What do The Substance, Nosferatu, and Babygirl have in common? They externalize the characters' inner feelings - self-loathing, guilt, shame - in the most grotesque ways possible.Ahead of the Academy Awards, Brittany Luse sits down with IBAM producer Alexis Williams and Pop Culture Happy Hour co-host Aisha Harris, to get into how these trending films bring women's internal monsters to life.Support public media and receive ad-free listening & bonus content. Join NPR+ today.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What does 'The Substance' reveal about women's inner monsters?
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Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. You know the phrase, you don't want to yuck someone's yum? If you start with Orlok at a yuck, by the end, you're like, I see what Ellen is getting into with this.
Speak for yourself, but okay.
Yeah. It is the last week of Oscar season. And instead of talking about the glitz and the glamour, I want to get nasty, but not in the way you may be thinking.
My producer, Alexis, noticed that some of our favorite films from the past year have been portraits of women battling with what disgusts them most, themselves, their insecurities, their desires, their yearning, and how those feelings manifest in a society that's often hostile to women. Think about it.
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Chapter 2: How does the film portray body horror and self-loathing?
The substance, Nosferatu, even Baby Girl, all feature women dealing with some type of self-loathing made real. Whether that's through a literal monster or an affair with a younger coworker. But I wanted to dig deeper. So I called up Pop Culture Happy Hours' Aisha Harris to help. Hi.
Aisha, Alexis, and I are getting into how women's desire, repression, and disgust have made the monsters that appear on screen all too real. And for those who haven't seen these films, there are some light spoilers ahead. But don't worry, we won't ruin the whole movie. First up, The Substance. The Substance
This Oscar-nominated film stars Demi Moore as Elizabeth, a fading celebrity who, on her 50th birthday, is fired from her job as a TV aerobics instructor. Then she's told about this substance, a drug that can make her young, hot, and most importantly, lovable again. She takes it and... Sue appears, played by Margaret Qualley. Sue is successful, beautiful, and gets Elizabeth's old job back.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of the character Elizabeth in 'The Substance'?
But the thing about the substance is you have to respect the balance. And Elizabeth can only live as Sue for seven days. Then Elizabeth must return to her old self. And that starts a vicious, very gory cycle that snowballs into one of the most gruesome body horror experiences that I've ever seen.
Aisha, when you think about this film in terms of women's relationship to the grotesque, or even women's bodies' relationships to the grotesque, what catches your attention?
I mean... This idea of body horror and the grotesque and making the internal external is definitely not something that's new in any way. You know, obviously there's been things like Rosemary's baby, Carrie, the fly, Jennifer's body. Like we've seen this happen before. But I think what makes this really interesting is that it is about an internal character study of what.
Men and misogyny and all the terrible external things do to a person on the inside. And it's about the effects of how that takes hold within yourself. It feels like such a apt time for this to come out, not just, you know, in an era where we are constantly fighting over what we can do with our bodies, but also just how Instagram and social media really encourages people.
young women and young people generally to want to look a certain type of way, to think that in order to have value, you have to look like a Kardashian or you have to look 20 years younger than you actually are. This movie takes all of that and then puts it into the most disgusting, gross package you could possibly imagine. I've seen a lot of horror movies. I can do gruesome.
This tested my limits in so many ways.
But Alexis, I'd love to hear from you on this.
So with The Substance, there's like one scene that really stands out to me in the film, and it has absolutely no dialogue. But I think a lot of people can resonate with it. It's actually in the trailer. So she's preparing to go on this date.
So listen, I was thinking that... Maybe we could get together and grab a drink.
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Chapter 4: How does 'Nosferatu' depict the relationship to the grotesque?
If you start with Orlok at a yuck, by the end, you're like, I see what Ellen is getting into with this.
Speak for yourself, but okay.
Listen, you begin to see why she may not turn away.
It's a tale as old as time. Whenever you're reading or watching something that was born out of a repressive time, Dracula, the Stoker version, the book came out of the Victorian era. So like whenever you're reading those things, it's often focusing on how women are being ignored or their needs and desires are being ignored.
So it's a little feminist in a way, or at least it's like treading in those waters.
I do think the reason why some people may have slightly turned toward Orlok by the end is because throughout the film, you know, Alan was really trying to connect with people and be like, hey, do y'all ever just feel very sad? And they're just like, no. No, girl.
So, you know, when you have no other person to confide in or at the very least feel seen by, it's not surprising that you end up finding unexpected or even grotesque places for comfort. As awful and murderous and terrible as he is, she cannot deny that indulging in him. It's a yearning that she can't seem to shake because she does feel so alone.
Coming up, a film that's a bit more grounded in this world than the underworld, but just as fun.
I guess the most grotesque this movie gets is like stuff that suggests dogs and milk. But again, if you're into that, there's no shame here. All that and more when we get back.
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Chapter 5: What themes are present in the Gothic horror of 'Nosferatu'?
Chapter 6: How does societal pressure influence women's self-image in these films?
And that's how she forms this psychic connection to Count Orlok, who is this evil vampire who also is like, I don't know, it feels like seven feet tall, bald, looks like a rotting corpse.
Well, also, Eggers apparently said that Skarsgård actually had like live maggots on him. Oh, no. Yeah. No. No.
And so Orlok wants Ellen all to himself, and he basically possesses her with these psychosexual seizures and fits. This is all happening until Ellen meets the guy who becomes her husband named Thomas. So Orlok... is obviously jealous when this happens and wreaks havoc upon their community. He's basically a plague unto himself, just taking everybody out.
And Ellen basically has to figure out how she can leverage her connection to Orlok in order to save her town. So Alexis, I'd love to hear from you on this. What about this film and the way it gets into Ellen's relationship to the grotesque jumped out for you?
So Nosferatu lives within the Gothic horror canon. And according to the New York Public Library, Gothic horror has these heavy discussions of morality, philosophy, religion, things of that nature. And the villains in these stories are often metaphors for some type of temptation the hero has to overcome.
The other interesting facet of this is like... There's also a plague happening. There's rats everywhere. So that's connected to Orlok. It's like his aura, his presence brings that in.
Right. Orlok sort of embodies the other, more specifically something like otherworldly or foreign. And this is important because Ellen is someone who is very sensitive to that and sympathetic to this idea of the other because she does have like these, you know,
interesting weird psychic abilities but that also alienates her from her community from her friends her family and her husband and the interesting tension in the movie is that as awful as Orlok is and terrible as he treats her she does admit that for a time she enjoyed the relationship she and Orlok had because he fulfilled some inexplicable desire in her that was hard to square with like polite society and
The other facet of this is like she is married. She has a husband. He's clearly not satisfying her in the way that she would like to be satisfied. He is not Orlok. And so that's the truth.
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