A Gaian Interpretation of The Substance

Sometimes you watch a movie that leaves you so disturbed that you can’t stop thinking about it. It might not have been a good movie, or one that should even warrant your continuing attention, but somehow, your brain simply disagrees. That’s how I felt with The Substance.

For those who haven’t seen it,¹ the plot (including a lot of spoilers) is this: a famous actress, Elisabeth Sparkle, is fired from her day-time exercise show because she’s old (she’s turning 50). Rather than fighting back, or pivoting (older women certainly exercise and probably would value her continuing on a new channel), she instead embraces a different path. Elisabeth tries a strange drug that promises to revitalize her youth. She gets the drug from some back alley establishment (literally) and with just a few instructions and no human guidance, she injects a glowing green liquid into her arm.

An entire new person erupts from her spine and takes over her consciousness. This is where the instructions kick in: They warn that these two beings are one and have to share consciousness, one week per person, and somehow the other body survives on the small intravenous feeding packets included with the Substance. (If you want a brief rant about the utter lack of scientific grounding in the film, read endnote two).²

Well, all goes well for a week: Elisabeth’s doppelganger, Sue, gets her old job, and makes the fitness show sexier and is suddenly the celebrity du jour. But Sue starts to want more time than just her allotted week, and that causes Elisabeth to physically decay, which leads to her becoming depressed and make a mess of their shared home. So Sue steals even more time, turning Elisabeth into an old crone and triggering Elisabeth to ask to terminate this arrangement (with the disembodied voice over the phone—the only guide to her use of the Substance). Elisabeth starts to inject Sue with some sort of “Termination” chemical, but at the last moment she has a change of heart and tries to revive her. Sue wakes up at the same time as Elisabeth (a first) and, angry at this betrayal, proceeds to beat Elisabeth to death.

Sue then heads to her big New Year’s Eve show, where physically she starts to fall apart (literally: teeth, ear, etc.). Remembering the statement (belatedly) that “You are one,” she rushes home and injects herself with leftover Substance, and gives birth to another being—this time a horrible monster with multiple heads. (The bottle was clearly labelled: “One Time Use Only.”) The monster, named MonstroElisaSue, goes back to the studio to attempt to do the show where it is attacked and dies a horrible death.

Apologies for the full recap, but it’s important. Critics have raved about the film as a critique of the horrors women are put through in Hollywood (and The Substance was even nominated for five Academy Awards). In fact, just this weekend I tripped over an interview in the local Connecticut newspaper with Demi Moore, who plays Elisabeth, exploring that. And I can see that interpretation (it’s impossible to miss with a producer almost as monstrous as MonstroElisaSue played by Randy Quaid—and the extreme close-ups on his face, his gluttonous consuming mouth, and so on).

But neither being a woman, nor in Hollywood, my mind attempted to make sense of this cautionary tale in a different way.³ At first I looked at it through the lens of a parent. Elisabeth literally births this being from her body, surely drawing on her body’s nutrients (though she somehow loses no weight or shows ill signs even though she births a being as large as herself). And while they seemingly share memories at that initial moment of conception, it becomes clear that Sue is a separate being (even though, repeatedly the disembodied guide-on-the-phone reminds them both that “You are one.”). And Elisabeth continues to sacrifice (or be sacrificed) for her progeny, who is never really grateful, just resentful that she doesn’t get more (and thus feels entitled to take more). So that has many parallels with childrearing, at least in western consumer cultures where the materialism and the drive to progress push parents to raise ambitious, self-centered children, who often forget that if they do not take care of their parents, their own lives will diminish too.

But of course, that’s not exactly true—especially in our hyper-individualistic culture. Children abandon parents all the time here, and while a mean proverbial scar may form—like the one along Elisabeth’s spine—life continues. But in the film, when Elisabeth dies, Sue dies too.

You are one… with Gaia

So it wasn’t too much of a stretch to think about a different dependency relationship: that of humans birthed from our larger parent, Gaia. In this case, the birth process makes more sense: Gaia is so large that birthing us has no impact on Gi.⁴ However, we are part of the larger Gaian whole, so what we do to Gaia, we do to ourselves. It’s easy to forget that, particularly as with Sue we never really encountered the effects of our early transgressions: a rotted finger or mangled thigh on a different body altogether is easy to ignore, as are far off mining scars, plastic gyres, or invisible increases of CO2. But eventually, eventually, the parental body that the offspring depends on breaks down, and either fails or rebels, and because the offspring was never separate from that being, it will die as well.

