Bodies and Commodities: THE SUBSTANCE, in conversation with Jon Greenaway

We are thinking on the basest of planes. What we need are more eyes… Still from The Substance (2024) dir. Coralie Fargéat.

Coralie Fargéat’s THE SUBSTANCE is the biggest horror movie of the year, making waves at Cannes and finding a huge audience in the UK and abroad. Its style, in-your-face themes, stunt casting of Demi Moore, and explosive, carnage-filled third act has prompted a lot of discourse online. 

I had the great pleasure of discussing the film with writer and researcher Jon Greenaway. Jon (@thelitcritguy) has a PhD in Gothic Studies, and specialises in Gothic Marxism, which he explores at length in his new book, Capitalism: A Horror Story, available now through Repeater Books.

We examine The Substance’s place in the wider canon of body horror cinema, if it has anything genuinely new to say, whether its title is one big joke, and so much more. I first heard about Jon and his writing through the podcast RevLeft Radio, where he appeared as a guest for a recent Halloween episode on Gothic Marxism. We linked up to speak earlier this month. 

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and contains spoilers for Coralie Fargéat’s The Substance. 

Self-love? Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in The Substance (2024) dir. Coralie Fargéat

Tom: I hope you’ve been having a great few weeks. How has the press for the book been going?

Jon: It’s been crazy busy, and more than I was expecting! It’s a nice problem to have. I thought November would be a quiet month, but I’ve still got a bunch of events to get through! I’m glad the RevLeft episode sparked your interest. 

 Tom: I’ve listened to Brett’s podcast for a long time — he’s very passionate and engages with a pretty extraordinary range of material with a lot of honesty. Listening to your episode made me want to hear more about how you first got into horror — how did you start getting interested in marrying Marxist theory with the work that's in your book? It feels like very fertile ground.

Jon: So I finished my first degree in 2008, when the subprime mortgage crisis happened and the economy of the UK functionally collapsed. At the time, the university I did my degree at — the University of Stirling — was the only one in the country to offer a taught Master’s course in what they called the Gothic Imagination. It was run by some incredible academics, but it was shut down because it isn't cost effective for the neoliberal university to deliver that education. That’s the way with a lot of post-graduate studies, sadly. But it was a kind of fortuitous historical moment — not only was I reading a lot of Gothic horror back then, but we were living through this gigantic crisis of capitalism and the first run on a British bank in a century. 

So I did my Master’s, and then I moved to Manchester to start my PhD in Gothic Studies. I stumbled across this talk by China Miéville called Marxism and Halloween. It was like a conceptual light bulb went on — I started digging into it, and that was when Brett very kindly invited me on RevLeft for the first time, to talk about Gothic Marxism. The ideas were still quite provisional in my head, and something I really respect about Brett is his willingness to let people just work stuff out in public. I think that's a really valuable and important thing. That’s where it all started.

In terms of what got me into horror, it’s not a surprising choice, but I think The Exorcist is a perfect movie. It’s profoundly sad in many ways, and actually a good working class horror — it's about someone who's poor and is worried he's going to lose his job and isn't going to be able to take care of his family anymore. And I still find it really frightening! How about you?

 Tom: A few years ago I started getting really into films that I see as a mix of psychological thriller and horror. So I love things like Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners. I think there are also a lot of ‘social horror’ aspects to films like Memento, too. I really enjoyed writing on De Palma's Carrie and Ducornau’s Raw, films I only saw for the first time last Halloween. I do think the final jumpscare of Carrie is really incredible. 

Jon: Too right, it’s so good!

Check out my extended review of Carrie (1976) and Raw (2016) here.

Tom: It’s a good link to The Exorcist as well — I like thinking about how, as the ’70s grew up, so did the subject of female horror. So much of ’70s and ’80s horror actually centres on a certain kind of young female experience, which makes The Substance quite an interesting comparison piece as well. What were your first thoughts on it?

Jon: I thought it was very interesting. I think it struggles to do what I think it could do. I’ve seen Fargeat’s short film Reality+, which has quite an obvious metaphor. That’s not a bad thing per se, but I thought The Substance had the same thing going on. There's an excellent essay over at Blindfield Journal by Joanna Isaacson about ‘hagsploitation’ and comparing The Substance to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?.

