Is The Substance a Stealthily Perfect Trans Allegory?

Somewhere around the midpoint of The Substance, a familiar series of emotions began to build up in my general vicinity. As I watched the film, I could sense a sudden, immense feeling of self-loathing, riddled with dissociation and detachment. I recognized it as a dysphoria spiral, a complete and total realization of how badly one’s mind and body have become disconnected. I had been hit with those spirals for much of my life, up until I began to transition in my late 30s.

It’s not as though I never experience dysphoria anymore, but for several years, it hasn’t been as bad as it once was. So whatever was happening in The Substance was simultaneously familiar and alien because I wasn’t feeling it. Instead, I was observing it—a sort of sympathetic resonance with the movie itself. Somehow, director Coralie Fargeat had taken some of my worst-ever experiences, mutated them so they could work as body horror, and put them up onscreen. It was a little like having an out-of-body experience, one that prompted a question I hadn’t considered before sitting with The Substance: Is this movie the transest thing I’ve ever seen?

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Netflix’s Emilia Pérez, the most nominated film at this year’s Oscars, should be the transest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s about a drug kingpin who transitions to live as an anonymous rich woman, with the help of an ambitious lawyer—very much the sort of story cis people like to tell about trans people. (Indeed, writer-director Jacques Audiard is cis.) Though the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón, is now better known for writing so, so many racist tweets, she’s also the first openly trans woman ever to be nominated for the best-actress prize. So that’s something!

But while Emilia is ostensibly trans-forward, it’s frustratingly bound by a lack of imagination when it comes to gender and transition. It is, for instance, all but impossible to refer to Emilia with she/her pronouns both before and after her transition, because the idea that pre-transition Emilia was violent and post-transition Emilia is saintly is central to the film’s conceit. Emilia Pérez functionally treats them as two separate characters, only knitting them together when, say, Emilia gets angry and her voice drops an octave. “See?” the movie suggests. “She was really a guy all along!” (In some ways, this limited understanding of gender should perhaps bother cis people more than trans people. After all, it’s not as though a woman has never been violent!)

Like Emilia, The Substance is extremely French (derogatory in the case of Emilia; complimentary for The Substance). Fargeat’s film follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an aging star drawn to a drug/potion called the Substance. Once she uses it, a much younger woman pops out of her back: Sue (Margaret Qualley). The rules are simple: Elisabeth gets one week; Sue gets the next week.

At least some of the grousing about The Substance has centered on how, exactly, The Substance itself is supposed to work. Elisabeth and Sue are different people, but they’re also sharing both an apartment and an entire life cycle. Anytime Sue overstays her time in their shared life, Elisabeth pays the price with her own aging body: First she gets a withered finger, and more dramatic changes follow, as Sue starts wanting more and more time in their shared life, leaving Elisabeth to rot. So are the two of them the same? Or are they one, as the voice on the phone who represents the interests of the organization behind the Substance frequently reminds them?

The film’s putative subject is how young women (who are valued by society) and older women (who are not) are artificially pitted against each other. The perceived beauty and fuckability of younger women give them advantages that even a 60-something woman as beautiful as Moore simply cannot access. And yet the curse is that aging comes for us all. Even if Sue and Elisabeth stick to the rules of the Substance as written, Sue will eventually still age into someone who won’t be valued by the world. By stealing opportunity and years from Elisabeth, Sue is ultimately only stealing from herself. It’s a body-horror stab at female solidarity. Elisabeth and Sue are two different people, but the struggle they face is the same one, even if they can’t always see it that way.

And yet! Allow me to venture a queer/trans reading, one that posits Sue and Elisabeth are actually both different and the same person. When I started transitioning, a younger woman I had put on ice in my brain suddenly woke up and started pestering me. She hadn’t gotten to experience the joy of childhood, the boundary pushing of adolescence, or the fucking around and finding out of one’s 20s. She wanted those years back, but she was stuck with me: her weird, adult self who had spent all of those years doing her level best to offend precisely no one. It’s not as though I injected myself with a drug and had a younger, hotter version of me spit out of my back, but hormone replacement therapy does tend to make women—both trans and cis—look younger than their age, if only subtly. And the more I estrogenated myself, the more that girl in my brain was like, “When do I get to take the wheel?”

In this queer/trans reading of The Substance, Elisabeth is someone who has come out late in life and mourns the years she should have gotten as her best, truest self. The part of her that wants those years back is real and persistent and constantly yelling at her to get out of the goddamn apartment and have some fun already. But she can only listen to a point. Ultimately, her body is the age it is, and she’ll inevitably be dragged back by the reality of that.

The Substance’s presentation of something like transition that isn’t precisely transition is much more metaphorically compelling and rich than Emilia Pérez’s very safe, soft gloss on an extremely cis person’s understanding of it as a one-way trip between man and woman, with no way stations in between. I think I was supposed to see myself in Emilia, and there were elements of her story that felt recognizable to me, if underdeveloped—namely, her struggles to accept and atone for sins she committed pre-transition. The Substance was far from my favorite movie of last year—it’s as subtle as an extreme close-up of Qualley’s butt to the face—but watching it at least made me feel like I was seeing some version of my life onscreen. Trans people have often found themselves in body horror, and as overobvious and “Did you get it??” as The Substance could be, it was no exception to that rule for me.

What’s more, I think its vision of the younger, hungrier entity inside someone who just keeps getting older is applicable to every person on the planet. We all carry within us some memory of the person we used to be, whose back didn’t ache when they got out of bed in the morning, or whose legs didn’t groan quite so badly after going for a run, or whose brain could think just a little bit more quickly. That person is somewhere inside all of us, and they desperately want to be calling the shots. Yet here we are, trapped inside our bodies, trying to honor both the people we were and the people we’re becoming. The Substance understands transition so well because it understands that with time, everybody transitions into another version of themselves—whether they want to or not.

Emily St. James is a writer and cultural critic. She is also the author of the upcoming novel Woodworking, which is about an adult trans woman who befriends the only other trans woman she knows: a 17-year-old. So it’s kind of like The Substance if you think about it. Woodworking is in stores everywhere on March 4.

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