Warning: The following contains major spoilers for the film The Substance (2024).
The once-lauded movie star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has long hosted an aerobics TV show meant to inspire women to move — even as they age. In The Substance, directed by Coralie Fargeat, Elisabeth contends with her aging body in the face of Hollywood’s obsession with youth. Like similar films that came before it — The Neon Demon, Starry Eyes — The Substance examines what a woman loses by getting older. In contrast to its peers, however, Fargeat’s film doesn’t start with a youthful woman fearful of aging. Instead, the film follows the life of a woman who has turned fifty. She’s in menopause, she’s old, and she becomes what might be called a crone.
Crones (ugly, haggard old women) are ubiquitous in popular culture, especially in stories of witches. Normal, proper society tends to reject them; they often live alone. Think of the old, scary woman who lives alone in a forest cabin. That’s a crone.
Despite cultural misgivings and disgust about crones, they are unusually powerful, often relishing in their “outsiderness.” In The VVitch, for example, the crone (Bathsheba Garnett) represents power and freedom in the face of young Thomasin’s (Anya Taylor-Joy) repressive home life. While the crone can appear youthful — and does so to her own benefit — her most powerful form is that of an old woman.
When these crones appear as young women, they are often viewed as duplicitous. The crone can never remain the youthful representation of female sexuality; she must always transform back into the hag. An unempowered crone, like Maleficent of Snow White, may seek out permanent youthfulness but rarely succeeds. A crone can wear youth and beauty like a mask but must take it off and eventually reveal their true form.
Elisabeth Sparkle, though, isn’t empowered in her aging body. On her 50th birthday, producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) tells Elisabeth that the show will be moving in a new direction, and her “old” age is the reason. This, understandably, upsets Elisabeth. While she has not been a film star for some time, she still maintained a semblance of her former fame through the aerobics show. Now, though, she must confront the fact her age has made her an outsider in Hollywood.
This is an important piece of the crone’s archetype. Living on the fringes of society can be a position forced upon someone or a choice they make themselves. In The VVitch, we see Thomasin make the decision to join the women in the woods. No one, however, grants Elisabeth the option. Her star has dimmed, and it is time for her to go.
But she’s not ready to be done. After learning of The Substance, a black market drug promising youth and beauty, Elisabeth signs up to receive her first dose. The substance creates a second version of Elisabeth, one that is more beautiful, more youthful, and more energetic. There are rules, though. Elisabeth’s consciousness may only occupy each self for seven days. When the seven days are up, she must transfer between bodies. Not doing so has serious consequences.
Elisabeth’s other self, Sue (Margaret Qualley), quickly makes her mark in Hollywood. She takes over the aerobics TV show, now called Pump It Up! with Sue, which becomes a hypersexualized successor to Elisabeth’s aerobics program. In fact, nearly everyone is enamored with Sue; her charm and sex appeal are undeniable.
At first, Elisabeth and Sue live in harmony, but as time goes on the two selves begin to resent each other. Sue’s success haunts Elisabeth, who becomes a ghost of her former self, and Elisabeth’s self-hatred and old age frustrate Sue to no end. Sue, then, begins to break the rules of The Substance, opting to wait longer between switches, but her lust for youth has consequences. Elisabeth, already forced out of the industry and living alone, only seeing the world as a younger version of herself, now becomes physically grotesque.
Here, it is important to note that Elisabeth, while 50 years old, is still a beautiful woman. She may not be young, but she has many years of life ahead of her. When Sue takes more of Elisabeth’s life than she is allowed, however, Elisabeth begins to transform into the crone the entertainment industry believes her to be.
First, it’s just one rapidly aged finger, but with each transgression and more stolen time, Sue allows Elisabeth to suffer as a trade-off for her own success. Each time Elisabeth re-inhabits her body, she sees that same stolen time etched into her body when she looks in the mirror. Her own abuse of the “magic” — as Sue — made her the image of what she fears most.
Elisabeth and Sue’s relationship is central to both Elisabeth’s transformation into a crone and her rejection of being one. As Sue, she buys into the narrative that she is too old for Hollywood — and happiness. When Elisabeth gets ready for a date, hoping to take back the intrinsic power she holds despite her “old” age, she instead focuses on that age, seeing her 50-year-old face as the crone she becomes. Instead of going on the date, she applies and reapplies makeup, eventually giving up and missing the date altogether. If she can’t go into the world as Sue, is life worth living at all?
Due to her success, Pump It Up’s network offers Sue the hosting gig for their New Year’s Eve broadcast. On a high from her successes and disgusted with Elisabeth’s binge-eating and self-hatred, Sue decides to steal time indefinitely, not considering the potential ramifications of her actions. Sue ignores the reality of the magic mask she wears — her body is just a glamor, only existing because Elisabeth wished it so. Elisabeth’s consciousness is fighting her own nature; whereas powerful crones accept their form as part of their power, Elisabeth rejects what allows her to appear young at all.
When Sue begins to literally fall apart ahead of the New Year’s Eve broadcast, instead of returning to her original form as Elisabeth, she chooses to inject the substance into Sue’s body, anticipating an even younger, more perfect version of herself to be birthed from her copy.
Elisabeth’s inability to accept her reality as an aging woman leads not to an even better version of herself and Sue, but her final form: a grotesque monster with multiple faces, many breasts, and a large, bulbous body. The crone must always return to her original form, the source of her power as an outsider.
Only after horrifying audiences at the New Year’s Eve broadcast does Elisabeth — as a literal monster — find peace with herself. She accepts this new body as her own creation. The audience screams in fear, but this is nothing new because Elisabeth’s aging body horrified the entertainment industry long before this moment. Elisabeth sees that the fear she incites is her power. The audience fears her. They don’t understand her, because they refuse to see how, despite the ugly, this new creature could be beautiful, could be funny, could be charming.
The crone succeeds when she understands that living outside the confines of regular society is power. Maleficent fails because she wishes too much to be young and beautiful, to be loved. There’s power in being invisible, in not being understood, and in being ignored.
In becoming the most hideous, hag-like version of herself, Elisabeth is feared by many but finds peace. 🩸
About
Sydney Bollinger (she/her) is a queer writer based in Charleston, SC. She regularly writes for Charleston City Paper’s arts & entertainment section, covering local artists and events that transgress boundaries of creativity. Her creative work has been published in Northwest Review, GARLAND (Fifth Wheel Press), and Dunes Review. Follow her @sydboll and find her work at sydneybollinger.com.
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