The Substance’s Substance looks familiar. You may not be seeing it in a pack of injections designed to make you a better you, but you’re almost certainly seeing something like it in stores — a Supreme advertisement, on boxed water, maybe even the now-defunct Soylent food bars.
And yet the look of the Substance is immediately brasher, a little more in your face. The spaces inside the letters feel a little constricting and small, a nod that this will not be the freeing process it promises. The center alignment makes it feel closer to a gravestone than it does a friendly advertisement; this isn’t a reminder, it’s a command.
Which is exactly what writer/director Coralie Fargeat was hoping for: something that feels like it’s speaking to you from a familiar place that’s just a little beyond our own humanity.
“It’s something that in itself is very dehumanizing, because you never get to speak to someone for real,” Fargeat tells Polygon. “It’s all through a box, a voice, a screen — a place which is super clinical and where you become just a number, basically.”
The goal, as with all advertising, was to make it feel “monumental.”
“[It] would be super simple, but as kind of an injunction; it’s something that is almost like you have to do it, with this very simple ‘activate,’ ‘stabilize,’ ‘switch’ — which was almost kind of a propaganda type of font. There is something that you see, and it’s like you can’t escape it,” Fargeat says.
To drive that point home, she wanted the packaging to be clear and simple. Her goal was a sort of playfulness to the whole thing, complete with the unboxing experience. The audience should be able to imagine themselves in the place of The Substance’s women, making sense of the rules, sewing up your other self, pushing the plunger on the yellow vials.
This being a horror movie, it’s not really a spoiler to say that Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) and her doppelganger Sue (Margaret Qualley) don’t heed the subtle warnings of the Substance branding, and things go awry. And while the misuse of the Substance can certainly be seen as a skill issue, Fargeat’s “Faustian pact” was a specific tale of this one woman’s failure to not only listen to the directions but to truly understand them.
[Ed. note: OK now we’re going to talk spoilers of The Substance and get into fuller details.]
The Substance directive — disembodied and devilish though it may be — repeats again and again that Elisabeth and Sue are not separate characters: “Remember you are one.” Through that simple instruction, The Substance teases out the difference between a doppelganger movie and a simple body horror. As Elisabeth and Sue both bemoan the other’s disrespect, they are falling prey to what anyone who’s ever had a double has felt: the gnawing ache that the other might be indulging, winning, living better than you.
Again, advertising in general is built to cater to this fear, even if it’s not telling you that your clone is the one who actually deserves that couch. But the catharsis of The Substance comes from the tragedy of both Elisabeth and Sue (such that they are not one person) each believing the promise on the box more than they trust in each other.
“You can’t escape yourself,” Fargeat says. “I think it really comes from the internalized things and wishes that we are led to make for ourself [and] it creates this thing that arrives to her as if the world around had heard her inner voice.
“And it’s this internalized voice — which, of course, is created by the outside world, but that gets to have so much strength within ourselves. This internal voice becomes so powerful in terrorizing us, in putting us in this jail where you feel that if you don’t try and change this or that, or don’t look like this or that, you are not good enough.”
In that way, Fargeat sees the Substance as standing in for a million little products, diets, procedures, and fixes we’ve been sold in our lives. But for The Substance, there is only the one person who needs to be happy to see what she has, and that’s Elisabeth. Her thirst — for fame, for adoration, for unimpeachable beauty — is all that is standing in the way of her happiness. It’s no surprise she overindulges on the Substance, and no shock that she is ultimately the architect of her own destruction. After all, it’s the messaging we get every day.
The Substance is now in theaters.
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