The Current - Will The Substance change how we talk about women and aging?

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

In the Oscar-nominated movie The Substance, Demi Moore plays an aging star who takes a black market drug to unlock a younger version of self. We look at why the movie has struck a chord in a society that still sees age, particularly for women, as a liability.

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Sounds attractive doesn't it? The horror film The Substance is up for an Oscar for Best Picture. Its star Demi Moore is in the running for Best Actress. This film tells the story of Elizabeth Sparkle, an actress who gets old, as you do, and is forced out of her job as a TV fitness guru. And so she takes a drug called The Subst substance that spawns a younger, supposedly better version of herself, spoiler alert, it all goes horribly wrong for both versions of Elizabeth Sparkle.

This film is a harsh critique of Hollywood's impossible beauty standards, but it has also been a huge success and has a lot of people talking because of its conversations around ageism that go beyond just the movies. Paula Froehlich is a senior story editor at the Cable News Network News Nation and a contributor to the Free Press.

Candace Frederick is HuffPost's senior culture reporter. They both join us now to talk about this film and the conversations that it has spawned. Good morning to you both. Hello, thank you. Candace, just describe the main character in this film, Elizabeth Sparkle, and the point at life that she is in as the movie begins.

Elizabeth Sparkle is a Academy Award winning actor who is now kind of like this fitness guru kind of like this fitness guru. And she is kind of moved over from acting into this televised fitness space and is doing relatively well for herself. She has a following and kind of at the height of her TV fitness game when, and she's an older actor,

and she is deemed just unattractive and not suitable for pop TV, I would say. And she's effectively discarded. So at this height of her second phase of her career, she's discarded and left from, or thrown from her post there. And so she's kind of in this space where it seems like she is,

she kind of hung a lot of her entire identity around being a celebrity and being beloved and being well liked and then she gets this opportunity in the form of a pill to see if she can perhaps reverse the effects of her natural aging process. Yeah. She takes the substance and this is about unlocking kind of the fountain of youth and as we said, it goes terribly wrong over the course of this film. This is based, I mean, it's not a documentary, it is a horror movie and yet Paula, when you look at it,

how much of this film do you think is based on some sort of grain of truth? I think it's all based on truth. Women are always hating their bodies. They're always kind of hating themselves, right? And I just thought it was fascinating. I actually did not realize it was a horror movie. After I watched it, I thought it was like a tragic comedy.

I saw it in Chelsea, and I was surrounded by a bunch of gay men who were laughing their asses off, as I was at several points. It's pretty gory. That's that maybe that's the horror part of it. Yeah, but the gory wasn't really gory. Like, let's be honest, like we've all seen worse. This is the attack, you know, where everyone's trying

to outdo themselves in dumb, dumb stuff. So it's, you know, I didn't really, it wasn't that gory for me. Like at the end, it was just like an homage to the shining and check the blob from, so I thought it was fabulous. There's a film that has, as I mentioned, it has people talking. You wrote a piece about how, I mean,

tell me about the dinner party that you were at and the Hamptons and the themes that come up in this film that were kind of surfacing at that dinner party. Okay, well, first of all, you have to understand nobody at the dinner party saw the movie. We were talking about the vagaries of traffic in the Hamptons, which is one of the reasons I don't go to the Hamptons.

And a friend of mine who's over 60 60 all of a sudden was just having a minute Slammed her hand on the table and just screamed. I'm invisible every woman over 60 is and you know, I think she was once or something and and you know, I think a lot of women feel that way and You know, I think a lot of women feel that way. And you know, I mean, I'm not 60, but I definitely, there were themes in the movie where you're just like, yeah, I get it.

It's how your younger self hates or doesn't pay attention to the older self and kind of really screws around with their life. You know what I mean? Heck, I used to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. And then how the older self loads and presents the younger self for actually being and not appreciating it and kind of screwing them over a little bit.