The essay sees the movie as subverting and questioning a particular model of femininity. The ‘hag’ is a vision of female subjectivity that’s more in line with drag or trans models than a patriarchal normalization of female subjectivity that the film is critiquing. And I agree with that, but in the context of this film, I think that only goes so far, mostly because the subversive threat is quite spectacularly (and bloodily) decapitated at the end. It’s a very depressing ending to me — there’s no great catharsis to it. I liked the movie, but I think it struggles to get beyond its stunt casting — Demi Moore was amazing in it, though.

Fear and Loathing in LA: Demi Moore in The Substance (2024) dir. Coralie Fargéat

Tom: For sure, there's a lot to dig into there. I remember finishing the film and thinking, the movie’s title is a bit of a joke — the film presents itself in some ways as unsubstantial, and almost encourages you not to see it too too deeply, but then the reception hasn’t been in that register. I think it's so good when an out and out, crazy campy body horror like this gets pushed into the mainstream or somehow finds a bigger audience. But it’s made me unsure where The Substance is going to sit culturally, whether it’ll have a lasting impact as a really important film of the 21st century and so on.

On the hagsploitation note, there's a great video essay by Broey Deschanel that takes a lot of inspiration from Isaacson’s article. She shares the concern that The Substance invites us to scream in terror instead of to empathise with a certain bodily experience. It’s funny to think of Demi Moore playing a hunchbacked version of herself when she voices Esmerelda in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame… When you see her like that, the film presents her as ultimately horrifying and not to be empathised with. A comment on the video points out that Elisabeth / Sue is happy and genuinely at peace only at the end, when she has no body at all.

I wonder what you think other body horror has to say about that — is it possible to have a satisfaction and inner peace that doesn't require you to have this kind of literal annihilation?

Jon: Totally — I mean, there are moments within the film when you do see that Hag-esque subversion. You know, the great scene where Demi Moore is cooking all of the gross French food, turkey and foie gras and so on. And it’s all played for a joke. But ultimately, the subversion is only partial — it only exists within the private sphere. As soon as she's in public, she's a spectacle again, this time to be looked at and then treated violently. A comparison with this film that really annoys me is when people say, "Oh, it's like Cronenberg.” Like, please be serious for a moment! It's far closer to something like Brian Youth’s Society. That’s another kind of gross ’80s body horror comedy. In terms of films that have transformations that are actually subversive, I think two good points of comparison are Julia Ducornau’s Titane and Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. 

So Titane is really interesting in its ideas of identification, family, and social / physical reproduction. And Crimes of the Future is one of my favourite films of the last few years. I think it's incredible. There are transformations that are sad and terrifying, but they're also beautiful in a way. They're also held up as being a form of art. There’s a great scene that shows a display of a bunch of old CRT monitors, and on it there’s a message: BODY IS REALITY. It’s a very Cronenberg-ian point to make.

Cronenberg’s soap box: Still from Crimes of the Future (2023) dir. David Cronenberg

The changes of the body that come through ageing or disability or physical difference are not just solely seen as repulsive, but they’re an art form. The body is the last mode of art that exists for humanity. There’s subversive and political potential there.

Tom: Hannah Strong from Little White Lies also had a lot of reservations about The Substance. Her review was very negative but interesting. She writes near the end: “More than anything, The Substance feels deeply depressing” — like you said — “a reminder of how society denigrates anyone who challenges the standards pushed by pop culture. But replicating images doesn’t make them implicitly subversive, and The Substance’s presentation is as shallow as the very thing it’s critiquing. There’s no compassion and certainly no catharsis, just more exploitation and a sense of déjà vu.” It sounds like your thoughts align with hers. Satire needs clarity of purpose and all that.

With that said, though, I do feel like The Substance sparks a very layered conversation about doubling in modern society. Of course there’s a lot of old school horror like Jekyll and Hyde that comes to mind. I wonder if you’ve read Doppelganger by Naomi Klein? 

Jon: Yeah, I’ve read Doppelganger. That’s a really interesting connection to make.

Tom: It’s such a good book. I found it so compassionate, and so readable. There’s a chapter in which Klein talks about wellness culture, and its strange links with anti-vax movements. She explores the theme in fitness culture of trying to chase and create a self that is not actually you, and is always unattainable. The goal almost aligns with desire itself, if that makes sense. You can end up not even living for yourself, in the pursuit to become a ‘best self’, and it results in a lack of genuine acceptance. I thought The Substance interacts with that idea of unattainable goals a lot, but in a farcical way — especially when the other characters’ garish comments and projected beauty standards take physical form on Monstro Elisasue.

