I first learned the danger of looking at myself for too long when I was 15. 

That year, my mom’s stepsister was driving down a Texas highway, running late to work. As she looked at herself in her rearview mirror to apply makeup, she crashed into the back of an 18-wheeler and died instantly. 

The Substance (2024) starts with a car crash. Elisabeth, a former movie star living in Hollywood, has just been fired from her job as a TV aerobics instructor on her 50th birthday. As she watches a billboard of her face be torn down, she runs a red light through an intersection and gets hit by an oncoming vehicle. This should be an omen for Elisabeth, for us. Lingering on one’s own image can be fatal.

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The Substance has become one of 2024’s most misunderstood films. Yes, Demi Moore’s Best Actress snub—losing to 25-year-old Mikey Madison—was frustrating. But what disappointed me more than the Oscars were the reviews that came out months before. Film critics understood the film’s themes—ageism, sexism, the violence of beauty standards—but many questioned whether Elisabeth and Sue share a consciousness, in essence critically misunderstanding the film’s central premise. Emily Gould, writing for The Cut, articulated that confusion this way: “The two selves (Elisabeth and her young body) don’t share a mind, so the old self must just sit around and watch TV while the new self paints the town. Why, I wondered, would anyone make that bargain?”

The Substance is wonderfully outlandish and hyperbolic—at times, it seems random, even contradictory. But the more I thought about my own anxieties around aging, the more its extremes—its grandeur, its chaos, its shock of an ending—felt cohesive. It made sense. Elisabeth isn’t making a bargain. She has become alienated from her own body. 

I’m only 28, and I feel it. Even at this age, I find myself glancing too long in the mirror, wondering how much longer I’ll be what people want to see. How much longer I have before I will stop being seen at all. 

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I remember when I noticed my first wrinkle. I was washing my face when I found it: a small, centimeters-long crack on the lower part of my right nasolabial fold. I had to look closely to see it, but there it was, as I leaned into the mirror. I immediately texted a doctor on my telehealth subscription service, feeling indignant and a bit pissed off. “Is there a way to reverse the line permanently?” I texted, “I am only 21 years old.” 

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The star-shape is a regular motif in Coralie Fargeat’s films. In her debut film, Revenge (2017), a woman on vacation with her wealthy boyfriend and his business associates is raped and left for dead. Bloodied and barely clothed, she pursues her assailants for revenge, wearing pink star-shaped earrings. In The Substance, Fargeat brings back the star shape: the film opens and ends with a bird’s-eye shot of Elisabeth Sparkle’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and Sue’s signature accessory is also a pair of glittering star-shaped earrings. These women wear the star-shape on their bodies, but Fargeat is equally interested in the star as the body—not just as a status-symbol but as a symbol for the horrors that women are forced to endure. 

In both films, Fargeat’s female leads want to be famous—to achieve stardom: an echelon where everyone can see them. But not all stars live in the sky. Some live on the deep seafloor—the proverbial “bottom.” That “bottom” is where Jen begins after she’s raped and thrown off a cliff, and where Elisabeth lands after being fired from her TV show and flipped in a car crash. These women are fractured and split. And yet, like starfish, they contain the raw material for regrowth. 

Starfish are adaptable. They don’t have a brain or blood. They can asexually reproduce. If an arm breaks off, they can regenerate it. Meanwhile, the detached arm can develop into an entirely new starfish. Its specialized cells divide and replicate, generating four new arms. The second starfish is a clone of the first, genetically identical. As if the original were reborn.

Fargeat’s characters go through a similar cycle: a violent rupture, then something like resurrection. In Revenge, Jen pulls herself off the spike of a dead tree and cauterizes the hole in her middle with a beer can. In The Substance, Elisabeth drinks a neon green potion that rips her back open to birth a younger version of herself—Sue. She creates an “improved” copy, a kind of daughter. Like a starfish, a split self that lives. 

Fargeat’s use of body horror in her films is not redemptive or healing, but a sign of rupture—a split that makes transformation possible, even as it wounds. The pain of that split echoes one we’ve all endured. There’s a prominent view in psychoanalysis that when we recognize ourselves in the mirror for the first time, we become conscious beings as our selfhood splinters in two. We become both Subjects with an interior point of view (which we have always known), and Objects, which we learn we are. The mirror teaches us that we can be seen. That realization—of ourselves as visible—fundamentally alienates us from ourselves.