Candice, how do you look at age? I mean, there's the idea that age ain't nothing but a number and yet that's not the case. How old is old these days, do you think? I always say that old is getting younger and younger every single day. It's interesting the way people talk about age. And I think myself, like a lot of other people

are chronically online. So you kind of eavesdrop on these conversations about how people are talking about themselves aging and certainly how people talk about complete strangers and, you know, celebrities that they see from afar. And I think it's just very strange. There's a lot of like, oh my gosh, I'm about to turn 30. I can't believe it, I'm old.

And I'm just like, oh my gosh, that's one, that's not old. And two, you get to have a birthday. There's a lot of people who don't get to have birthdays, and we just take them all so for granted. And I think the way people talk about age is so strange, also because if there's, say, an older celebrity who's in their 70s, I think about about this, like when people talk about like, oh my gosh, Jack Nicholson is out and about or some other person who is older and a celebrity,

a well-known figure and they're just like, oh my gosh, I can't believe they left the house and can you believe what they look like? And it's, it's a strange thing. I think that when people see people out and about who are older, they it's almost like, are you okay? There's this sense of doom and sense of just like, oh my gosh, look at what they look like. I think that is far more compounded with women. Whereas, like I said,

older is getting younger and younger every day, but women, it's like that's even, I would say past 40, which is almost completely detestable in a lot of people's eyes. They're just like, you can't be sexual. When I think about this, I think about the way in which women are portrayed on screen, but certainly in our own lives,

there's this idea that women just shrivel up. Because one of the most powerful parts of this film is, yes, it's a man that prompts her into taking the substance, or at the very least, leads her to that place, but there's this sense of internalization that goes on as well. And that that's what a lot of people have spoken about in terms of where they see themselves in the film. They see themselves

falling prey to that. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, Elizabeth is extremely self-sabotage and she's very self-believing. I also just think that the movie is so profoundly sad. Like the moment towards the end of the movie, when she fully realizes the destruction that she's done to her own body and literally says, I can't stop. Like I'm going to take it again. That's addiction.

And that's something that I don't think that we talk a lot about in terms of this movie, but like there's addiction going on. There's also this sense of like, I have to continue to try to better myself even if it's this fabricated way, this way that doesn't really make sense and not actually real. But that's something that is very true to Hollywood. I think women feel the need to constantly change themselves through plastic surgery or whatever they do in order to fit this standard.

And it's never ever going to, it's never going to give them the type of success that they think they're getting. They might be more accepted in some cases, but they're completely destroying their own lives. Paula, you've written about how at some point in time, all women have considered using some form of the substance. What did you mean by that?

Well, I mean, just look at the gazillion dollar face cream market, right? You've got 20 year olds being like, this takes care of my wrinkles. You're like, yeah, I bet it does. What wrinkles? Or you've got the beauty industry is targeted toward it. You've got, you know, just on the base level, it's very easy to look at and find. You work in TV journalism,

and you have written yourself about how you are not somebody who is going to go gentle into that good night. You have, you have in your your words a preferred youth dealer. Tell me about the pressure that you felt and what you've done in the face of that pressure. Okay, so I want to be real clear about this. Nobody has pressured me. It's myself where I look and I'm like, huh, are my eyelids starting to bag or droop over my eyelashes like my mother's?

Yes, they are. I'm going gonna take care of that or you know I just it makes me feel good I like it I look exactly like myself it just I don't look exhausted and I don't see a problem with it nobody at my work is saying oh you better get this. Let's be, you know, it's literally me looking in the mirror after two years of boom on COVID being like, hold up one second. I don't have to deal with the droopy eyelids.

I don't have to deal with the five lines on my forehead in which we could grow corn in. Have you felt, I mean, maybe it's not external pressure, but as you get older, as we all do, what has that done? And this is what Candice was talking about, that sense of internalization. What has that done to you in terms of how you think about yourself as you get older? You know, it's more, for me, it's more hormonal. I'm pretty fine with the way I look.

