On Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance & Rewriting the Narrative of Aging Women

Some News:

My new book, DEATH AND OTHER SPECULATIVE FICTIONS: AN ESSAY IN PROSE POEMS is now available for pre-order. As many of you know, pre-orders often determine how a book does, so I would deeply appreciate anyone taking the time to order. Thank you so much! The book comes out January, 2025.

Here is some info on the book:

Caroline Hagood takes the reader on a wild ride, using surreal stories to process the recent death of her father. She mourns by making language work as a time machine to go back and let her father live again, bending space and time to make a place for him, if only in this book that is, above all, a séance. Death and Other Speculative Fictions is for anyone who is grieving the loss of a loved one and searching everywhere for answers.

“Caroline Hagood's vibrant, surprising prose poems speculate on the nature of human connection and loss with astonishing, understated force."

—Idra Novey

“In the aftermath of her father’s death, Caroline Hagood turns to a steady diet of speculative fiction for solace. In this haunting sequence of prose poem meditations, she draws on sources as rich as Charles Yu, Kurt Vonnegut, Madeleine L’Engle, and filmmaker George Miller to construct an alternate mythology to help process her grief. One is gripped by the vulnerability, the raw tenderness of her voice, yet at the same time inspired by its provocations. Hagood shows how the speculative imagination, rather than a mode of escape, is a powerful tool for understanding the real–even rewriting it. “It’s by way of the fabrications, the coming at it from outlandish angles…that we can really see how things are here on earth and how they need to change.” This book charts the road between life and death with furious creativity and vision.”

—Elaine Equi

“Death and Other Speculative Fictions is a gorgeous tribute, a survival diary, a love letter, an ode to a father, to speculative fiction, to time, and to life. It cobbles together from real and imaginary places and the thresholds in between, a means to think about the unthinkable, and to go on with the impossible and beautiful task of living in a world that is both flooding and on fire, while letting go of those we love most, and eventually ourselves. It is full of grief, wonder, awe, hope and love. I was so moved, and my world was expanded by this book. Like Furiosa’s mechanical arm, it is a thing of beauty, born out of loss, pain and necessity.”

—Ananda Lima

“In this beautiful and devastating essay in poems, Caroline Hagood’s voice is fully alive, witty, searching and razor-sharp. What is so unique about this book is how she balances vivid descriptions of 21st century life with searing questions about the relationship between grief and speculative fiction. By reminding the reader how strange everyday life has become and how quotidian science fiction can feel, she reinvigorates hybrid writing, bringing a new liveliness and incision to the genre. An instant classic.”

—Joanna Fuhrman

“Have you looked into the eye of death lately? If you are not ready to do so, no worries, Caroline Hagood has done it for you. In Hagood’s new collection, DEATH AND OTHER SPECULATIVE FICTIONS: An Essay in Prose Poems, you will find a hauntingly thorough scanning on what it means to lose a parent in a 21st Century vernacular that engages Furiosa, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Blade Runner 2049, and Kurt Vonnegut. For all that we might know, medically and scientifically, about what happens to our bodies when we die, Hagood wants to know more about the plane where death has no meaning and she means to find it. In this new work, Hagood becomes “a student of time, space, creativity and sorrow” so that we may get a glimpse of the beyond.”

—Jiwon Choi

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Coralie Fargeat’s second movie, The Substance, won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in May and received a thirteen-minute ovation. Applause that long is noteworthy for a film in a genre many can’t stomach: body horror. Still, the film has been divisive, with critics such as Slate’s Dana Stevens saying she’s all for the film’s genre and feminist messaging but she didn’t find its delivery to be as profound as others have—or at all subtle.

In the film, an executive (Dennis Quaid) tells celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), who now does a Jane Fonda-style aerobics show, that she’s gotten too old—“when you reach fifty, it stops.” The solution? She hears of a substance that can help her birth a younger version of herself (Sue, played by Margaret Qualley) out of her back. Elisabeth and Sue switch off every seven days, with one living while the other hibernates in the bathroom.

By harnessing the modes of humor and horror, in The Substance Fargeat confronts (you guessed it!) the “male gaze,” which Laura Mulvey wrote about back in 1973 in her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Of the operatically graphic and also darkly humorous ending, Fargeat says, “Having this explosion of blood and guts was a way to externalize the violence that I feel, all those gazes and this beauty pressure put on us.”

