The Substance & Ageing
MINOR SPOILERS FOR THE SUBSTANCE!
When I was 37, I told my mum I had found a single grey hair. “Oh Lara,” she replied. “It’s not like the women in our family to prematurely age.”
My family pride themselves on ageing well. My mum has always been an outrageous babe, and very indiscrete about it, collecting me from school wearing i.e. an FCUK (Fabulous Cleavage Underneath Kit) t-shirt or pink leather jumpsuit. Thanks mum. My grandma is 95, but has the most amazing, supple skin; like a baby. Ageing well has been set as a kind of benchmark for me; something I am working hard on.
I turn forty next year, and as a treat, I have allowed myself to totally lose my fucking mind.
Last night I went to see The Substance, a film about ageing and totally losing your fucking mind. Very good! I wanted to stand up and cheer in the cinema once it had finished. I went with my two best boy friends, and after, we ate chips and drank wine in the café, though they deserved neither chips nor wine, because they don’t get it: don’t get the horrors and indignities of ageing as a woman. They are only getting more gorgeous with age! And society is constantly reminding them of it!
The Substance is (spoiler!) about a middle-age TV star played by Demi Moore, who injects herself with the mysterious substance: a drug that reproduces her DNA, prompting her to “birth” a younger, better version of herself. She then sort of switches consciousness between the two bodies, living seven days as Demi Moore, seven days as Margaret Qualley.
Would I take The Substance?. Nearly forty is a strange age to watch the film. I am at the exact midpoint between Margaret Qualley (29) and Demi Moore’s character (50). There is a strange liminality to almost forty. Some days I feel closer to Margaret Qualley, a sense of my sexual power, potential for desirability, if only the edges of it; other days I feel closer to Demi Moore, hopelessly past my best, unfathomably old. I kind of vacillate between the two like I have already taken The Substance; one week on, one week off.
And I already perform a series of violences to my body and face in the pursuit of conventional beauty: acid-based face masks, microcurrents, laser hair removal, sebum melts. In the last couple years I have become a Tretinoin devotee, cruising semi-legal French pharmaceutical sites, following strict application procedures lest my face start peeling off in chunks. This morning I received a face oil named “Conserve You”.
Everyday abjection and micro-violence is something I think Coralie Fargeat, the director, does really well; both in The Substance and her debut film Revenge. There is also an interesting bleed, in which anything, in which everything, can become abject. The tear strip on a carboard box being ripped like skin. A fleshy olive at the bottom of a martini, violently pierced and eaten. The wincing squeak of a leather jacket. The froth and foam from a pint of beer.
Coralie Fargeat also seems attune to the attendant shame of everyday abjection, of trying to discipline a body that is ungovernable. Margaret Qualley runs from a one-night stand, her nose bleeding, to sort herself out in the bathroom. Do I take too much pleasure from regaling men with the gorier aspects of my menstrual cycle? It is possible. “You might be at a lunch or in a meeting, and you can literally feel yourself losing blood and clots of it,” I told my friend, after the film. “And you have to act like everything is normal.”
Later in the film, in her older body, she briefly becomes a kind of witch: white, wild hair; cackling; cooking complicated recipes for their abject potential rather than from any appetite to eat them. What would Silvia Federici make of this!!! I thought. Federici argued that land enclosure and the disintegration of communal forms of agriculture was a major factor in the production of witch hunts. Older women rebelled against their impoverishment, their social exclusion; the emergence of capitalism destroying their means of living. The film begins with Demi Moore being sacked from her breakfast TV aerobics slot for hitting 50; she is no longer viable as a product, no longer has a role in the machine. White haired and cackling is the closest she comes to happiness in the entire film; albeit a demented kind of happiness; leaning into what society expects from her (she is literally gifted the recipe book she cooks from as her leaving gift). But there is a definite sense of freedom in the acquiescence; a transgression, really.
A while ago, one of my female friends told me they planned on “ageing gracefully”. I assumed what they meant was a lack of resistance, of intervention, allowing nature to take its course. I remember thinking it was the most self-possessed thing I’d ever heard anyone say. Unlikely to be me.
I got ID’d a couple weeks ago. I jumped for joy. I literally jumped for joy; happily brandishing my provisional driver’s licence. “1985!” the man at the till exclaimed. “Yes!” I replied. “That was a very long time ago!” I said I’d be forty soon. He asked me what I had planned for my fortieth, and I told him I wanted a party, a nice dinner, and a trip to New York. “New York,” he said, contemplatively. “What exact month?” “January,” I replied. “Shame,” he said. “It’d be much nicer to go at Christmas.”