I've always been, you know, the way I look. I think for me, it's more the way I feel. You feel crazy. You know, I was laughing that we were having this conversation with a man. No offense. Because I was like, yeah, I don't, I honestly don't know how you could actually understand how women, when they go through perimenopause or when they get older and your body is not your own, your mind is not your own, and all of a sudden it becomes like you're like, jeez am I schizophrenic? What the hell is going on here? You know and all of a sudden there are things that just happen naturally, you know? Candace, is using horror, does it help to articulate

some of what Paul is talking about there? Some of the unimaginable or unexplainable things, but also just how extreme this conversation can be? Yeah, I mean, I think I'm a huge horror fan in general. And I think this movie is really, it makes really good use of it in terms of just like, what I find so interesting about the movie is how intimate it is.

Like we're seeing a destruction from her own point of view, from the protagonist's point of view. And so this sense of, again, self-loathing and how that can manifest into something metaphorically ugly and metaphorically just deeply self-destructive. And I think the gore, how everything kind of feels so visceral in terms of just like I think about that scene where Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid are at lunch. He's buying her firing her. He's an exact and she's one of his employees and that's not a traditional horror scene, but him eating the

Shrimp and how like the heightened sound effects like all of is- It's almost violent the way he's eating. Yes, precisely. And so all of those elements like really goes to, like even just the act of eating, she's not eating anything. The fact that she's not eating anything and he's eating because he doesn't have to worry about like weight. And he's older.

Exactly, exactly. And so it's a really fun but really effective use of the genre to really pronounce all of those things that she's internalizing and she's trying to work through. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what

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Demi Moore's up for an Oscar, uh, for her role in this film. She won a Golden Globe and did a blazing speech. Have a little listen to, uh, to what she said from the stage. In those moments when we don't think we're smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough, or enough or successful enough or basically just not enough. I had a woman say to me, just know you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick. And so today I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving

me and for the gift of doing something I love and being reminded that I do belong. Paula, what did you make of her speech? I loved it. I think I know the woman she's talking about who told her that. I loved it. I thought it was absolutely right. You know, a lot of women, especially in Hollywood, which also by the way people say say oh, well, that's Hollywood No, Hollywood trickles down to real life. Just look at the heroin she goes epic trend. That's cut that's going on throughout the United States and I just thought good for her. That's absolutely right and you know

She didn't say anything earth-shattering to be fair. It's stuff that we've all heard before, you know. But it came from her, which I think was interesting. But exactly. And you know, I think Demi Moore has also really struggled in a lot of ways. You know, she had people say, you'll never be a serious actress. She's, you know, she's metamorphosized over the years.

And it is kind of freeing to say, yeah, that's right. I do want to actually get to the point where you're just like, nope, this is it, and I love it. Candace, what do you make of the narrative around the comeback? I mean, Demi Moore is being framed, I mean, partially for her performance, but also that she has, has in the eyes of Hollywood,

come back with this film. And she is alongside people like Pamela Anderson, Isabella Rossellini as well, who have also been given that comeback tag. What do you make of the way that Hollywood talks about these women? Yeah, I'm struggling with this because, I mean, if you were to ask any of those three women

that you just named, I feel like they would all say that I never really left. You know what I'm saying? And so when I hear this word comeback, which is often attached mostly to women and women who are outside of like the the whatever is the youth age, older female actors. And so I think about, you know, when people started saying a comeback for each of those three actresses, I was just like, well, where do they go?

I mean, like, I feel like what happens is that they actually just, people just stopped talking about them. And it's not like they went anywhere. We didn't care what they were doing. As opposed to perhaps, you hinted at this earlier, older male actors who are allowed to age gracefully and look at what Harrison Ford or,

they don't disappear in the same way. Yeah, I mean, I think they're also, men are allowed to have more interesting roles, even if, like usually when they're having a quote unquote comeback, they, it's because they probably left. They weren't like forced out or they weren't forgotten or ignored.