Elisabeth, like all of us, has already endured this fracture. Because of the shame that society has made her feel for her age, she has come to feel most concerned with her Objectness. And who can blame her? Society’s obsession with women’s youth is purely about Objectness, and that obsession bears real consequences. Immediately before the car crash, Elisabeth loses her job as a TV fitness instructor—and, it’s implied, her career as a movie star years ago—because, as her producer Harvey tells her, “At 50, it stops.” What stops? 

Most films never show their characters in the bathroom, but Elisabeth’s bathroom is central. Its mirror amplifies her shame, presenting the image of her own body to her scrutinizing eye like prey to be hunted or ravaged. When Elisabeth injects “the substance,” she does so holding her own gaze in the mirror. She hopes to change her Objectness, but what the substance offers isn’t a return to youth. Instead, it spurs yet another division. Her back pulls apart and a younger body emerges, with perky breasts, an apple-shaped butt, and taut skin. Like Lacan’s mirror, the transformation doesn’t create a whole self. It creates a double, with neon green acid coursing through its veins.

In the Bible, God made childbirth painful as punishment for Eve’s sin. Here, for her vanity, Elisabeth is ripped open to create a new form.

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I was around 26 years old when my anxieties about aging started regularly keeping me up at night. 

I had always dreaded my late twenties. In high school I read Dataclysm, which shows from online dating data that men, regardless of their own age, find women most attractive up until age 25. Since then, my 26th birthday had long been etched in my brain as the beginning of a decline. I felt even worse knowing that strangers tended to guess I was older than I actually was—typically assuming I was closer to 30. 

My habit became obsessive: after watching YouTube videos or scrolling through Instagram before bed, I would open the Photos app on my phone and scroll through its 2,000 stored images, including selfies from high school to the present. I would zoom in and take screenshots of my face to try to pinpoint the signs of aging. If I knew what they were, I could try to “fix” them. My face had lost fat, trading pillowy, plump cheeks for sharp cheekbones. The nasolabial line I had spotted at 21 had grown into a full fold when I smiled. 

After several nights of repeatedly looking through photos, I decided to pay a thousand dollars for filler, withdrawing from my emergency savings. Through a long needle, I received hyaluronic acid—a clear and squishy substance—injected into my face. Some say that this kind of filler is never completely broken down by the body. Perhaps milliliters of this moldable gel will live in my face forever.

Later, I peered at my cheek in the bathroom mirror. My smile lines were gone.

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The men in The Substance are crude, grotesque, and greedy. They’re hungry for more, obsessed with finding demure “pretty girls” (ages 18-30) for their feasting eyes. When they’re done molding a woman to their liking, they discard her. Elisabeth’s age to them makes her taste like expired milk. At 50, it stops. 

When Harvey dismisses Elisabeth from her show, he’s eating shrimp. Some shrimp (like the Harlequin shrimp) eat starfish. To make their feast, they will flip the starfish on its back to immobilize and eat it, one arm at a time, as the starfish still breathes. But remember: starfish can regenerate their arms, even if those arms have been eaten. So the cycle repeats. The new regrown arms get eaten too, unless the shrimp eats so rapaciously that there is no more of it left. “Renewal is inevitable,” Harvey says. Renewal is insatiable.

The men have eaten Elisabeth, so now let’s turn to when Elisabeth enters her young body, Sue. Who is Sue, really? And really what I mean is, who is Sue to these men? 

Sue is anonymous. Sue has no life story (Elisabeth/Sue seems to come up with her backstory on the spot under a talk show spotlight). She has no last name. She doesn’t need one. Sue is moldable, literally flexible (Margaret Qualley, with her ballet background, can sit up straight in a split with ease). Yet there are limits to her Objectness, as there are to anyone’s. The fact that Elisabeth’s new body as Sue engorges the men around her is luck, being in the “right time and place,” so to speak. The casting directors looking to replace Elisabeth are searching for someone so moldable that they might as well be asking for a Picasso painting: “Too bad her boobs aren’t in the middle of her face instead of that nose” they say about one woman who auditions for the role. But when Sue struts in, their insatiability is rewarded, if even for a fleeting moment. “Looks like everything sure is in the right place this time,” they say. They’ve found a body whose image they can mold. 

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As one of the oldest members of Gen Z—the so-called “Anxious Generation”—I recognize the very real toll that social media and rising mental health struggles have taken on our generation. But I also wonder how something more quietly invasive—the fact that we’ve grown up with thousands of images of ourselves, from childhood through adulthood—will shape our experience of aging. It’s certainly shaped mine. 

Before Elisabeth gives birth to her Sue-body, she has an aggressive streak toward herself, but there are limits. She throws a wine glass at a massive portrait of herself in her living room, shattering the glass around her eye. But the longer she’s able to live in her Sue-body, the more she manages her Objectness with rough hands. She attempts to go on a date, decides against it, and wipes the makeup off of her face, mussing her hair and rubbing her skin raw. 

