In Defense of Elisabeth Sparkle

How The Substance’s biggest flaw is its greatest strength.

MUBI

Everything we know about Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is implied. Coralie Fargeat's body horror The Substance tells us nothing of her past or her future — we are stuck with Elisabeth in her very unspectacular now, this former Academy Award-winning actress relegated to hosting a decades-spanning at-home exercise program, her set and moves screaming outdated and washed-up. It’s clear from the moment we’re introduced that she is someone we will understand as we go along, and we, as an audience, must follow this throughline.

In the first 10 minutes of the film, we are hit with an almost constant running gag about Elisabeth’s aging. There's the comment we overhear from her boss (Dennis Quaid, expertly playing the caricatured chauvinist of a Hollywood exec, though the character lacks the subversion of trope necessary to make it fully work), who remarks on how Elisabeth is no longer fertile and looks for her replacement. There's the nurse who throws Elisabeth's robe open without consent after a car accident before slipping her a piece of paper (an advertisement for the titular substance) wrapped like a tampon. If we know nothing else about Elisabeth, we know that her body is not her own — a fact that was impressed upon her by the industry she inhabits, a tough pill she swallowed far too long ago.

Without her bodily autonomy, what does Elisabeth have left to take hold of in those rare private dimensions? What colors of existence are unmistakably hers? 

The audience never does find out — every single aspect of Elisabeth’s life feels like a performance.

In her moments of joy, she blows a kiss to the camera and tells her audience to take care of themselves, an oft-spoofed and ingenuous action that nonetheless marks her as the happiest she’s ever been. In her sadness, she drinks four martinis at a dimly lit bar where she sits alone, each glass perfectly placed beside her. She is delicate in manner and sip. When she checks herself in the mirror, there's a perpetual pout on her face, as if even the self she is for just herself is performative. Every part of her inner dimensions feels like a charade of how a woman like her should act, but what’s missing is the woman to base it on.

The fact of Elisabeth’s underdevelopment has garnered criticism. But I am here today to argue that this is the crux of The Substance: an exploration of the two halves that make up a woman — a person — whose entire inner world has depended on other people’s perception of her. 

In her naked figure, Elisabeth has the sweet fortune of looking aged. Her breasts are weighted, her ass is full — all parts of her feel well-maintained. The only part of her that feels like a choice is her bush, full and wild. Arguably the most performative aspect of femininity is sex, and keeping her pubic hair intact and long feels like the one thing she can have.

When she transfers her consciousness to the product of the substance, her consciousness has the quality of rapidly passing cinema lights. We can see how deeply ingrained her need for the film industry is when her innermost dimension is the thing that has elicited her praise.

Sue (Margaret Qualley) is birthed off the back of Elisabeth. She is dazzling, no doubt thanks to the special spark of vibrancy that Qualley brings to everything she touches. She is "perfect" — supple breasts and ass, with no bush — a tabula rasa on which Elisabeth’s desires and dreams can enact their greatest domination on the system trying to push her out.

Where I feel other commentary on the movie gets it wrong is in pitting the two women against each other. Sue and Elisabeth are foils only in a dramatic sense; if we take the plot literally, they’re the same person. Sue’s success can be attributed to playing a game she knows she can win, because she’s already been through it all before as Elisabeth. When their name title cards show up, Elisabeth’s is after blowing a kiss into the camera, and Sue’s is while she's in the head of the network’s office, watching the last minute of her audition over and over again, holding the remote. It’s obvious who feels more empowered here. 

As Sue becomes fledged and Elisabeth dulls, the two transform into versions of themself that neither of them can recognize as authentic. It's obvious that Sue is the currently more "successful" one: her bright bubblegum pink contrasts Elisabeth’s dark blues, and her weaponized girlishness makes her more attractive to a perverse culture of men who want to believe they own her. Sue’s billboard is visible from her glass-walled apartment, whilst Elisabeth’s was only viewable from a side street. The home also takes on a new form: bathed in almost divine full sunlight, Sue is the version of a woman at the peak of her life, while Elisabeth’s home is dark and somber. This renders Elisabeth furious, when it should make her content — because, after all, Sue without her is not whole, and vice versa.

Sue’s participation in femininity is expertly written. She's less a male fantasy of a woman brought to life a la Barbie (as she seems at first glance); rather, she has the lived-in intelligence of Elisabeth to guide her through her charades. Sue bats her eyes and adopts a breathy voice to swat away the creepy neighbor’s noise complaints. Sue fucks like she’s hungry; every single action that happens between her and her one-night stand comes because she was both architect and director of the movement, excited to take and leave desolate, in the same way she acts with Elisabeth. Her destructiveness and her ambition run in tandem.

Elisabeth is not a victim or redeemable. She is unabashedly selfish by calling up her middle school friend Fred (Edward Hamilton Clark) to have drinks, knowing that he will be a fountain of validation because he has told her she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She never does make it to drinks, however — she's too consumed by her imperfections in the mirror, comparing herself to Sue and desperately trying on her lip gloss and then removing it. She’s fumbling, trying to find what beautiful is, when beauty isn’t set but rather felt. I wonder: if she had made it, would she even be content with the version of her that Fred was praising? People from the past tend to love the memory of someone, like the middle school Elisabeth before the glamor. I wonder if listening to him praise the girl she used to be would’ve saved the woman she was from the monster she became. 

The most anger-inducing part of the film isn't the petulance of Elisabeth’s descent into madness or Sue’s growing vanity — it's when Sue’s hook-up walks down the hallway to the bathroom, where a monstrous-looking Elisabeth has emerged from her sleep, quickly shutting the door and bellowing for him to leave. What rang in my head was a resounding refrain of: “This isn’t for you.” The bathroom as a setting for the narrative beats is reflective of real life; the bathroom of your home shows only the rawest dimensions of yourself, so for a man she has known for three months to feel entitled to Sue’s personal dimensions feels so violating, and is the very same line of dehumanization that created the vanity in Elisabeth.

Elisabeth Sparkle ends the film exactly how she wanted: a mess of flesh on a pathetic artifice of praise, her mind replaying a false delusion of applause as her remains are scraped off her Hollywood Walk of Fame star. Her goal of praise feels superficial in a way, but understandably so — for a person who has hungered for the spotlight her whole life, it makes sense that her last act is to posture her mangled self on a fake totem. To some, the death of both Elisabeth and Sue without a magical return to form on Elisabeth’s end feels unsatisfying, but that’s the point: there is no way to separate Sue and Elisabeth into two different entities. The whole point of the film is how the two make up the same disastrous whole, how different parts of anyone can consume them in their quest for praise. The lesson that The Substance begs us to learn is to kill the parts of ourselves that are superficial and desperate for praise — to revolt against the system that sowed a need for praise in us and that continuously exploited every aspect of ourselves until there was nothing left.