That's usually attached to women. And so when I think about this comeback, I'm just like, they didn't really leave. We just didn't really care what they were doing. And I think that's a whole conversation that we really need to be focusing on. And so, when I hear about like this warm embrace, like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad you're back when I hear about this warm embrace,

oh my gosh, I'm so glad you're back. I'm just like, well, how long are we gonna be excited that they're back and what roles will we embrace them in forthcoming, you know what I'm saying? So I don't know, I just feel kind of cynical about it. Paul, I think it's interesting, Pamela Anderson, part of this comeback, is being really vocal about the fact that she's doing all of these

public appearances without makeup. And she's saying that she's doing all of these public appearances without makeup. And she's saying that I'm doing, that this is what I look like, this is who I am now at this age, like it or leave it. What does that do, do you think? Well, let me just say, I kind of disagree with Candice.

I feel like someone like Pamela Anderson actually took herself out of the picture and moved to Canada lives on a farm and was like, yep Bye, I don't like this life and I do there are plenty of male actors who actually have been kind of passed over yes, there's always a There there's always a Harrison Ford right who gets to do a project when he wants to do a project. But then you have Nicole Kidman, who's doing 900 projects a year, unfortunately, sometimes playing

the same character over and over. But then you have Pamela Anderson, and I have a very cynical take on this. I felt like she, and I've written about this actually that I like the no makeup look that's great. I just felt like it was part of a marketing ploy for the movie and sure enough she didn't get nominated and now she's back in full makeup on the cover of Elle. I'm not like you know I feel like it happens with both sexes you you know, male plastics, serious skyrocketing. The biggest trend in the States right now among regular dudes is facial masculinity surgery. So everything looks, it's almost like gender affirming surgery for dudes.

And- I mean, it was Zempik as well, right? You mentioned that earlier. Oh my God, yeah. And a lot, you know, and then you also, and men are on it just as much as women You know last year I wrote a piece about the two hundred and fifty thousand dollar face facelift that a lot of Hollywood guys are doing so men feel it too

I'm not sure if it's like full specific gender, but I get it that women traditionally and historically have I mean You know Pamela Anderson is Pamela Anderson. She's quite brilliant on how she manipulates the media and God bless her, you know? So we started out by wondering whether this film is actually going to change the conversation around aging and how people see those who are getting older in the public eye.

But just before we wrap up, Paul had suggested maybe we aren't actually going to change that conversation. I think the conversation has already changed because you've got people who are very, I mean, look at the conversation about menopause. Everyone's talking about it. Now, why weren't they talking about it 10 years ago? It's because people like Jennifer Aniston,

very big stars of the 90s and 2000s are getting older, but they're still maintaining. And all of a sudden, 50 is, 50 is the new 20s, 60 is the new 20s. I think the conversation is changing because we have to actually take these women into account. Candace, we have to go, but do you think a film like, and the conversation that comes out of a film

like The Substance will actually create that kind of change that you're looking for? No. In a word, no. I mean, I feel like it's evolved right now, and I feel like it's one of those things because we're talking about this movie that's very popular right now and that will be popular for a bit.

And I wonder whether, after the Oscars, after whatever happens there, will we still be talking about this? I mean, every decade or so, we have a conversation about women aging in Hollywood and ageism in Hollywood and beyond. And we are still as ageist as ever. So I don't know if we're just going to do that. We're still going to be approaching

this in just like a really trivial way. I'm glad to have the chance to talk to you both about this. Hopefully people watch the film and maybe we're wrong and the conversation will continue after. In the meantime, thank you both for being here. Thank you. Paula Froelich is a senior story editor with News Nation and a contributor to the Free Press. She was in New York City. Candace Frederick is HuffPost's senior culture reporter.

She is in Brooklyn, New York.