It’s entirely possible to have too many mirrors, too many images of ourselves to confront ourselves with. All the photos and selfies that I have ever taken, easily accessible on my phone, with the ability to zoom in on my features to scrutinize, are hundreds of mirrors. “This day” compilations on Snapchat are reminders of what I used to look like, when I was plumper, younger. I have an on-hand timeline of my Objectness. 

The substance in The Substance is a dangerous, high-tech mirror, if there ever was one. For, at least when we just have ourselves, there are limits. But when Elisabeth inhabits one body, the other body defaults to being not of her own: it is separate, Other, a literal Object. Her regard toward her original body becomes to completely objectify it. As her Sue-body’s fame skyrockets, and she enjoys its rewards, Elisabeth’s emotional distance from her original body shrinks her ability to see her own humanity. She treats her original body like other objects around her: she covers it up with a blanket, stashes it with her portrait in a hidden closet in her bathroom. 

Consciousness seems immaterial, but objects (bodies) can be broken, taken apart. The disadvantage of Sue’s body is that it’s especially breakable. Elisabeth’s Sue-body relies on fluid from her spinal tap; otherwise, she will come undone. Elisabeth has a nightmarish dream where Sue’s back is unzipped and the organs inside of her cascade out; Sue kneads a chicken leg out from a bulge in her own butt and pulls it out from her belly button. These moments should be an omen for Elisabeth of the risks of Sue’s plasticity, even if she adores its rewards: Sue, so moldable and molded is she, cannot keep her own innards contained, or maintain their integrity.

It frustrates me that some film critics misinterpreted the fight for time that ensues between Elisabeth and Sue as two separate women fighting for dominance, when their one-ness  feels clear. When Elisabeth spends overtime in Sue, her Elisabeth-body ages exponentially. This creates a dreadful cycle: the more her Elisabeth-body ages and self-isolates, the less she wants to get back into it. When Elisabeth finds that she’s temporarily maxxed out her Elisabeth-body’s spinal tap and must switch back, she’s shocked at her own image—she has aged beyond recognition. It’s not that Sue is independently selfish and has left only scraps for the real Elisabeth. It’s that Elisabeth is seeing the results of treating her original body as an Object; inhabiting an outside point-of-view has alienated her from herself. The way that Demi Moore plays the complexity of this scene is absolutely beautiful. Even with Sue, this is the body that Elisabeth realizes she must live with. She realizes that her original body’s newfound plight is, squarely, her own. You can’t escape from yourself. 

Elisabeth finally appreciates that her addiction to Sue must be stopped. She starts administering the terminating black substance to her Sue-body, but stops mid-way. Sue, seeing the new version of the Elisabeth-body in front of her, sees red. Elisabeth tries to escape into her hiding place, the white-tiled bathroom. Sue pursues her there with Elisabeth’s predating eyes. During the struggle, Elisabeth’s two bodies momentarily stand in the bathroom mirror, looking at their reflections, after which Sue rams Elisabeth’s face into their reflections, over and over. What’s clear is that Elisabeth-as-Sue is destroying this body—its face, its perspective, its claim, its refusal to bend, its inability to be shaped at will. She had two molds, two Objects; now she is discarding one. Both their mirror reflections are shattered, splintered into little pieces. 

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To be honest, I almost didn’t write this essay. I just turned 28, and in the hours before the submission deadline to Bloodletter Magazine, I’ve spent more time scrolling through my “Hidden” album on my phone than actually writing. Per usual, I’m not looking for memories—I’ve been checking for signs of aging. And, if I’m being more honest, for reassurance that I still look good. It’s a habit now. I do it when I write, too—opening Photobooth on my laptop once an hour to flip through pictures I took on days I thought I looked pretty. I’ve done that since college, and I’ve always wondered why. It’s like, the moment I settle into my own perspective—start to write, to think—I have to interrupt it. I have to look. Maybe it’s a way of facing my own finiteness. But I think it does more than that. I think it traps me in it. 

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The substance isn’t blood, water, food, or sustenance. It doesn’t serve real organs, but takes from them to keep up an appearance. It splits and replicates human cells furiously; it knows how to create copies of things and creates them diligently. The DNA code that it creates is weirdly hollow. It says, if I have one, I make two. If I have two, I make four. 