You activate only once… “Monstro Elisasue” in the final act of The Substance 

Jon: Something they say in The Substance again and again is, "Remember, you are one." They constantly try to drive home the idea that there really isn’t two characters—there’s just one. From a formal point of view, what you really need the film to provide is some access to interiority. You need to understand why this constant drive for fame—even though she’s clearly aware of its terrible costs—is the only available option for someone like Elisabeth. It’s something she can’t even walk away from. But the two sides of this person don’t ever seem to have any kind of interlocking relationship. They don’t think of themselves as one person. In fact, that drives so many of the problems in the plot. And they’re certainly not framed or treated by the camera as if they’re one person, which, again, is all part of what’s going on here. I feel like it leaves the audience necessarily outside of the subject.

In terms of why I don’t think the film works all that well, there’s no real time spent on the awareness that this is the idealized self she’s trying to bring into being. There’s only one moment where the film comes close to doing that, which is when she thinks she’s going to kill off Sue, and then she says, “No, I can’t. I need you.” To me, that’s the emotional core of the entire movie, but it’s incredibly brief and glossed over. And I think that’s a real shame.

What you also reminded me of is how the social sphere of this film is completely empty. She seems to have no friends, no family, no social acquaintances. Her idealised projected image is all there is. And I think this is where Naomi Klein's point about the relationship between reactionary politics and self-improvement comes into play, because self-improvement is entirely disconnected from the social sphere, right? You can have your own idealised self-image, but it only really has meaning when you’re part of a social totality. So if you have an empty social sphere, when others are introduced, you get rejection or violence. Like Hannah Strong is saying, I’m not sure what we’re being told here that’s new or interesting, other than the way it’s presented.

Tom: Yeah, exactly. I’m trying to work out if it’s a problem that the film does nothing new. I feel like Greta Gerwig's Barbie is in the same boat. I thought it was genuinely really funny when I first watched it, especially the manosphere comedy stuff. I was definitely the loudest one in the cinema…. But then I watched it again, and couldn’t help feeling like I was watching a string of SNL skits turned into a movie.

That said, I wanted to talk about the idea of the 'Substance' itself, and how it's presented. The delivery package of the Substance is sleek, minimalist, almost sexy, like a modern meal kit. And we have no idea where the Substance actually comes from. It's nebulous and undefinable. 

I found that presentation of the complete divorce from process and production to be very in line with Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism. As well as the whole beauty-standards thing, I felt like the film was as much about isolated consumption habits and what that does to you, and how that divorces you even from understanding the source of what you’re consuming.

Jon: There’s something really interesting about how the film critiques these kinds of consumption practices. The way the Substance is delivered, how it seems so sterile, so polished—it’s a quick fix for something deeper, something existential. And in that sense, it’s very much like the commodification of self-improvement. In the same way, these meal kits and all these on-demand services offer a semblance of convenience, but they obscure the process, they erase the labor involved, and they leave us with just the illusion of effortless consumption. This idea of being able to have a new version of yourself, with no real understanding of the work or the consequence behind it, is very similar.

In the film, the whole process of the Substance is opaque. It feels like it’s just there to serve the needs of the character’s desires, with no reflection on its origins or its implications. It becomes this metaphor for the way we consume beauty, identity, and even relationships in a way that’s detached from their origins or true meaning. It’s all about the final product—the clone, the perfected version — without any understanding of the cost or labor it took to get there.

Hey guys, welcome to my unboxing video… Still from The Substance (2024) dir. Coralie Fargéat

Tom: Exactly. It’s a complete disconnection from the reality of what goes into the process. Elisabeth can use the substance, but it won’t actually get her closer to whatever ideal she’s chasing.

And I think the horror there is the realisation you’re not just consuming a product, but a kind of false version of yourself—one that can never really be authentic because it’s built on this unsustainable and unattainable ideal.

Jon: We could talk about Ozempic, too — that feels like a more immediate comparison to me. It’s strange because, in a way, this movie is about commodities but doesn’t actually have any physical commodities in it. The ultimate commodity is ephemeral: it’s appearance, brand, celebrity. It’s like the logical endpoint of an entirely de-industrialized economy, where all of us will be famous for 15 minutes. 

It made me wonder who the other person is who takes the Substance. Elisabeth runs into this old man in a diner who talks about how, you know, the "other" is always eating away at you. And this isn’t a celebrity; this is someone who wants to be an Instagram influencer. That’s who they are. You know, their younger self is working as a healthcare assistant or as a nurse— they’re young, and incredibly photogenic. They look like they’ve been facetuned in real life.

