"THE SUBSTANCE" AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INNER CONFLICT
Article by LiveReal Agents Courtney, Mary, and Kevin
The Substance is a modern fairy tale that deserves unpacking.
In the film by writer/director Coralie Fargeat, Demi Moore takes on a career-defining and award-winning role as Elisabeth Sparkle, a successful but fading Hollywood star.
The story opens with Sparkle – once a glittering beauty and fitness icon – facing a looming shadow of retirement, old age, and irrelevance.
Desperate, she reaches for a cure, and (spoilers!) things don’t go as planned.
(The Substance is a horror movie, after all.)
While The Substance isn’t for everyone and is R-rated for good reasons, it clearly has something to say.
But what?
Many conventional interpretations are bland and predictable.
Hollywood holds up unrealistic standards of beauty. Hollywood is run by piggish brutes (as played by Dennis Quaid) who eat like hogs and treat women like cattle. (Every studio boss in Hollywood, in other words, is Harvey Weinstein.) Beautiful young women serve as fodder-victims in this ruthless, Darwinian churn.
The implications are that Hollywood should modify its standards of beauty or abandon them altogether. Men should become less obsessed with sex and youth. Studio bosses should be nicer. Aging starlets should never be fired, and if that leads us to 85-year-old aerobics instructors, so be it.
Clearly, those conventional approaches have flaws.
While they offer a few surface-level truths, The Substance also plumbs depths that are beyond the reach of simplistic platitudes. It deserves a deeper analysis.
For example, we can point out something the above analysis politely tries to avoid.
Sparkle isn’t merely an innocent victim.
In fact, she hearkens back to classic Disney villainesses.
Some antagonists from fairy tales are obsessed with eternal youth and beauty, such as from Snow White (“Who’s the fairest one of all?” – spoken with jealousy of a younger and more beautiful rival) or Mother Gothel in Tangled (who kidnaps Rapunzel and holds her prisoner for her magic hair, which keeps Gothel young and beautiful.)
It’s a theme explored by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the hero (Dorian) became increasingly handsome while his portrait (representing his soul) became increasingly disfigured.
But The Substance also echoes a Jekyll-and-Hyde dynamic, with multiple levels of inner conflict that goes awry (ala Black Swan, Fight Club, Hulk, multiple werewolf stories, and others).
All to say, Sparkle is no mere innocent pawn. She’s an active protagonist who freely makes choices that eventually result in her tragic downfall. It’s a King Lear of Sunset Boulevard.
Fargeat put her finger precisely on the nerve.
The elusive attraction of Hollywood – to be “IT” for even a moment – can create a perfect recipe for insecurity.
But the core problem Sparkle faces also isn’t reserved exclusively for beautiful Hollywood starlets.
It’s universal.
We all face the problem of old age, sickness, and death (or will eventually). Youth and beauty are temporary – here and gone, like glitter (and yes, sparkle).
It’s the human condition.
We all want to be more beautiful or handsome than we are, more appreciated than we are, stronger and happier and more effective than we are.
One philosopher pointed this out several centuries ago.
“Man would fain be great and sees that he is little;
would fain be happy and sees that he is miserable;
would fain be perfect and sees that he is full of imperfections;
would fain to be the object of the love and esteem of men,
and sees that his faults merit only their aversion and contempt.
The embarrassment wherein he finds himself
produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable,
for he conceives a mortal hatred
against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults.”
- Blaise Pascal
The question is, if the real problem is the human condition, how do we face that problem?
Five basic points (spoilers ahead) can help us extract lessons from The Substance.
First, Sparkle seemed to have zero spiritual life.
To all appearances, she seemed to be a complete atheist.
From what we could tell, her life offered no evidence of any religion or spirituality whatsoever. Her life philosophy or worldview was one of pure materialism.
Yet she found herself facing a spiritual problem.
Even faithful materialists find themselves faced with existential riddles. Old age, sickness, and death are matters of the soul.
In this sense, “we’re all religious.” As Sparkle demonstrates, whatever we may believe or imagine, we still have to give our lives to something, and we must all decide what to give ourselves to. Even if we close the door on traditional religious approaches, the problem remains unsolved.
But that approach can open the door to “substitute religions.”
That's the path Sparkle chose.
One substitute religion is science, a second key element in the story.
Eager to solve the problems of old age, sickness, and death, Sparkle turns to what she thinks is the latest and greatest breakthrough in medical technology.
