REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE (THE SUBSTANCE, 2024)

(SPOILERS for THE SUBSTANCE below!!!)

When the final transformation arrives, it felt quite intuitive to bring the character ultimate relief. Ironically, it’s when she’s totally deformed and monstrous that she doesn’t care what she looks like. In fact, it’s the only time she looks in the mirror and kind of likes what she sees. [...] That the only real moment of relief that she has is when she doesn’t have a body anymore, I think, says it all.

Coralie Fargeat on the ending of The Substance 

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There’s a scene in THE SUBSTANCE that gnaws at me. Elizabeth Sparkle is huddled in a diner, attempting to reconcile her terror at her aging body and disappearing influence with her compulsion to continue to give her lifeforce and consciousness to Sue, the nymphette homunculus that emerged from her back. Every seven days, Elizabeth cedes control to Sue. Sue’s youth and beauty are the whole of her right to exist. Where does that leave the increasingly frayed and aging Elizabeth?

Elizabeth is spotted by a haggard old man who recognizes her as a fellow Substance user. Instead of gloating about the beauty and success the Substance birthed from their bodies, he checks in on her gently. He asks if she is taking care of herself, if she is lonely. 

She looks confused, and then comes his grim reply: “It gets harder each time to remember that you still deserve to exist. That this part of you means something. That you matter.”

Shortly before I watched this movie I’d had a frustrating conversation with my (cis) therapist about the realities of pursuing a masculinized body, an expensive and complex surgical goal that becomes more labyrinthine every time I explore it. She had no idea that my insurance company could simply tell me no because I am Too Fat, or give me a yes that remains a no without a ten-thousand-dollar ransom payment. She seemed surprised that I could not simply walk into the doctor’s office and point at some kind of Gender Value Menu to order my add-ons. I’ll take a chin implant and an extra-large phalloplasty, hold the balls.

It is galling to admit that I am vulnerable to internalized ageism and transphobia. It’s also true. So: Yes! I am older and fatter than most transmasc folks whose bodies you see on the internet, and yes I am a nonbinary trans dude with a body that reads middle-aged-lady to rude dumb-dumbs, and yes that makes me sad sometimes.

I’ve done what I can, but there are limits to the ways you can change your body on your own. Two years of testosterone can’t reverse forty years of estrogen, and puberty blockers aren’t useful to me without a time machine. I still have thick hips and thighs and perky spaced-out little tits and a thousand other visual cues that tell cis people to yell at me in public. It’s possible more will shift as I continue with HRT, but that’s a gamble, not a surety. My body has the shape it does, and absent surgical interventions I cannot afford, it will most likely remain as it is. 

One of the most common criticisms of THE SUBSTANCE comes from the relative stupidity of the plot. I’ve seen multiple people complain that it makes no sense that Elizabeth Sparkle is willing to mutilate herself to keep her job as a jazzercise instructor, or that it’s unbelievable that people are willing to die for the maddeningly generic and weirdly tits-focused New Years Eve Show. 

The issue with this criticism is not that it is incorrect, but it misses the point of satire. Of course the world of THE SUBSTANCE is shallow and unrelentingly stupid. So is the world it parodies. I have a legitimate fear that using the wrong public bathroom without looking sufficiently pretty or manly will get me an ass-kicking. I have to beguilingly perform gender just to take a safe piss, and you’re telling me it’s weird that a gorgeous woman like Elizabeth worries about her aging skin? Of course it’s all stupid. 

And of course, it’s all important too. “Passing” as one gender or the other can be a life-or-death scenario for a trans person. The ability to pass is determined by a trans person’s conformity to binary gender, and pretending that socially gendered aesthetics are not a part of passing is obviously ridiculous. Playing along feels demeaning, but it also makes the world less hostile. Rejecting cis beauty standards feels better to many of us, but that rejection comes at a social cost. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. 

Learning about the origins of facial feminization surgery provided me with a helpful example of this catch-22. The blueprint for the procedure was created by comparing hundreds of “mens” faces to “womens” faces to make an achievable platonic template for femininity, with an admitted bias towards what a cisheteropatriarchal society considers feminine beauty. To be beautiful is to pass, to be exceptional is to fail. 

On one hand this enrages me; how many faces are excluded by normalizing a narrow set of aesthetics as the only acceptable “female” one? And yet, when someone says the purpose of the surgery is to allow trans women to do normal things without being clocked and called a slur, I can't help but concede that I would also like to go outside someday without the fear of being yelled at.