The film is ‘relatable’ inasmuch as we are all necessarily now our own influencers, and in that all of human activity has to be subsumed into this visual matrix of identity and perfection. That’s why ageing has to be met with horror rather than with the acceptance of our own fundamental contingency and fragility. But that’s also why the movie is so depressing to me. Because if the image is all there is, and all you can do is present the kind of image that this world of images responds to with revulsion, then you aren’t really there. There isn’t really an outside you can get to here.

It’s so striking that the film frames and shoots Elisabeth in her “hag phase” as a figure of fun. She’s supposed to be gross and ridiculous rather than treated with any sort of sympathy. Again, it’s true to say that all of this is the point of the movie, but at a certain point, are you just reproducing something, or are you subverting it? I think this is the problem the film runs into.

Tom: Yeah, I guess this brings us back to what you said about the comparison to Hannah Strong's review in Little White Lies. I saw another comment on Broey Deschanel’s video that said the film is ultimately an expression of the director’s intense self-hatred. It’s a little like an artist saying, “I don’t agree with my message, but I just need to make this thing and release it” — like having a cursed baby, I suppose.

Are you much of a gamer? Have you played Bloodborne?

Jon: I’ve been known to game..! And yes I have.

Tom: I thought you would have, because it’s literally Gothic horror: the game..! So I thought there would be some parallels.

Jon: Yeah — and it’s about injecting yourself with a dangerous substance over and over again!

Tom: I mentioned it because in the game, the ultimate objective is to rid the world of a nightmare that’s been born out of a kind of hubris, you know, from trying to make too much contact with the Great Ones and all that deep lore. There’s a lot of engagement with infancy, the final boss being a demonic ‘wet nurse’ and so on.

Jon: Yeah. I actually think Bloodborne is a really good comparison piece. It’s often misread in some ways. The whole point of Bloodborne is forced pregnancy, menstruation, the blood moon and so on. Plus, as the hunter in Bloodborne, you’re not tragic—you’re frightening. You know, if you walk through the streets of Yharnam, what do people say? “Get away from me. Leave me alone.” You’re terrifying to these people. You’re a monster, and you’re becoming one.

A hunter must hunt. Still from Bloodborne (2014) presented by From Software; game dir. Hidetaka Miyazaki

Tom: Yeah, I remember seeing a great video essay on Bloodborne and ‘visceral feminity’. There feels like a link with The Substance on birthing horrors and ‘termination’… Anyway, if that’s the case, that the director was exorcising some demons, then she could’ve made an indie project without Demi Moore, you know? The casting choice itself seems to be asking for a bigger audience. So I wasn’t necessarily convinced that it’s just a catharsis project.

Jon: I don’t think looking for psychological intention is necessarily the most useful thing to do with a film. But I can see why people have gone there. There’s a lot that’s been written about women in cinema, particularly about the role of post-menopausal women, because that’s the position that Demi Moore’s character is in. But like you say, the casting of Moore is kind of like a stunt — it demands critical attention. It was a deliberate choice — but if it makes a Demi renaissance happen, I’m here for it.

Regardless, I can’t help but think so many of the directorial choices are deeply obvious, and I think the film would have been more structurally coherent as a short. I mentioned Fargéat’s debut short Reality+, about a mysterious kind of social hack that ceates a perfected sense of self for you. So it’s in similar territory to The Substance. 

It’s a more tragic piece, and it presents the technology as fundamentally alienating. But in The Substance, we’re not quite shown an alienation from the self — it’s more a splitting of the self into something that no longer recognizes itself, right? Maybe this is what makes the film feel a bit unsatisfying to me.

Tom: At the end of the day, Elisabeth and Sue both get punished for not “respecting the balance” of the seven-day cycle. But we don’t see anyone who’s successfully using it. The old guy in the cafe is very cynical about it. But the film suggests this wider potential social network, especially at the start when the doctor's assistant says that Elisabeth is a “good candidate.” But it doesn’t extend beyond that. It brings me back to commodity fetishism — the film starts to comment on that aspect of our culture, but does it get anywhere?

Jon: Of course the text of the film does go into the ultimate commodity being the individual and the body. There’s a degree to which I think this film basically thinks that we all hate ourselves — that all of us have this sort of split within ourselves. There’s something quite Freudian about it. This idea that all of us are sort of riven with these drives and kind of obsessional feelings about ourselves and our role in the world that we can’t really get over. And I think the central problem is that the body—that is, the older body—is not just seen as aesthetically revolting but is precisely, in the Marxist sense, unproductive. 

