“And above all, don’t forget to take care of yourself”says Sue, the character played by Margaret Qualley in The Substancea film released in French theaters in November 2024. This young and idealized version, with a firm body, is the alter ego of Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), former star of a fitness show fired due to her age. She is the perfect representation of what is happening in the 2020s.
Taking care of yourself, the ultimate quest
To appear young, able-bodied, in good physical health, extremely thin, white and rich, and to flourish in your professional, romantic and social life, you absolutely must take care of yourself.
The Substance, Uglies (Netflix), A Different Man or even the confidential Skincare (no release planned in France) are films which all address the question of beauty standards in a more or less head-on manner and tell more precisely the quest for validation.
“These films manage to describe the obsession with the perfect body, as well as what this generates in terms of dissociation and obsessionas well explained by the work of the philosopher Susan Bordo who evokes the self-regulation of bodies as a social control: it must be disciplined, ordered, normalized by the culture, by its practices, by its laws, and in particular how female bodies are even more subject to increased attention, especially when they are under surveillance.”, explains Héloïse Van Appelghem, doctor in cinematographic and audiovisual studies.
This question of surveillance is particularly interesting in the film Ugliesadapted from an eponymous novel by Scott Westerfield, released in 2005 and comprising five volumes. In this futuristic dystopian universe, teenagers “uglies” (ugly people) are forced to undergo cosmetic surgery before the age of twenty to transform themselves into “pretties” (beautiful people) and move on from “the other side”in a wonderful world where their lives would be more pleasant and easier thanks to their beauty.
In this universe which seems both so distant and so close, everyone grows up with this life objective, because it is hammered to them from a very young age that this is how the world is organized and that they will contribute to its supposed order. Others nevertheless manage to escape it by exiling themselves into a self-managed society, where their freedom lies elsewhere than in their physical appearance. Dr. Cable and his army control and punish any form of rebellion that falls outside of these imposed eugenics rules.
“Bodies become docile, accustomed to external regulation and subject to the gaze of others, to submission, to transformation, without there ever being satisfaction at the end”recalls the researcher.
The adaptation ofUglies succeeded in tackling an ultra-contemporary problem with a novel that was twenty years ahead of its time. This future is in reality a present that we know well, and which unfolds through a sort of filter “Bold Glamour” on bodies that are still young, whose beauty lies notably in their age.
All-terrain dystopia
In The Substance as in our society, it would be enough to ingest a product, to consume, to buy, to become a better version of oneself.
In any case, this version has its limits and, very often, a downside. To Different Man underlines this by evoking the story of a man who suffers from a genetic disease (neurofibromatosis) making him deformed. He manages to become someone else thanks to surgery “miracle” whose immediate success impacts all aspects of his life and comforts him, until he meets a man suffering from the same illness, but to whom everything succeeds…
These films are not the first to address the phenomenon, but they come after a decade of contemporary feminist reflections on beauty standards, where social networks, and more particularly TikTok, have never taken up so much space. This quest for beauty and desirability is not new; “it just takes on new forms”explains Clémence Mesnier, doctor in comparative literature whose work questions representations of the skin. “We find these questions cyclically, with particular orientations which can mark issues specific to each decade: in the 2000s, films on the world of fashion, diktats and pretenses; in the 2010s, productions which became more incisive, with mishandled bodies in Black Swan or The Neon Demon… And since 2020, Ducourneau’s films, The Substance, with a spectacular dimension (in the sense of the society of the spectacle and at all visual), very referenced.”
A continuity and a cinematographic mirror
These genre films explore, to different degrees, the possibilities of bodily transformations in a more or less distant future, as if the use of horror or dystopia facilitated the understanding of the issues.
“Dystopia can be fertile ground, but we can also approach these subjects in a comic or fantastic form, as in Death Suits You So Well, which has a lot of similarities with The Substance by the way. But we can also evoke it in a very naturalistic way with auteur cinema”continues Héloïse Van Appelghem.
In Lilliana film by Andreas Horvath released in 2019, follows the story of a poor maid of Russian origin who lives in New York and decides to return on foot to her native country via the Bering Strait. “The treatment is quite particular, because as she immerses herself in the wilderness, she gradually abandons the trappings of femininity. We see her getting rid of what is hypersexualized at the start, and she gradually covers herself to appear almost genderless. As if leaving civilization allowed him to abandon all that. There, we are witnessing a hyperrealistic, even silent critique of the question of gender in relation to beauty aesthetics.”
The irony of all these films, recent or older, is based on the discourse of the cinema industry which amplifies beauty standards by conveying distorted representationsbut also on the way in which it invisibilizes non-normed bodies, whether they are non-white, fat or aging. The film industry and the beauty industry are constantly in interaction, perpetuating the idea that women of a certain age must either leave their place or impose a drastic lifestyle to hope to stay in the spotlight.
According to Clémence Mesnier, the future of these questions on screen must go further: “It is clear that the majority representations have changed little. The bodies remain very neutral, white, smooth, fine and without roughness. Even more than the criteria of corpulence and skin color, aging bodies remain unthought of.”
By choosing a 62-year-old Demi Moore to play a 50-year-old woman, desirable in both cases but whose career and physique are no longer popular with the majority, The Substance lays the foundations for a necessary discourse on old age, but there is still so much to tell.
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