“Beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theater of their enslavement.” 

So says Susan Sontag in her cutting 1972 essay, “The Double Standard of Aging,” which suggests that, for women, “aging is much more a social judgment than a biological eventuality.” To become an “old woman,” she argues, is a kind of arbitrarily timed, socially imposed death, a “possession” of a woman’s mind which “limits how women feel free to imagine themselves.” Coralie Fargeat’s campy sledgehammer allegory of anti-aging technology and showbiz misogyny gone awry, The Substance, attacks precisely this set of concerns, highlighting the ways in which ageism and sexism come together to tear women’s psyches apart from the inside out. While the film deploys a specifically 20th and 21st century visual lexicon to unpack this problem–– film and television, health start-ups, etc.–– it’s notable that many pieces on the women of The Substance (including my own initial review) reference a character Barbara Creed once called the “one incontestably monstrous role in the horror film that belongs to the woman––the witch.”

Much of The Substance’s runtime is dedicated to the agonized, myopic scrutiny of a woman’s flesh as it begins a rapid descent into decay and hyperbolic dereliction, eventually bursting out into a firehose of blood, guts, and fury. The film’s reclamatory depiction of the abject monstrous-feminine has been celebrated as an honest portrayal of what Alexandra Heller-Nicholas calls “the culturally enforced dissociation that happens en masse when, as a woman, your body starts to age.” Johanna Isaacson argues similarly that the film amounts to an updated version of a “hagsploitation” film–– the subgenre Peter Shelley calls “Grande Dame Guignol” horror–– which “allows uncensored exploration of internalized ageism as well as the creation of vengeful, psycho-biddy monsters that exceed every boundary of good taste” through their embrace of the abject that “always contains a seed of liberation.” As Sontag argues in her essay, “the visceral horror felt at aging female flesh… [the] radical fear of women installed deep in this culture” is embodied by a “demonology” of “mythic caricatures” of which the witch is a central pillar. Indeed, in her study of older women on screen, Claire Mortimer cites Lynn Botehlo to point out that in early medieval Europe, witches and “witchlike” characters (“a potential fountain of disorder, delinquents outside of male authority… creatures of malevolence”) were virtually the only archetype available to women past a certain age. The Substance is a science fiction horror film, not a supernatural one, and none of Elisabeth Sparkle’s parthenogenetic offspring cast spells (at least not literally, though Sue certainly mesmerizes). Yet, as it would have in the Middle Ages, the image of an older woman, hair wild and fingers gnarled, muttering to herself over a giant, steaming pot brings only one character to mind, whether she’s cooking in a carpeted high rise or brewing potions naked under a full moon. 

As Heidi Breuer notes in her work on witches, 

The gnarled, cackling Renaissance crone still has meaning for us—but what’s amazing is that she still has predominantly the same meaning. Why is the witch figure still here if we no longer believe in or persecute witches?... If belief has changed, what has stayed the same? In short, what’s stayed the same is capitalism.

Elisabeth’s story is an elemental one in a consumerist society that still values women most for their youthful beauty, sex appeal, and reproductivity. After being illegally fired from her job on her fiftieth birthday, Elisabeth is forced into economic as well as sexual superfluity. She finds herself shamed into self-imposed house arrest, literally sent back into the kitchen with a cookbook her chauvinist pig of a boss gives her as a parting gift. “Renewal is inevitable,” he tells her by way of signing her social death certificate, “at fifty, it stops.” As Claire Mortimer emphasizes, Vivian Sobchak suggests that the older woman is “both scared and scary – the woman who is neither mother nor lover, the woman who becomes excessive by virtue of her being regarded as excess.” Sue, Elisabeth’s beautiful alter ego, uses Elisabeth’s prone body casually, carelessly, draining her spinal fluid like an energy drink; Elisabeth herself crosses her own half of their shared days off on the calendar like wasted time, vacuuming the carpet, watching TV, and rotting away. This tension in a film specifically dedicated to the way Hollywood makes women feel disposable–– the older woman as literal excess biological material, DNA to be “unlocked” and reshaped–– brings to mind Imelda Whelehen’s contention that meta-hagsploitation films about movie stars past their prime (i.e. Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, etc.) of which The Substance is a clear example, treat their female stars like “the Dorian Gray to [their] own enduring usefulness in the films” of their youths, here literalized in Sue, the zombified fetish to Elisabeth’s prematurely foreclosed life. Synthesizing these dynamics, Sontag suggests that the "standards for women’s appearance go against nature… [and the capitalistic] revaluation of the life cycle in favor of the young brilliantly serves a secular society whose idols are ever-increasing industrial productivity and the unlimited cannibalization of nature. Such a society must create a new sense of the rhythms of life in order to incite people to buy more, to consume and throw away faster…"

even and especially when it comes to women’s bodies. 

For a society in which these dynamics still reign supreme, then, the witch is still our clearest recourse to this day. She is the old woman who won’t go quietly, the spurned folk healer with knowledge to pass down to the next generation; it’s no surprise that Elisabeth’s supplantment by Sue turns her aerobics class from a useful, gentle exercise tool for the kinds of stay-at-home women who find themselves watching TV in the middle of the day (her motto: “take care of yourself”)  into a “pumped up” MTV spectacle that mocks and parodies the very notion that those women deserve care at all. The witch’s coup is her refusal to submit to her own societal exile, her willingness to alter her reality and insist on her own existence past her “usefulness.” The different iterations of Elisabeth’s body could be viewed in this context as a perverse reimagination of the Wiccan Triple Goddess run amok. Even before the film’s explosive final act, we can clearly see the maiden (Sue’s woman-child innocence, a Circe-like witch), the mother (Elisabeth’s scorned maturity and wisdom, a Maleficent-style anti-maternal witch), and the hag (the witch Elisabeth becomes in her apartment-exile, a Hansel and Gretel-like witch-crone). Monstruo Elisasue, then, is the abjection that undergirds all three, the monstrous-femininity that belies feminine beauty standards. If as Sontag tells us “to be a woman is to be an actress” and “beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theater of their enslavement,” Elisabeth’s witchy bad biology burns the whole stage down, redeploying familiar archetypes witch a tremendous witch’s cackle. The Substance is a witch film.