After destroying her original self, Sue (again, remember, Elisabeth), is not doing well. She’s falling apart quite literally, on her big night where she will be the host of a televised New Year’s Eve show. Harvey makes a last emphatic effort to mold Sue in his own image, in front of the old, dopey shareholders he wants to show her off to. Her front teeth have already fallen out. “Is everything OK?” he asks. She forces a grin; she needs to escape. “So smile! That’s what we want tonight! PRETTY GIRLS SHOULD ALWAYS SMILE!” 

To that iconic, white-tiled bathroom, Sue makes her return. She’s searching for a fix before she heads back to the studio. And that acidic neon green substance? It’s single-use only, but she finds it and injects what’s left of it from the first go-around anyway. She urges, begs this substance: “Please give me a better version of myself…” 

If I have two, I make four. If I have four, I make eight. If I have eight, I make sixteen. If…

There are 5-armed starfish. 6-armed starfish. 7-armed starfish. 8-armed starfish. 9-armed starfish. 10-armed starfish. 11-armed starfish. 12-armed starfish. 13-armed starfish. 14-armed starfish. 15-armed starfish. 16-armed starfish! 

I contain multitudes. 

In the mirror we’re confronted with our finiteness, our outlines. But if our outlines aren’t like anything, or anyone else’s, aren’t we—in a respect—more unlimited than everything else?

Monstro Elisasue, at least, is many of any traditional body part: she’s several sets of teeth, lots of skin, eyes, faces, noses, heads. Remember, Monstro Elisasue is Elisabeth. Both her obsession with changing her Object-self and need for adoration drive her. 

Director Coralie Fargeat says that the way to understand Monstro Elisasue and her actions—how she looks at herself tenderly in the mirror as she gets ready and walks to the New Year’s Eve televised event, taking center stage—is that Elisabeth is accepting herself for the first time. As she writes in the script, “[It is] as if she was TRULY seeing herself for the very first time, and finally, accepting herself.” So let’s play with that idea. 

Elisabeth has been molded by the Hollywood industry, cracked out of her shell and discarded. Sue, the same. “She’s my most beautiful creation,” Harvey says, before Monstro Elisasue enters and shocks the crowd. “I shaped her for success!” 

No, Harvey. You didn’t make these women. And if not just for the fact that he’ll soon disown her, Monstro Elisasue makes this clear. Monstro Elisasue can live Elisabeth’s ideal of being moldable, to her own image, out of her own agency. Monstro Elisasue doesn’t have proper ears for her to hang earrings on? She’ll stick those earrings right in her head! Just one strand of hair? She’ll curl what she has! She is, if not infinity, close to it. 

But I don’t agree with Coralie Fargeat—I don’t think that Elisabeth accepts herself. Being moldable is fraught. This might be Elisabeth’s ideal, but infinity and moldability can only last so long. Finitude maintains our integrity; infinity explodes before our eyes. Very malleable things, such as yellow balls of clay, can be ripped apart and smacked together, made flat. Elisabeth in her Monstro Elisasue-body is a kind of miracle for a moment—like an asexually reproducing organism, like a starfish. When the crowd for the live TV show turns against her and men hit her with a baseball bat, her head explodes but, as if in reply, she grows a new head. I’m moldable, you see. Cells dividing a million times over. 

Her physical integrity and intactness fall apart as she tries to escape the screaming and aggressive crowd. The substance, as with Sue, isn’t good at keeping body parts together, for it prioritizes moldability. With every step, an implosion of yet another body part kicks off. It’s like she’s a volcano of body parts, erupting because she has no bones, no internal structure to serve as the core for her finitude to hang from. 

When Elisabeth’s now blob-self (notably, she is shaped like a starfish!) crawls onto her Hollywood star again, and looks up at both the stars and five palm trees with their heads above her in a pentagonal shape, I see her tragedy: she never loved herself. 

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I think often about the mirror. Not just as a place where I check my appearance or put myself together, but as a space where I come apart. The mirror gives me a body and takes one away. It returns my image, but never how I feel inside of it. Like Elisabeth, I’ve spent hours at its surface, searching for a wrinkle, a fold, a line. And in that search, I’ve sometimes missed my own face entirely. 

But I’m trying to see myself differently. Not to escape the mirror, or the screen, but to look through them—to see what they distort. I think that’s what The Substance offers, using body horror and gore: a warning about molding ourselves to an image we want to see, a reminder that finiteness, mortality, and rigidity give our bodies integrity and internal strength. It’s not a film about two warring women, one young and one older, one awake and one asleep. It’s about a woman fighting within herself, and coming apart from looking at her Object-self too often and for too long. 

I am still trying to put myself back together. But maybe wholeness isn’t the goal. Maybe, like a starfish, I can live through the break. Maybe I can even grow.