Somewhere around the midpoint of The Substance, a familiar series of emotions began to build up in my general vicinity. As I watched the film, I coul
Somewhere around the midpoint of The Substance, a familiar series of emotions began to build up in my general vicinity. As I watched the film, I could sense a sudden, immense feeling of self-loathing, riddled with dissociation and detachment. I recognized it as a dysphoria spiral, a complete and total realization of how badly one’s mind and body have become disconnected. I had been hit with those spirals for much of my life, up until I began to transition in my behind schedule 30s.
It’s not as though I never experience dysphoria anymore, but for several years, it hasn’t been as bad as it once was. So whatever was happening in The Substance was simultaneously familiar and alien because I wasn’t feeling it. Instead, I was observing it—a sort of sympathetic resonance with the movie itself. Somehow, director Coralie Fargeat had taken some of my worst-ever experiences, mutated them so they could work as body horror, and put them up onscreen. It was a little like having an out-of-body experience, one that prompted a question I hadn’t considered before sitting with The Substance: Is this movie the transest thing I’ve ever seen?
Netflix’s Emilia Pérez, the most nominated film at this year’s Oscars, should be the transest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s about a drug kingpin who transitions to live as an anonymous affluent woman, with the lend a hand of an ambitious lawyer—very much the sort of story cis people like to tell about trans people. (Indeed, writer-director Jacques Audiard is cis.) Though the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón, is now better known for writing so, so many racist tweets, she’s also the first openly trans woman ever to be nominated for the best-actress prize. So that’s something!
But while Emilia is ostensibly trans-forward, it’s frustratingly bound by a lack of imagination when it comes to gender and transition. It is, for instance, all but impossible to refer to Emilia with she/her pronouns both before and after her transition, because the idea that pre-transition Emilia was violent and post-transition Emilia is saintly is central to the film’s conceit. Emilia Pérez functionally treats them as two separate characters, only knitting them together when, say, Emilia gets livid and her voice drops an octave. “See?” the movie suggests. “She was really a guy all along!” (In some ways, this restricted understanding of gender should perhaps bother cis people more than trans people. After all, it’s not as though a woman has never been violent!)
Like Emilia, The Substance is extremely French (derogatory in the case of Emilia; complimentary for The Substance). Fargeat’s film follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an aging star drawn to a drug/potion called the Substance. Once she uses it, a much younger woman pops out of her back: Sue (Margaret Qualley). The rules are basic: Elisabeth gets one week; Sue gets the next week.
At least some of the grousing about The Substance has centered on how, exactly, The Substance itself is supposed to work. Elisabeth and Sue are different people, but they’re also sharing both an apartment and an entire life cycle. Anytime Sue overstays her time in their shared life, Elisabeth pays the price with her own aging body: First she gets a withered finger, and more dramatic changes follow, as Sue starts wanting more and more time in their shared life, leaving Elisabeth to rot. So are the two of them the same? Or are they one, as the voice on the phone who represents the interests of the organization behind the Substance frequently reminds them?
The film’s putative subject is how newborn women (who are valued by society) and older women (who are not) are artificially pitted against each other. The perceived beauty and fuckability of younger women give them advantages that even a 60-something woman as stunning as Moore simply cannot access. And yet the curse is that aging comes for us all. Even if Sue and Elisabeth stick to the rules of the Substance as written, Sue will eventually still age into someone who won’t be valued by the world. By stealing opportunity and years from Elisabeth, Sue is ultimately only stealing from herself. It’s a body-horror stab at female solidarity. Elisabeth and Sue are two different people, but the struggle they face is the same one, even if they can’t always see it that way.
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