Of course, like Sue, humans are lying to themselves that they’re separate—in reality borrowing from the future. This is shown grotesquely in the movie by Sue extracting increasingly black and polluted spinal fluid from Elisabeth to keep herself going—connoting fossil fuel extraction or increasing pollution of the environment in our case and propping up the illusion that we are separate, such as through chants of “Drill, Baby, Drill,” or romantic dreams of colonizing Mars. But of course, these are nonsensical dreams. We are tethered to Gaia and no amount of wishing will change that, a reality that Sue only finally understands as her body starts to disintegrate.

The Real Horror: MonstroGaiaHumans

When Sue does discover this, she does not resign herself to her fate. She could have attempted to do the show as a final sendoff (going out in a blaze of glory or attempting to follow through on her obligations); she could have retreated and accepted her just desserts for overreaching. Instead she tries to extract even more, bioengineering her own body with the hopes of creating another better being (even though truthfully, it wouldn’t be fully her but another sub-creation most likely with its own contempt for her). But ignoring all the confusing non-scientific nonsense, the bigger point is that this is what humans will probably do too when suddenly, irrevocably faced with Gaia’s (and their own) rapid breakdown.⁵ Arguably, we’re still in the final moments of Sue’s joy—before the spinal fluid has run dry, before Gaia has woken up transformed and, whether out of wrath or to protect the ability to function or simply because Gaia’s body is failing, will have to terminate Gi’s human offspring.

But what happens when we go a bit further, when we understand that Gaia is demanding a fealty that we refuse to give?⁶ Will we beat Gi senseless? Will we try to subjugate Gaia and force our will on Gi? Geoengineering, bioengineering, synthetic biology, all powered by our exciting new technology that we barely understand, Generative AI: who knows what MonstroGaiaHumans we will create.

In the movie, MonstroElisaSue was killed off quickly enough, but not before making a real mess of things. In planetary terms, MonstroGaiaHumans will probably live briefly as well (but that could be many years in human terms) and in all likelihood long enough to make a further mess of Gaia before our final demise.

It is a tough moral to digest. And far harsher than the hopeful Gaian prodigal son parable in which Gaia welcomes us back to the Garden regardless of how badly overgrown and degraded it has become. But there may be limits not just to Earth’s ability to provide for its human offspring, but to its ability to tolerate our abuses.

Let’s hope more folks start considering this interpretation of The Substance, and start remembering that We Are One With Gaia, and thus treat Earth with the respect that is needed to keep our planetary parent—and us—alive and thriving.

Endnotes

1) Considering the film seems to only be on the minor streaming service, Mubi, I’m guessing that’s many of you haven’t seen it. But if you really want to watch it, you can get a 7-day free trial.

2) Here’s a good moment to acknowledge that the lack of science in this film is deeply distracting. Watching it especially just as Season 2 of Severance came out, where that intentional split in these characters’ personas makes scientific and logical sense, this ‘magical’ substance makes the film’s reality difficult to accept. Truthfully, the film would have felt more realistic if Elisabeth had simply made a deal with the devil (which one could argue is the voice on the phone). Even the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, written 139 years ago, had a better scientific grounding than The Substance did.

3) Though, of course, I still empathized with the absurd and impossible standards forced upon women in our youth-obsessed consumer culture, particularly in Hollywood and the media. And all can also relate to the spectrum of self-harm (drinking, overeating, anger) made manifest when different parts of one being are put so overtly into conflict.

4) Gi is used as Gaia’s pronoun as it is a short form of Gaia. For a more thorough explanation, read here.

5) Gaia’s breakdown in this context means the shift of Earth’s systems to a degree that they no longer sustain a techno-industrialist human civilization (or possibly even any complex civilization).

6) That moment appears to be arriving quickly. Ironically, this story takes place in Hollywood—with it beginning and ending with a close-up of Elisabeth’s Hollywood sidewalk star. Here we are currently witnessing the horrible LA Fires, driven by extreme climate transformations, and reminding us of our utter and permanent dependence on Earth for our wellbeing. By forgetting this, we have invited destruction to visit us.

7) I attempted to use AI to generate a MonstroGaiaHumans but all the images were too pretty. I don’t know if AI is capable of making truly horrible images yet. Give it time though….