This will sound pervy, but I loved the nudity in The Substance (2024).
First, it’s practical. When aging, former film star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) injects herself with The Substance, her back splits open along the spine, and she gives birth to a younger version of herself that she names Sue (Margaret Qualley, a younger version/daughter of Andie MacDowell). It would be impractical for either woman to do the scene clothed.
Elisabeth has seven days to inhabit the younger body before transferring her consciousness back to her original body. After another seven days, she can switch back. The unused body lies inert on the bathroom floor with a seven-day supply of food matrix dripping into its veins.
Second, the nudity works because while it is shocking to see Demi Moore in full frontal nudity, we are prepped for it, so it is not disruptive. The film gradually normalizes her nudity, starting with a single exposed breast during a shower scene. The director does not want us to be so surprised by the novelty of her nude body that we are ripped out of the scene, like the time we saw Ed Sheeran in an episode of Game of Thrones. We expect A-list stars like Demi Moore to stay fully clothed or, at most, for the camera to capture fleeting glimpses of her body under tasteful, meticulously curated lighting. We are shocked to see her standing naked in a harshly lit bathroom with antiseptic white tiles, a fate we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy.
Third, and this is what I want to focus on, nudity is essential for understanding Elisabeth Sparkle’s motives. When we first see her, she is filming an episode of her aerobics show, Sparkle Your Life with Elisabeth. She is on the tail end of the career trajectory of former TV and movie stars like Jane Fonda and Suzanne Summers--women who were put out to pasture on exercise shows once someone decided they were no longer useful as actors. This was a precipitous fall for Elisabeth, too, since she was once a celebrated Academy Award-winning actress.
Elisabeth loses her show when she turns 50, and Harvey (Dennis Quaid), a disgusting producer, fires her for being old. Elisabeth uses The Substance to reclaim a youthful body and then her exercise show. It seems absurd that a woman as beautiful as Elisabeth would be eager to inject herself with a black-market serum that looks like Mountain Dew. It seems absurd that a producer, even one as repulsive as Harvey, would want to replace someone who looks as good as Elisabeth.
We understand when she removes her clothing and stands under the unforgiving light of the bathroom. Clothing, makeup, lighting, and, of course, plastic surgery disguise damage from elemental forces: time, sun, and gravity. A woman’s face, waistline, and breasts can appear eternally youthful, but apparently, the ass is an honest arbiter of age. An old person’s ass sags like a pair of slightly baggy jeans or like a candle that’s been used a few times. It’s like in that episode of Sex in the City where Samantha is on board with fucking a billionaire in his seventies until she sees his sad, droopy ass and runs away. (The memory of that old man’s bare ass burrowed its way into my brain and is a part of me now. Sometimes, I wake up with a start in the middle of the night, but I refuse to tell my wife what’s wrong.) There’s a literal monster in this movie, but I wonder if viewers are more horrified by an old person’s ass.
The difference between the ass of an old and a young person is made startlingly clear when we see Sue. One of Elisabeth’s first actions after waking in her younger form is to turn around and admire her ass, which can only be described as ethereal (adj. 1. extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world). There’s a lot of ass in this movie (e.g., a young waitress in a short skirt leans away from the camera in the scene where Harvey fires Elisabeth, Sue does the splits in her living room to test out her new body, Sue in pretty much every minute of her fitness show…) to remind us that, more than anything else, this is the difference between the young and old. The ass is an unfungible token of youth.
The true tragedy of Elisabeth Sparkle is not that she loses her job, her last toehold on fame, her purpose and identity; that she is lonely, with no friends or family with which to celebrate/mourn her 50th birthday; or even that she loses her youthful ass. Her story is tragic because she accepted long ago that she has no value as an actor. At no point after gaining the youthful body and persona of Sue does she attempt to resurrect her acting career. Elisabeth does not consider that a possibility. She accepts that her only value is as a fitness personality--essentially, just a body.
The Substance
Written and Directed by Coralie Fargeat
2024
141 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Mubi
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