Sparkle wasn’t entirely alone in this turn. Many of us today are infatuated, obsessed, chronically hypnotized, and addicted (even “devoted”?) to apps, gadgets, pills, and various techno-panaceas. We hope and imagine that even if they haven’t solved it yet, they soon will.
Some (see Bryan Johnson) have faith that science will make them immortal. “In science we trust.”
The science-as-religion efforts are nothing new. The obsession with science as solving the mysteries of life is a recurring motif (read: warning) has been the premise of many stories. (See Frankenstein, The Fly, 28 Days Later, Splice, and hordes of others.)
(And it’s worth asking: is it a coincidence that most of them are horror movies?)
(And will we at some point decide that science might be the wrong tool for the job?)
But Sparkles also employs science in the service of a different substitute religion.
Call it “worship of self.”
She didn’t spend her free time feeding the hungry, visiting the elderly, or taking in orphans, but obsessing about her crumbling fame.
The only prominent art in her home was a life-sized portrait of herself, hung near dust-gathering trophies.
The classical myth of Narcissus tells the tale of a handsome young man who fell in love with his own reflection in a river and never left that spot. Mild narcissism, left unchecked, can mutate into a substitute religion of self-worship. An unstable dynamic of self-love can collapse into self-hatred and self-negation. Without a greater governing principle, it can swing back and forth between extremes.
Narcissism played a role in feeding a fourth dynamic.
Call it “salvation through Hollywood.”
The promise is this: if only we can achieve a little more fame and status, then we’ll be fulfilled.
It echoes the pursuit explored in other films such as Babylon, Spree, or Sunset Boulevard. It’s based on a flawed approach to solving the problem of happiness.
Sparkle’s obsession – to remain the star of the show, at the center of attention, floating transcendently above the city on billboards – demanded that peak stardom must never end. It must be beyond the reach of time, or eternal.
It must be godlike. Misguided ambition – like Icarus flying too close to the sun, melting the wax on his wings – can lead to a fall.
She already had more fame and status than most other humans on the planet. Yet it still left her unfulfilled and hungry for more.
That dynamic fed a fifth aspect: her near-total isolation.
Sparkle apparently had no significant family or friends she could confide in. She lived in apparent isolation.
Her only potential for a genuine relationship – a date with a bumbling but honest admirer – collapsed when she lost her nerve – she decided that her real self was too flawed to be known, in a pivotal moment of self-rejection – and turned away.
Her most prominent and sustained interactions in the film (aside from her relationship with herself) were cold, clinical conversations with an impersonal and robotic “Substance” technical support. (It was never even clear that “he” was even an actual human or some form of AI.)
None of these five conditions were necessarily enough to lead to tragedy in themselves.
Together, however, they set the stage.
There are plenty of ways disaster could have been averted.
If Sparkle had had enough self-control to keep her “ideal self” and “worst self” working in harmony (through forgiveness, acceptance, and love instead of jealousy, hostility, and revenge) her two “selves” could have had a functional arrangement (theoretically, at least).
If she had pursued a genuine human relationship, however imperfect it might have been, someone else might have pulled her back from the brink.
If she decided to put her hope and faith in something besides Salvation-Through-Hollywood and “In Science We Trust,” she might have made different choices.
But human nature abides. When “the center cannot hold” and a self disintegrates into its component parts – a conflict-ridden brew of toxic self-hatred and toxic self-worship – the risk of a more significant psychological deterioration increases.
This condition reaches beyond the typical inner conflict.
And that’s where Sparkle’s real horror begins.
Christianity speaks of a “second birth” where one is “born again.”
Yet The Substance depicts a kind of reverse “birth” – a second anti-birth (or even a third).
Instead of becoming more, a human becomes less. Instead of becoming whole, a self becomes more fractured. Instead of “more will be added,” a self becomes a fraction of a self, and potentially a fraction of a fraction.
It echoes some of the darkest moments of horror movies. In Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect-like creature. In The Fly (again, through science), Jeff Goldbloom transforms himself into a monster. Before The Lord of the Rings, Smeagol (a Hobbit) discovered the One Ring, which eventually transformed his mind and body, caused him to develop multiple inner conflicts that some would describe as a “split personality,” and transformed him into “Gollum.”
This can remind us that human nature isn’t fixed.
Humans aren’t merely like plants or dogs or monkeys. We can become.
(This seems like a feature worth giving some attention to, although somehow, we rarely do.)
If we don’t, we could potentially find ourselves in an impossible situation.
