Coralie Fargeat's THE SUBSTANCE staring Demi Moore

I can’t stop thinking about The Substance. CW: death, violence, gore, female rage. <3

Sometimes the thought occurs to me to get a boob job. The most serious this has ever gotten was when I was visiting a dear, brilliant, and enterprising friend of mine from Brazil in Sao Paolo, and she casually mentioned how good a boob job would look on me. In the U.S., this would come across differently, offensively most likely. But there, it was casual, it’s the equivalent of a suggestion for a new moisturizer or foundation, or so it seemed to me as an outsider. She had one done, has implants still, and got them at a time when she was a professional dancer to increase how much she could make. Like I said, enterprising. I love her for it.

I won’t dance around the known Central and South American beauty standards and popularity and dangers of plastic surgery all over the body, but it’s also not something I know that much about, particularly because I’ve never seriously considered it. So, casually, the thought occurs to me sometimes: I could go to Sao Paolo, stay with my friend, and get one done, cheap.

In strangely twisted timing, this thought occurred to me the night before I went to see The Substance, on a whim, a rainy day matinee. I don’t know what it was. I’ve just turned 40, I’m from LA, I had a narcissistic mother (whom I loved; but she was clinical, not casually “narcissistic” the way everyone is now), and I’m thinking about tucking and plumping and lifting things because IT’S CULTURAL OKAY?

The rage at aging, at myself, is showing. This is what won’t leave me be about this film. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For those that don’t know what this thing is, here’s the astonishing trailer that had my jaw slack several weeks ago.

I wanted to see it a month ago when it came out, but I was scared. I’m not a horror person, and I also heard there were bad reviews coming out. I wasn’t going to inject treaturous images into my mind for a shitty movie. But when Hinton Als said it rocked, then I was ready. I’d go alone. I’d do whatever it took. I needed to know what this was all about.

If you watched the trailer and you’ve noticed the color palate and font I use for NFNR events, then you know that the aesthetic of this movie scratches an itch for me. The deep base sound track, the intensity, the surreal scenario as grand metaphor for an all-too-familiar-reality: these are my drugs of choice. Plus, the ending absolutely slaps. I sat for the last hour wondering how on earth this would all conclude, how much blood and gore and violence I’d have to hide my eyes from before I could know the end of this woman’s self-hatred. Despite my deep physical discomfort with the visuals, I was zero disappointed.

SPOILER ALERT: Here’s one of the last shots of the movie.

MORE SPOILERS, OKAY? In this movie, Elisabeth Sparkle, played by Demi Moore, battles her mortality, her vanity, her ego, tears apart and kills her dreams, then literally brings them back to life, only to be killed then revived by them as well. I’m telling you, this movie is a roller coaster of metaphors and culminates in a Carrie-esque scene in which Sparkle and her younger, beautiful-er sub-self, Sue, return as one wildly deformed and actively disintegrating monster in a prom dress, spitting a fire hose of blood all over a disapproving audience, spinning in pain and glory, with what I can only recall as metal noise punk blasting behind her. If she must destroy herself, then everyone will watch and soak in her physical destruction.

It’s funny that I mentioned my mom earlier: my mother self-destructed. I think about self destruction, as a concept, much more often than I think about a boob job, now that she’s gone. I think about her rage. I think about women’s rage, cis and trans, distinct from each other, but rage all the same. I think about white women’s rage, the absolutely unhinged nature of it, ready and willing to take down the human race for its suppressed depths. Now’s not the time to get into the degree of suppression and rage among white men, a far more destructive force, exponentially. So I think about my rage, my mother’s Elisabeth Sparkle’s, Sue’s (her younger, beautiful-er sub-self) when I’m talking to a customer service representative who wants to explain how I dialed the wrong number, when a man makes a kissing sound at me on the street, when I need to scream at high volume into a pillow, but I’m afraid to scare my dog.

I think about Sparkle’s yellow coat, Demi’s plumped lips, my mother’s painted nails as described by the coroner. I think about female destruction and release, about selfhood as a way out of this black hole. I think about the things that make me more whole: moving slow, considering a breath, taking note of the rain. Cliche things. Deeper and more personal things I didn’t realize I’d be challenged to broach here. For example, I grew up riding horses: I am a gay horse girl, it’s true! What a self. What an identity! Strangely, in Rainier Beach, Seattle, I live a five minute drive from a barn that has been there for over a century, and I just so happen to know the owner. This very day, I went, on a whim to that barn and remembered myself. The hay and the horseshit, filthy hands, big licks, broad and soft backs, horse people and their babbling about horses and horse things: these things allow me to speak from my chest. It is one way I tap back in: my legs and my fingers know how to move around the dirt and the stalls, the hay and the buckets of oats. Cold from the setting sun, warmed by the big bodies nearby and their soft noses: I lived in the valley riding horses, escaping Los Angeles and its scenes. I petted and cleaned horses before and after thirty-minute drives with my mother in a blinding rage over traffic and a million things she wouldn’t say, but would blame me for. Again, more than I expected to confess in this little newsletter. Hey new subscribers! Lol.

I suppose now is a good time to repeat that I’ve been obsessed with this movie, and to say that I’m perpetually startled but not surprised by the way my mother and her death in 2021 come around a corner at me when I least expect it.

It’s Scorpio season, and I’m a Scorpio moon, with three other Scorpio placements. If you want to embrace the season, see the spookiest shit that’ll come out all year, and go All The Way There, see this incredible film by this French filmmaker who left it all on the floor and made room for Demi Moore to totally and completely do the same. Bless them both. Bless the women and artists who do this for us. May this little missive be in service to them, in their honor.

Promise to have more NFNR news soon for those here for that. And if you’d like more of this kind of thing, please let me know.

Love to all.

Katie