The Substance (Coralie Fargeat) • Page 13

Very mixed feelings about this. Very watchable, good performances, and I loved how gonzo it got, but it was also way too long and there were aspects of the film’s internal logic that didn’t make sense to me.

For all the talk about “you are one”, it makes Elisabeth and Sue seem too much like different people. What exactly is Elisabeth getting out of this arrangement if she doesn’t appear to have any memory or knowledge of her experiences in the Sue body? Why would anyone want to keep doing this?

 

She gets to not be conscious in her old body but doesn’t have to die.

it’s a perfect solution for her character since they’re incredibly shallow and also too weak willed to end their own life.

 

You can't evaluate Elizabeth's decision making in this as if she is a rational person with emotional depth. She's a desperate, shallow person whose entire life centers around her physical appearance.

Given that that the main source of her personal value is diminishing, she turns to an unvetted and illicit drug that provides her escape from the swelling fear within because it's easier than doing other things like coming to terms with her place in life or committing suicide.

People do this all the time. Think about when someone's reached the obvious end of their life due to disease or age but opt to rely on drugs or machines to keep them going. In most cases this is done because the fear of death is greater than the pain of a miserable daily existence.

 

She gets to be Sue. They act like completely different people because they're in completely different circumstances and bodies, that's the point. How they are perceived has a huge impact on how they behave.

She doesn't have a clear memory of her time as Sue because there's a huge distance between the two, they don't even share the same brain, but they are a single consciousness. She still gets to spend half of her time as a younger, better version of herself that gets to be successful and famous again.

There's people out there that will happily get so inebriated that they have no real memory of the experience and they'll do it again because they expect to have a good time even if they won't remember it.

The whole point of the film is that she's gotten to a point where it's so important to her to feel young and adored again that she will put up with all the ridiculous bullshit to make it happen.

 

RE happily inebriated

can confirm. see every wedding I’ve ever attended. I do not remember my dance moves looking like THAT when I was doing them.

 

I tried to think of it as someone in the morning who regrets going out drinking the night before. You regret it but then you do it again the next weekend.

 

Yeah, it's substance abuse.

 

I didn't bother, you guys are putting more thought into it than the film makers. The phrase "oh well that's mornings me problem" sufficiently covers it.

 

Don’t know if that’s true but definitely thinking about it a ton. That’s what good movies do.