There gets to a point all of us will eventually become unproductive, under the paradigm of capitalism. And so Elisabeth’s fear is a lack of productivity, specifically as a fame industry worker. It doesn’t seem possible, in the world of The Substance, for somebody to be okay with ageing, with the fact that their body changes and that their role changes.

Tom: Yeah. I I was thinking about what this film would be like if it were actually like Cronenberg. I think I was expecting to be genuinely terrified and shocked based on what marketing I had seen. The online engagement with the film interests me a lot. It feels like there are a lot of teething pains at the moment with film criticism on places like Letterboxd, that encourage you to voice your opinions in the punchiest or funniest way possible for engagement. Because the film is so flashy and engaging visually, it’s attracting a lot of, well, ‘discourse’.

Jon: Yeah, there’s a problem of immediacy in criticism we could get into. In Marxist criticism, there’s this idea of mediation: something is needed to mediate the relationship between culture and wider society. But we exist in a cultural moment where everything is very immediate and depends upon this high arousal state of constant engagement and posting. I actually think it’s good to not immediately have a take on something. It’s a valuable skill to be patient and not jump into ‘discourse’ straightaway.

I think there’s a lot about The Substance which is challenging and worth talking about, but I don’t know if it’s the paradigm-shifting moment in contemporary horror that a lot of critical reception seems to hold it up as. Taken seriously, it’s quite a misanthropic movie that seems to think that we are all riven with an inescapable self-hatred. If you don't take it seriously at all, it becomes a quite campy, fun, grand spectacle that’s making a salient and accurate but fairly familiar critique of beauty standards, of patriarchal misogyny, of entertainment culture. 

Sometimes a little bit of time and space stops us from kind of immediately jumping at something which doesn't have enough substance to it. 

Tom: Totally. That kind of ‘alternative reading’ has me thinking about Parasite. There are people I’ve talked to who see Parasite as posing a kind of challenge, in that its social critique is secretly anti-poor if read ‘straight’. Is Bong Joon-ho actually just saying that the poor family somehow deserve to be in the position they are? Is the film actually ‘subversive’ in the way that everyone was saying it was? Bong Joon-ho is a very socially conscious director — and that kind of message wouldn’t feel in line with his work. 

The best plan is no plan… Choi Woo-sik, Song Kang-ho, Jang Hye-jin and Park So Dam in Parasite (2019) dir. Bong Joon-ho

Jon: It’s worth saying that we don’t just ‘receive’ a film. A film isn’t just a series of images that you kind of decode as like a natural given, right? To say that you’re reading a film “straight” is actually just to say, “I’ve naturalised my own method of interpretation.” But in fact, all acts of viewing are necessarily acts of interpretation. And really, the job of a critic is to call attention to the ways in which we’re already interpreting the movie. When we go, “Oh, it’s obviously XYZ…” or “Taken seriously…”, what do we actually mean?

The argument that Parasite is secretly anti-poor is quite a common one people make. I don’t find that terribly convincing, mostly because the film itself points out that poverty is socially and economically mediated. There’s that scene where the Kim family talk about the rich Parks and talk about their behaviour. One of them says, “Of course they’re nice. They’re nice because they’re rich.  If your response to that is, “The poor people are being morally objectionable”, then you probably think that because you’re rich, too!

I wrote about it in Capitalism: A Horror Story. I try to make the case that what we want in Parasite is the end of alienation. We want a chance to genuinely exist in a kind of human community. Even if you're trapped in the basement of the house, what you want is to get out. But the problem is, getting out requires subsuming yourself to that regime of capital accumulation where the only way to succeed and be human is to do it on the terms of the capitalist economy.

So yeah, I don’t know what it means to engage with The Substance in some ways. I think a little bit of subtlety would have made the whole thing hit a little more effectively for me.

Tom: Talking about it has shown me I’m still not sure how I feel. I think what I carried away from it the most was, ironically, the way the film encouraged you almost to relish in its sensuality. The music adds to that a lot — it has a kind of electric and sexual energy itself. I was very energised by it, similar to the score of Challengers. It definitely succeeded in making you feel like Sue had “the thing” that Elisabeth craved she still had.

Jon: Of course — it’s about the seduction of glamour. And you could say glamour is the aestheticization of one’s own self-commodification. What I mean is, we all get commodified, we are aware of our self-commodification, and so we aestheticise it to make ourselves into the best commodity that we can be. 

