By Cailín Frankland
“REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE”
This is the ominous message Elisabeth Sparkle reads when she opens the package containing the eponymous black-market drug of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance—she tosses the warning aside and injects the bright yellow-green activator dose under her middle-aged skin. Several minutes of pupil-splitting and full-body convulsing later, another woman—“younger, more beautiful, more perfect”—rips her way out of Elisabeth’s spine and onto the bathroom tiles, blood-soaked and doe-eyed as she admires her new body’s reflection in the mirror. Audience, meet Sue. Isn’t she pretty?
Sue is the product of Elisabeth’s desperation to pharmaceutically reclaim the fame and glamour of her youth after being ousted from her aerobics TV show on account of her age—by taking the substance, she volunteers her consciousness as a timeshare for she and Sue to occupy for seven days at a time before switching. The only rule, as the drug’s manufacturer puts it, is to “respect the balance” by sticking to the weekly schedule.
To absolutely nobody’s surprise, the balance is soon disrespected. Euphoric in a body with all the privileges of beauty, youth, and fame, Sue starts stealing increasing amounts of time from Elisabeth, who rapidly ages as a side effect. Resentment builds—Elisabeth envies Sue’s overnight success in an industry that unceremoniously disposed of her the second she turned fifty, while Sue has nothing but disdain for her shriveled alter-ego’s binge-eating and destruction of their shared apartment. The sole warning from the substance’s manufacturer long forgotten, Elisabeth and Sue regard themselves not just as separate entities, but as sworn enemies—the resulting war between their bodies results in the destruction of them both.
The Substance wields its body horror as a razor-sharp weapon for social commentary—it lays the ageism and sexism of Hollywood bare, forcing us to reckon with the gruesomeness of Western beauty standards at their most logical extreme. But what scared me the most about Fargeat’s masterpiece wasn’t the violence, the gore, the mutant Monstro Elisasue dissolving into a puddle of blood on Hollywood Boulevard—it was the fact that while Elisabeth and Sue wear different bodies, and are played by different actresses, they remain a single character throughout the film’s 141-minute running time. Elisabeth may fume over Sue’s decision to drain the remainder of her youth and beauty for a few more minutes as her “more perfect” self, but she is also that exact person in Sue’s privileged position, making Sue’s mistakes. Sue is just Elisabeth with more to lose, which turns out to be her own worst enemy.
We like to think we have a stable sense of self—clear concepts of right and wrong, values that we would hold dear regardless of fleeting attributes like beauty, age, and ability or markers of material success. The Substance calls this notion into question, asking us not only whether we would seize a chance to create a more privileged self, but also whether we could trust that self not to abuse the power of those privileges. The answer for Elisabeth Sparkle is clear, but what about us? Would we remember that we are one? Could we respect the balance?
Cailín Frankland (she/they) is a British-American writer and public health professional based in Baltimore, Maryland. Their literary criticism has appeared in The First Line Literary Magazine, their poetry has appeared in Eye to the Telescope (Rhysling-nominated), and their flash fiction has appeared in Flash Frog Magazine (nominated for Best Microfiction), Black Hare Press’s Dark Moments series, and My Galvanized Friend. They live with their spouse, two old lady cats, a rotating cast of foster animals, and a 70-pound pitbull affectionately known as Baby.
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