Episode Details

Physical beauty must be the most bitter of gifts because it carries the seed of its own destruction, and its absence mortifies more than any. We all more or less know how the young and handsome Dorian Gray had problems to deal with this, and whoever does not should stop listening this literary podcast right now, shake off the mental sloth, and dust off the master of paradoxes, the great Oscar Wilde, who remains still undefeated a century later, so unparalleled and unique was his genius.

Some French film director has lifted a big fuss with a movie that shamelessly pinched that character from Wilde–they call plagiarism now to be inspired by–changed the gender in order to cater to a feminine audience and moved Dorian Gray from Victorian London to the show business in LA.

Coralie Fargeat, the director and writer of this satirical film, had the audacity to convince one of the most iconic movie stars of the 90s, Demi Moore, to take on the lead role. This meant portraying her as an old, broken toy of cable TV, but not in a way we’ve ever seen before. No, this was a fresh take on Demi Moore, one that showed her naked, humiliated, and degraded in front of the last of the nepotistic babies, Margaret Qualley, the daughter of curly Andie MacDowell—remember Sex, Lies, and Videotape?

I forced myself to watch twice this true horrorshow, this cinematic nightmare, and the only thing I missed were those eyelid clamps that a young Malcom McDowell was forced to wear in A Clockwork Orange. Because the first act is just brilliant and highly recommended.

Instead the lavish beginning of Dorian Gray, we see a conceptual episode: a raw egg in a cold pan. And a hand with a syringe with a magical substance in fluorescent yellow that it infuses in the egg yolk. Then, after a second, the yolk duplicates with a blob sound.

Demi Moore plays a TV aerobics instructor who's fired when she turns 50. Desperate to stay in the spotlight, she avails herself in the black market drug, a substance–uh-huh–that births from her body a younger, entirely separate version of herself very squelchily. But there's a catch. She has to switch back and forth between her two bodies every seven days or things are going to get weirder and somehow even squelchier.

I’m not a fan of spoilers. While Oscar Wilde presented in The Picture of Dorian Gray one paradox after another to make us ponder, this completely bonzo, bloody, campy, and unapologetically feminist body horror film loses all its originality of the first scene to follow the rules of this old genre with a fresh coat of paint, where men are depicted under a prism that is almost ludicrous. I wonder how many women must have seen me as well just like that. As my wife, with an American Mid-Western accent, would say: “He’s a dog!”

Instead of the utterly sugarcoated Hallmark romance movies, I think The Substance would be a perfect tool for couple therapy and also for understanding each other’s needs, anxieties, and moods. I mean it. Sometimes, a wake-up call is necessary and highly valued. Perhaps eyelids clamps will be handy in the case where an individual rejects to acknowledge that youth and beauty are the only things worth having, so vain we are. And how much self-loathing we have. Demi Moore’s character in the film has a moment that is quieter and truly effective. She is asked out on a date and spends a considerable amount of time getting ready for it. There’s a lot of standing in front of the mirror, examining her skin and noticing how it no longer looks supple, observing the wrinkles, and then looking at her entire body. I admire how that very quiet and somewhat introspective moment in the film effectively conveys that point.

Humans have always been drawn to beauty. Of course, beauty standards change all the time. What one culture considers beautiful, another might consider ugly. What our own culture considered beautiful 200 years ago, or ev