men and women cannot see each other
The Substance and A Different Man, in a special Oscars edition of Compare/Contrast
Compare/Contrast is an occasional series where I look at two works that may, or may not, have something, or nothing, in common. Read earlier entries here.
When a woman looks in the mirror, what does she see?
The woman she once was, and is no longer.
When a man looks in the mirror, what does he see?
The man he failed to become.
The Substance and A Different Man feel like two halves of a larger, unseen whole. Or twins separated at birth, perhaps. A boy and a girl, of course. This is doubly appropriate considering the movies themselves, which are obsessed with doubles, mirrors, mirror images, twins, repetition. But for all their similarities, they are also, in another sense, diametrically opposed. One movie may be the other’s twin sibling, but it is also the other’s negation.
Let’s list it out, readers.
The Substance A Different Man
Female Male
Los Angeles New York City
TV/entertainment Theater/art
I genuinely can’t tell if these movies have something to say to each other, or if they will only end up talking past each other, as women and men are often wont to do.
+++
The Substance is a high-gloss horror movie, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat. (Fargeat is French, which explains…a lot, honestly. More than it should, perhaps. And yet.) Demi Moore stars as Elizabeth Sparkle, a home-fitness icon who was once hugely popular, years ago. Sometime in the 80s, presumably, as evidenced by the Jane Fonda-style workout videos, though the film plays with history and the past rather loosely. It is far more interested in The Eighties, the aestheticized era conjured by Tumblr posts and Synthwave videos, than the actual period of Ronald Reagan and awkward bowl cuts.
Elizabeth has fallen on hard times, though. Ratings are down, an executive tells her. She’s too old. Viewers want someone newer. Younger. The executive is played by Dennis Quaid, in a performance so rife with sputtering and over-the-top laughter that it verges from caricature into a stereotype that feels vaguely offensive? He did recently play Reagan himself, though, in the recent, ill-conceived biopic, so I suppose he’s right for the mood.
After her show is cancelled, Elizabeth gets in a car accident, which she miraculously survives without a scratch. She is not grateful, though. She’s despondent. Far better had she died, thus sparing her from the indignity of obscurity and decline. But a nurse at the doctor’s office gives her a USB drive, which contains a video for a product called: THE SUBSTANCE. The Substance promises to create a new you, a different you, that can enjoy life again. All of the product design for The Substance is top-notch: the typefaces, the unboxing. Millennial squee curdling into a scream. Elizabeth resists, at first, but finally succumbs. She calls the number, orders the Substance, and goes to pick it up from a dropbox in some LA back alley. For the whole movie, actually, Elizabeth never actually meets any Substance employee face to face. Only the voice on the phone, and the packages in the dropbox. Frictionless contact. Instacart as mad scientist.
Once injected, the Substance does what it says on the tin. Elizabeth falls into a swoon, and then her back opens up along her spine. A creature emerges from the aperture—a fully grown young woman, played by Margaret Qualley. Elizabeth’s better you. She calls herself Sue.
There are rules, though. While there are two bodies, they share one life. Balance must be maintained. Sue is awake while Elizabeth lies in a coma, but she can only stay out and about for seven days. At that point, she has to switch places with Elizabeth, aided by medical equipment included in the Substance. Sue falls into her own swoon, her health maintained by IV drip. It is now Elizabeth’s turn to live out her own seven days. And so on, and so forth.
Of course Sue auditions for Elizabeth’s old job, and of course she gets it. Sue is an immediate sensation. Her own fitness show is borderline pornographic, which makes it a hit. Elizabeth, when she has her own seven days, witnesses Sue’s success with a mixture of pride and horror. Pride, as a part of her is successful and beautiful once more. Horror, as she cannot luxuriate in that glory herself. Fame is what she longs for more than anything. More than love, more money.
Of course, Sue overstays her welcome. Literally, staying out an extra day for some nookie with a motorcyclist. The extra time leaves its mark: Elizabeth’s finger is now decrepit, corpse-like. Irreversibly so, as the voice on the phone reminds her. “Remember you are one,” the voice says. Whatever life Sue takes from Elizabeth cannot be reclaimed.
You can tell where the rest is going. Sue stays awake for weeks at a time—months—until she can no longer keep Elizabeth unconscious, as doing so would kill her, and thus kill Sue. Remember, you are one. This results in a bloody denouement before a live studio audience that honestly made me laugh out loud with its over-the-top-ness. Maybe not the effect it was going for, but what are you going to do.
The Substance is a very literal movie. Female body image, literalized? Check and check. It is also incredibly stylized and referential, recreating scenes from Kubrick movies for no other reason than to congratulate viewers for getting the reference. It all makes The Substance feel less like a movie and more like a music video. I could easily see Nikki Minaj playing both the Elizabeth and Sue roles in a clip that would proliferate across platforms.