It is deeply stupid that looks have anything to do with survival as a trans person. But when I inevitably do get yelled at in a bathroom or on the bus, it's because my gender-fucked appearance can't be reconciled by the average cis person and they’re angry at me about it. They also feel entitled to give me hell, just like the cavalcade of dummies in fancy suits feel justified in shunning Elizabeth once they don’t like looking at her anymore. 

I understand why she wants to look young and beautiful, because on some level, so do I. Passing would make my life infinitely easier, even if I don't want to do it. I resent the implication I should care, and I also cannot deny that it is the reality I experience. 

The most infuriating aspect is being denied the opportunity to love the body I have, because the world is obsessed with the body that could be here in its place. I like my “girly” bits, my tits and my thick ass and everything else. If I lived in a world where people didn’t treat me like a freak for having them alongside the masculine ones, I wouldn’t think twice about it. Instead I find myself bent into aesthetic pretzels, trying to appease a world that hates my guts and won’t leave me alone about it. 

When the background hum of your life echoes with reminders of your inadequacy, it’s hard not to want to hide in the dark. It’s hard to remember that every piece of you matters, that every previous version of yourself lies in the wrapper of what came after it. It’s hard to remember to treat the older, frailer, less aesthetic parts of yourself with love.

REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE is the warning of THE SUBSTANCE: to deny one side of yourself is to destroy yourself entirely. There's a part of me that wants to ignore this advice, a part of me that would zip myself out of my own skin as easily as Elizabeth does. It's the same part of me that sometimes cringes when I see myself from the wrong angle, or feels ugly shame when I price out various surgeries and realize I’m too poor for them.

Elizabeth and Sue ignore it by treating each other with contempt, hucking each other’s limp husks in dingy crawlspaces. This leads to their downfall. If Elizabeth and Sue had realized they could help each other, the movie may have been different. Sue would have benefitted from Elizabeth’s expertise in navigating a sea of Hollywood sharks and perverts, and Sue could have helped Elizabeth embrace trends and find new relevance. Instead the old and new went to war with each other. Seperated, neither can survive for long.

I am luckier than Elizabeth because I already know that queerness cannot be separated from samsara; that is to say that this is not the first time I have been reborn, and it is unlikely to be the last. You never stop coming out, and so you never stop becoming something new. Aging queers already know that you rely on the lessons from the last birth to survive the next one. 

The fat dyke I was before I became a dude has years of experience telling rude people to mind their own fuckin’ business, and she’s an excellent consultant for the anxious man I currently am. I no longer use my deadname, but that doesn’t mean I won’t keep the girl who wore it for decades safe in my heart. I refuse to throw myself away, even when the world makes me feel like I should.

When I saw THE SUBSTANCE for the first time, I mistook Monstro ElizaSue’s rampage as a tragedy. I ached for her as she jammed earrings into her warped ears, as she slicked lipstick onto her mask, as she shimmied and oozed her way onto the New Year’s Show stage. She’s surrounded by identical toned bodies, a spiral of dazzling teeth, a fractal of shiny tits and asses to frame a twisted monster that vomits up the flesh everybody wants to see when the spotlight hits her right. At first glance, it feels like a ritual humiliation.

I am glad I read the interview with Fargeat, because it helped me see the ending as the triumph it is. Flanked by terrified near-clones of her younger self, Monstro ElizaSue vomits blood across the stage, giving everyone the New Years Show of a lifetime and instigating a violent finale. 

Because of course Elizabeth was right: her survival in this world really does hinge on her appearance. The world wants the sex appeal of Sue alone, not a monstrous combination of them both. The same woman who is worshipped when she appears as a taut fuckdoll is mobbed and beaten when she appears as the complicated creation she actually is. 

Eventually she is decapitated by the infuriated crowd, but even this cannot stop Monstro ElizaSue from glorying in her violent and messy re-integration. Her explosion of blood and rage against her oppressors is a joyous repudiation of their shallowness, a celebration of the power of her monstrosity. In the end, her triumph is real, if bittersweet. As her disembodied face crawls away from the carnage and finds a final place of rest on her Hollywood Walk of Fame star, she is released from caring about how people see her body at all.

There’s something instructive in the end of THE SUBSTANCE for trans folks. We cannot reject our past selves, and we cannot bet everything on a perfect plastic self in the near future. We are all Monstro ElizaSue to some mob of shitty strangers. Embracing the parts of yourself that society finds monstrous is undeniably dangerous, but the freedom it confers is worth it. Remember you are one. Remember that you matter.