Mulvey maps out not merely the problem of “the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle,” but possible methods of resistance, of “transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire,” and here’s where Fargeat seems to be staking out her cinematic territory.

I understand why Stevens says we already know this (that aging women, and particularly actresses, are rendered invisible in our society) and that Fargeat isn’t subtle about the delivery of this message, but what if that’s precisely the point? What if Fargeat also wants to take down subtlety, as part of her attack on all these supposedly feminine qualities that she wants to monster, take apart, and put back together in more innovative forms?

Fargeat’s hard at work in this film, glossing Kristeva’s abjection, Mulvey’s male gaze, Butler’s gender performativity, and many other greatest hits of feminist theory in a highly violent but also highly hilarious manner. Horror and comedy are not subtle forms but they are revolutionary ones. As Fargeat puts it, “Humor is such a strong weapon. It allows you to be irreverent. It allows you to not follow the rules and to show the absurdity of what rules the world: the violence of domination, the violence of politics.” 

In one killer-funny scene, Elisabeth angrily cooks French cuisine (from a cookbook the executive gave her to keep busy after being fired), while watching Sue (who’s taken over her fitness show) on a talk show discussing her small town origins—when Sue has in fact only recently burst out of Elisabeth’s back. At one point, the scene interweaves images of Sue’s body in the fitness show, a gyrating piece of meat, and Elisabeth shoving her hand into a turkey’s cavity and pulling out its innards—its substance. 

While her younger avatar Sue’s doing talk shows and photo shoots, the older Elisabeth watches TV and binge-eats at home. She’s a symbol of the way we put the elderly out to pasture in general (we get a similarly sad glimpse of another older man who’s using the substance), but women, and celebrity ones in particular, experience a peculiar kind of incremental invisibility, like a slow vanishing act. As Elisabeth initially leafs through this cookbook—full of fancy ways of preparing the parts of the animal we often reject, such as veal brains—we start to see a connection between these animal body pieces and the parts that get culturally discarded in this phasing out of older women.

With The New York Times declaring Miranda July’s All Fours “the first great perimenopause novel,” the need to reinvent the story of what aging women experience is gaining more momentum. Fargeat discusses being in her forties while writing The Substance, and fearing future invisibility. As her film, and her comments about her own aging, imply, women often come to see themselves from the outside-in. The project of becoming liberated, or growing up, involves learning to shift this view, to start seeing from the inside-out—not what do they see when they look at me but, rather, what do I see when I look at the world?  I want to craft something, not be crafted.

So, what if we really rewrote this whole narrative of women aging? Let’s get to work.

I take my lead from a scene in Fleabag. Personally I await the relief and freedom promised to me by a fictional character in this TV show. 

At a bar, after winning a women in business award, Belinda (Kristin Scott Thomas) tells Fleabag (Pheoebe Waller-Bridge):

“I’ve been longing to say this out loud. Women are born with pain built in. It’s our physical destiny—period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives…We have pain on a cycle for years and years and years, and then just when you feel you are making peace with it all, what happens? The menopause comes. The fucking menopause comes and it is the most wonderful fucking thing in the world. Yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get fucking hot and no one cares, but then you’re free. No longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You’re just a person. In business…It is horrendous. But then it’s wonderful. Something to look forward to.”

Fargeat chooses the tools of humor and horror to rewrite this tired old narrative, so that she can, in Mulvey’s terms, “break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.” Of the final explosive section of the film, Fargeat says, “All the things that can be seen as pieces of flesh from the outside gaze — our breasts, our ass, our teeth, our smile — were totally deconstructed, pulverized, and put in no order.” Here’s the actress who plays Elisabeth Sparkle, Demi Moore, on this, “When I was younger, I was obligated to be of service…I wouldn’t be loved if I wasn’t—if I didn’t give of myself. My value was tied into my body.” 

So, The Substance’s fantasy is to do away with this body as we understand it.

It’s uncomfortable, violent, disgusting, but it has to be. In the end of the film, the monstrous amalgam of Elisabeth and Sue escapes and runs down the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It becomes a mound of bodily matter out of which emerges Elisabeth’s disembodied head. Ultimately, she struggles to pull herself, using brain matter alone, back to her Hollywood Star where she can rest, a mind finally freed of the body.