The thing that frustrates me about the way that Sue is presented is that it’s done deliberately: she’s all surface and externality. It means that the central character drama of the film, which is the relationship between Elisabeth and Sue, doesn’t really work for me. There’s only one moment where you get close to her internal reality. It’s when they’re all zooming in on her in the monitor on set, and she’s embarrassed and humiliated, and angrily calls for her dressing gown to cover up. But the film glosses over that; it’s about her being external, the “object that objectifies itself”. It stops the film being as structurally or formally cohesive as it could be, and it just ends up relying on spectacle to paper over those cracks. 

Tom: I think I connected with the earlier scenes of Sue because I often feel the power of that potential self-objectification. And I often reflect on what it means to ‘sell out’ while trying to retain some agency.

Mirror, mirror in the bathroom… Margaret Qualley in The Substance 

Jon: I get that. There’s something quite thrilling, quite intoxicating about recognising your own agency to impact the world. But there’s a difference between our qualitative and quantitative experiences. The promise of what we might call “image capitalism” is that you turn that qualitative capacity for us to affect the world — to place our thumb on the lever of libidinal energy, as it were — you turn that into something that is quantifiable and reflective of price. So if you're famous, your qualitative capacities are measured in quantitative natures. And by that I mean, are you a box office success? And how do we measure that? In cash. Are you a viewing success? We can quantify that. How many social media likes? So it's about the degree. There’s always a question of how complicit we are in our own quantification.

Tom: Absolutely. I suppose what I’m getting at is that thrill of becoming aware of oneself as an object of desire. There’s that classic heteronormative idea that imprints on many people, whereby men are encouraged to desire and to put action into their desire, and then women are supposed to desire the idea of desire itself. Turning yourself into a recognisable “category” can be so satisfying, because the world is so confusing, and because confronting our individuality and our uniqueness can be terrifying. Relating what is happening internally to the outside world can sometimes feel impossible. So there can be a strange excitement when you notice yourself turn into something that is to other people. That instinct or impulse feels both fundamentally social and also at the same time, to me, fundamentally alienated. 

It feels to me like The Substance doesn’t properly examine the fact that what Elisabeth desires to do, and to be, comes from both a very human place and a very mechanical place.

Jon: There’s something very Lacanian to all this. He had a lot to say about cinema. For Lacan, you don’t have your own desires — you learn how to desire things. And the whole point of cinema is that it shows you what desire looks like. So your desire is always the desire of the other, it’s never your own. It’s always located externally to the self. I think you’ve hit upon the important question. You say there are some things which are very ‘human’ reactions. Well, ultimately, where does that come from? What do we mean when we’re talking about human beings in a hyper-visual, fame-mediated culture? Are there such things as intrinsic human qualities, or have we just wilfully made ourselves into these empty ciphers that can be inscribed upon with the various ideological structures of a given kind of system? And for us, now, that system’s capitalism. 

This is why I find it so interesting that Elisabeth has no interiority. What does she do when she’s freed from the burden of being looked at? She’s constantly watching television, right? It’s a pretty bleak existence.

Tom: Yes — all she does to ‘unwind' is to shut down and make no use of her body physically. Apart from that potential date with Fred, I feel like there’s no other point where we see her thinking critically about what she wants to do with herself.

Jon:  Yeah, that’s an important point. What does she actually want? She wants to be looked at, constantly. There’s no actual subjectivity there — or rather, the film gives you no access to it, beyond the caricature-ish gestures of the hag stereotype in the middle section. There’s only a self in the context of being perceived. Again, this is all part of its broader critique of the entertainment industry. But I do wish there was something more going on here than this constant reinscription of the voyeuristic gaze of the camera as being the ultimate arbiter of subjective relevance. There are so many shots in this film of a camera lens looking back at you. I’m like, yeah, okay, I get it. Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema — it all goes back to that. 

But at the same time, she does make choices—she chooses to try the Substance. There is a subject here. There is a subjectivity here. But the film doesn’t really give a proper exploration of it.

So there’s a whole cluster of questions about desire here. Do you want to be a person or do you want to be a spectacle? Do you want to have those kinds of qualitative, non-commodified experiences that are essentially non-reproducible —which is a frightening? Or do you want to have a kind of surplus of these, but they’re necessarily quantified, and they’re necessarily reproducible and exchangeable.

Tom: Yes, I mean it’s also a film on a meta-level about cultural reproduction. It’s not hard to see the whole film as about Demi Moore herself and a commentary on her past career. I wonder what Mark Fisher would have had to say about it all. 

Many thanks again to Jon for speaking with me. Please support his work — check out Capitalism: A Horror Story!