For example, we could feel that we’ve “become” an ugly monster, and the only solution is to try to hide what we’ve become by pretending – putting on a mask or adopting a false persona (even if it isn’t literally taping a picture over our face).
It’s where the self-esteem movement, flawed as it is, is at least trying to resolve a genuine problem – even if the medicine it offers (often simplistic self-affirmation) is too weak, by an order of magnitude, to do the job.
What’s the moral of the story?
If we’re inclined to draw lessons from horror movies, The Substance offers several.
For example: don’t seek salvation from fame or status.
It’s natural to want to be recognized, appreciated, loved – to become somebody.
But seeking to satisfy our deepest longings through fame or status is like trying to satisfy a thirst by drinking salt water. It leaves us thirstier.
We also shouldn’t devalue real human relationships in favor of synthetic ones.
Temptations toward self-absorption, narcissism, and isolation are often fostered by today’s technology – cell phones, social media, and unending streams of streaming services. They can be siren songs that lure us to islands of loneliness.
In Pinocchio, Pleasure Island is presented as a paradise for children that offered unlimited fun and unrestricted pleasure without any adult supervision. But over time, yet again, boys transform – into donkeys. The Coachman – who runs the island and orchestrates the boys’ transformation – eventually sells the donkeys to work in the salt mines or perform in circuses.
The parable might seem farfetched.
But the archetype is thousands of years old. in Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus and his men visit The Land of the Lotus-Eaters, where the men eat the lotus, find themselves in an intoxicated, semi-blissful state of forgetfulness, and forget about journeying home. The lure of a endless pleasant distractions, counterfeit-eternal-youth, or simply avoiding the weight of adulthood can be strong.
We should work to manage inner conflicts.
We all navigate between our “best” and “worst” “selves.” Our real “self” is greater than its component parts, and in acts of “human reductionism,” shouldn’t be boiled down to its most basic ingredients.
We should also ask Big Questions, face existential riddles head-on, and figure out some form of spirituality that can handle the job. We should seek out a life philosophy that not only makes sense of the world and ourselves, but offers legitimate and compelling answers to serious problems.
In short, we should reverse The Death of God.
After all, these problems are serious.
We’ve all been younger than we are now. And we’ll all soon be older than we are right now. And given enough time, we’ll be much older.
Real human relationships are difficult and messy. Hollywood is glamorous and seductive. Science and technology have achieved genuine successes, promise more, and tease us with hope it doesn’t (and can’t) deliver on.
We all face the existential riddle – “The Problem” – of old age, sickness, and death. And atheist, nihilist, existentialist or not, we all look for ways to overcome it.
And some answers are better than others.
Science has held out the promise of solutions to various problems. And it has yielded profound results in the material realm.
But it clearly hasn’t yet made the same progress in the mental, emotional, or psychological realms. In math, physics, and chemistry, the advances of science have been undeniable. Yet when it comes to psychology, sociology, “political science,” and other fields, the results have been mixed at worst and sometimes utterly catastrophic. (Example: the 20th Century.) The problem isn't that we're deliberately seeking horror and catastrophe. (Sparkle simply "trusted the marketing.") The problem lies in playing with forces we don't entirely understand.
Spiritual problems won’t be solved through science. Spiritual problems can only be solved on the level of spirituality. Genuine resolutions here won’t be delivered by mere science, self-improvement, or Hollywood.
Even the most atheistic of us sense that human nature needs to be transformed.
We all long for it.
It’s the basis of billion-dollar endeavors in advertising, entertainment, medicine, music, sports, and more.
But that transformation doesn’t happen by way of anything that can be shrink-wrapped.
It’s an inner process that takes place in the realm of genuine spirituality.
Modern spirituality isn’t always up to the task, clearly.
It often consists of tired repetitions, stale habits, and worn-out platitudes that inspire few and transform even fewer.
Even genuine spirituality isn’t always effective when it comes to transforming individuals or solving The Problem on a visceral level.
Yet just as clearly, genuine spirituality does offer legitimate answers to the problems Sparkle failed to solve. Even ineffective spirituality is better than the approach Sparkle took.
A humble approach of wisdom can allow us to age gracefully. It can allow us to endure and overcome the hardships of life in ways that ennoble us and confer dignity. It can foster solutions to inner conflicts and, instead, set the stage for inner harmony. It offers solutions to the problems of old age, and sickness. And in ways that can be difficult to explain, it can even solve the problem of death.
But when we look for shortcuts, the results can be tragic.
In this sense, The Substance offers us a warning. We should listen.