we cause against our own body because we don’t think it’s good enough. If you harbor intense negative feelings about yourself, it can lead to self-sabotage to the point of complete self-destruction.
Unrealistic beauty standards
Often, this feeling that our body isn’t good enough comes from unrealistic beauty standards in the society. The Substance does an excellent job of driving this point home by depicting Elisabeth’s descent into madness as she takes increasingly drastic measures to fit the conventional beauty standards but ends up turning into a monster.
It’s a nod to the current rage of Botox, fillers, and plastic surgery. Just a few minutes of scrolling through famous actresses’ transformations over the years will show how many have turned to artificial enhancements to make themselves look a certain way in alignment with what’s socially accepted as attractive.
Like in the movie, in real life, these procedures are often botched and the women end up looking worse than what they started with.
But who takes responsibility for the damage done? Was it the actress at fault for making the choice? The social pressures driving her to it?
Chris Lambert from Colossus described it beautifully:
“Monstro Elisasue is a byproduct of the industry. That’s why Fargeat has Harvey say, “She’s my most beautiful creation.” And why we have the absurdity of the monster even making it into the building, much less onto the stage.
It’s Fargeat saying, “Look at how dumb this industry is. This is what they create and they’re too blind to see it until it’s spinning around and spraying blood all over them.”
And even once everyone sees the monster, is aware of the monster, what will change? What consequences will the industry face? Will there even be consequences?
Or will Harvey, and the other men like him, just keep on keeping on? While the people they exploit slip between the cracks of the metaphorical sidewalk.”
The cycle of destruction
The impact of all this isn’t limited to one actress. It creates a cycle of destruction, where everyone feels compelled to jump on the bandwagon to fit in. The unrealistic beauty standards become normalized and people are forced to take drastic measures to catch up.
As a Redditor described it:
“When the Elizasue third variation came out and was spewing blood and her gore all over people, it made me think of how individuals who engage in these self-sabotaging methods of achieving perfection spread their own internalized hatred to others without necessarily meaning to. In a way like an infection, the hate of ourselves is proliferated and can become visible, even maybe promoted to others through our actions.
Elizabeth is not only a result of the toxic environment that caused her to hate herself, but also an agent pushing this narrative by altering herself and crossing the line between perfection and horrifyingly unnatural. The blood and gore in the theatre, as well as Elizasue, is the accumulated hate that can no longer go unnoticed.”
Now, not just celebrities, but even normal women are expected to present a certain image: No body hair, makeup on, slim body with big assets. How many women can show up to their workplace without makeup or with body hair on display?
Because we’ve normalized these standards, anyone not following them is immediately discriminated against. People perceived as ugly are less likely to be hired! So, irrespective of your preferences, you’re forced to follow these increasingly unrealistic “rules” and push others around you to do so as well.
We keep perpetuating the cycle of destruction by normalizing things like starving and malnourishing ourselves to achieve a certain weight and look, adding plastic to our bodies to match what’s perceived as ideal, and spending thousands of dollars every year on beauty products, with the list of what must be done continually growing.
Male gaze
The Substance makes it clear what drives many of these decisions: the male gaze. Sue’s workout program seems erotic rather than fitness content, targeted toward a male audience who would watch it to ogle at Sue instead of actually following the exercises.
That’s why Elisabeth is fired from her job. She’s considered too old for the target male audience to consider attractive. They want a younger, hotter woman with ‘all the things in the right places’ so ratings and audience interest goes up.
In the younger body, Sue mainly tries to please men instead of enjoying the vitality for other activities, like traveling or adventure sports, that may be difficult for an older woman.
The message is clear: The reason she wanted this younger, conventionally attractive body was to attract attention because she believed social validation defined her worth.
Addiction
One of the more obvious themes in The Substance was the journey of addiction, how it becomes increasingly difficult to stop, even when you know it’s destroying you.
As a Redditor explained:
“This movie also works as a drug metaphor where Sue is your high self and Elizabeth is when you come down. You keep on wanting to do a bit more even though it destroys you and you go into a downward spiral that you cannot stop. Also the movie is literally named The Substance.”
Sunk cost fallacy
Among the bigger themes of body dysmorphia and self-sabotage, a key theme in The Substance was the concept of sunk cost fallacy. When Elisabeth realizes the damage she’s doing to herself, she has the option to stop, but refuses to. She feels like she has come too far now, invested too much to turn back at this point.
The agent offers her the option to end the Sue program and go back to her normal life. But once she’s had the taste of youth, she can’t go back to the body she hates, which has now been further ruined due to her own negligence and greed. She looks down at her rapidly ageing, decomposing body and decides it’s too late, there’s no going back now.
It’s reminiscent of toxic habits and relationships that we refuse to let go of due to how long we’ve been attached. We think: We’ve done so much, we can do a little more. It would be a waste to let it all go now after all this time.
Metaphor for parenting
In a way, although it’s hard to say whether it was intentional, Elisabeth and Sue’s dynamic is a lot like parenting. From the birthing of a younger version of your DNA to the host body being damaged by the newer one, it’s eerily resonant of the childbirth and child-rearing experience.
From the scars on the mother’s body to the career years lost owing to childcare, the young are reared through the sacrifices of the mother.
As a Redditor put it:
“The entire thing was an allegory of having children, where they violently split you in half and steal your youth, and then you sit at home while they go out and have crazy fun while you are trapped at home.”
The theme continues to highlight the parenting journey at later stages by showing elderly neglect and abandonment.
As another Redditor said:
“I’m surprised no one mentioned the generational dismissal of the elderly in this film. I thought the part where Sue puts Elizabeth in the dark room so she could go live her life without the burden of taking care of her in any meaningful way was a great subtext for how we treat our elders by putting them in retirement homes and just forgetting about them.”
Foreshadowing
One of the things The Substance does really well is foreshadowing.
In the beginning of the movie, during her workout program, Elisabeth talks about becoming a starfish. She ends the movie melting into a starfish-shaped blob.
When we’re introduced to her star in the beginning, a man walks across it and drops ketchup all over. The scene is similar to the bloody remains of Elisabeth spread across the star in the end.
Ending
Many viewers complained that the movie became too over-the-top in the end. But that was the point!
We’re watching her descent into madness. Things seem crazy because they are. She has lost grip on reality and reached the point of no return.
The movie actually does a fantastic job taking us through the journey, beginning from what seems like a normal human tendency to desire more and better, but turns into an absolute tragedy when the quest for greener pastures burns down her entire world, leaving her with nothing but some dirt that’s cleaned up by morning.
What makes the cleaning shot a great ending is that it shows how, despite destroying herself to the point of oblivion, nothing really changed. Nothing she did mattered. She didn’t matter.
There will be another younger, hotter, fitter Elisabeth/Sue in the morning and when she’s no longer the ideal version of what a beautiful woman should look like, she too will become trash discarded on the sidewalk to be cleaned up without anyone noticing or caring.
It’s nihilistic, feminist, and a striking portrayal of what we’re doing to our own bodies and how the world we live in not just normalizes but encourages self-destruction for no real benefit in the end.
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