The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) as Postmodernist Backstudio Gothic Woman’s Film; or, the Powers and Doubts of Recycling
The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) as Postmodernist Backstudio Gothic Woman’s Film; or, the Powers and Doubts of Recycling

Summary/Abstract: The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) proposes a merger of the movie-about-making-movies and body horror. While the director and film critics sought to describe the film as “satirical feminist arthouse body horror” that tackles timely and important social issues,” other scholars highlighted that it poses problems for feminist film theory. This article posits that The Substance is as ambiguous when it comes to its aesthetics as to its politics, and that it poses similar problems to theories of postmodernism and artistic creation. The allegory of the film-as-monster or monster-as-film evokes anxieties regarding the possible “end of cinema” in the age of postmodernism, transmedia and the digital. My contention is not only that these ambivalences are just as central to the film as its feminist politics but also that the film’s “feminism” may, perhaps, lie more in its exploration of such ambivalences and in our own acceptance of the work itself as an expression and a manifestation of a female filmmaker’s doubts regarding her own poetics of recycling.

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