It is this literalness that, ultimately, I found frustrating about the movie. Everyone does exactly what you expect them to do, offering little surprise. But perhaps that is simply because I am a man, and thus don’t relate to my own body, my own image, the same way that women would. The Substance seems explicitly designed to function as a mirror to women’s anxieties about their bodies, aging, youthful and otherwise, and I suppose it is possible, even likely, that if one does not possess such a body, one may not see anything in it at all. Rather, I felt like I was watching the movie through a two-way mirror, studying these women who cannot see me. It was uncomfortable, being placed in such a clinical position, and perhaps that is the point.
A Different Man is what could be called an absurdist comedy. I thought often of Being John Malkovich, with its emphasis on the bizarre, shabby New York setting, imbalance relationships, body horror, and the erosion of identities.
Edward is a struggling actor with a severe facial disfigurement, the result of a condition called neurofibromatosis. He gets by through acting in corporate training videos that instruct employees on how to treat such people with legally-compliant kindness. A bright spot appears in Edward’s life when a young woman named Ingrid moves in next door. Ingrid is an aspiring playwright, and the two of them strike up a tentative friendship, eating pizza and discussing theater.
An even brighter spot appears: Edward’s doctor says he may qualify for a new experimental treatment. The same scene, basically, in The Substance, though this one is played more as cringe comedy. Edward agrees to the treatment. It is successful—spectacularly so. In a scene that recalls Lost Highway, where Bill Pullman literally transforms into Balthazar Getty, Edward’s face falls away, revealing the handsome man now beneath, played by the Winter Soldier himself, Sebastian Stan. And though Edward is not literally a different person, he is certainly treated like one. Revelers at a bar invite them to join their table. A woman kisses him in the bathroom.
Edward’s doctor appears at his apartment, wondering where he is. He does not recognize New Edward at all. And why would he? Out of nowhere, New Edward tells an extraordinary lie: that Edward, the previous tenant of the apartment, took his own life, and he moved in immediately afterwards. And Ingrid, we see, overhears this from behind the door of the apartment.
Time jump: Edward, now calling himself Guy, works as a real estate agent. He is successful. His beautiful face adorns subway advertisements. His coworkers love him. He is happy, he thinks. But his curiosity is piqued when he sees a newspaper ad for an off-Broadway play. They are casting, specifically, actors with facial disfigurements. Intrigued, Guy/Edward goes to the theater. The playwright is none other than Ingrid, and she has fulfilled her earlier ambitions by writing actual play. It is titled Edward, and it recounts her friendship with Edward.
Guy/Edward is shocked. This is exactly what he longed for, before the procedure. A role in a play that would demand an actor with a face like his. A work of art that would redeem his disfigurement. But obviously, he can’t audition for the role now. He’s too beautiful. Not nearly ugly enough.
Or can he? Guy/Edward has a mask that was made of his earlier face, and he puts it on to try out for the part. Ingrid is intrigued, and she tentatively casts him. She also starts a romantic relationship with him, even asking that he wear the mask in bed, which results in her laughing uncontrollably. But Guy/Edward’s actorly ambitions are dashed when another actor swans into the small theater. Enter Oswald, a man who also has neurofibromatosis.
Oswald is played by Adam Pearson, a British actor who indeed has the condition, having lived with it all his life. Pearson first appeared onscreen in Under the Skin, director Jonathan Glazer’s film about an alien disguised as a human woman, who’s come to earth to harvest human beings as a delicacy. The alien is played by Scarlett Johansson in what is arguably her best performance. Pearson later appeared in Chained for Life, written and directed by Aaron Schimberg, who also wrote and directed A Different Man. Schimberg (like me, actually) was born with a cleft palate, an experience that has resulted in his interest in facial disfigurement as a theme for art.
Oswald is a force of nature. Garrulous, talkative, friendly–the life of the party. Far more lively than Edward ever was, and also far more lively than Guy/Edward in his current incarnation. Oswald is so charismatic, in fact, that Ingrid casts him as the lead in her play, explaining to Guy/Edward that it’s for the best.
Guy/Edward is distraught, though. Which is a strange feeling to have. Outwardly, his life is better now, in every way, than before. Yet he is no longer an actor. He is no longer an artist. And, as becomes clear, that loss of meaning is total. Without it, Guy/Edward has nothing. Inevitably, tragedy results, and Guy/Edward loses everything, while Oswald gains it.
+++
So is this what these movies are saying: that for a man, severe disfigurement can result in the emergence of a poet’s soul, while for a woman, the inevitable process of aging drives one mad?
Is it saying that the redemptive power of art is available only to men? That physical beauty is all that women have, and any art they may create results only from that, and nothing else?
Or perhaps, as seems to be the case, these two movies have nothing to say to each other, at all. The distance between men’s experiences and women’s seems to grow wider every day, to the point where no mirror could reflect anything across such a chasm. Even a shout at the top of one’s lungs would only register as a distant hum.