The Substance, The Beast and Severance are part of a recent trend of works that question the merits of removing undesirable elements of the self for corporate gain, writes Meg Walters.
Art often has an uncanny ability to tap into the cultural anxieties that define the age. Right now, it’s no great surprise that one of those anxieties centres around the ever growing unknowability of technology’s power – namely, its potential to warp our very humanity into something entirely unrecognisable. This fear has led to a slew of recent works that share a common and rather specific conceit: what if the next step in technology is a procedure that splits us up into pieces?
It is this theory that sits at the heart of Coralie Fargeat’s second feature, The Substance, a body-horror epic about a black-market ‘substance’ that splits the user into two halves – while the original body stays as it was, a second young and perfect body is formed. Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, an ageing and soon-to-be redundant actress-turned-jazzercise instructor who uses the substance in an attempt to cling to her rapidly disintegrating career. In a sickeningly gory sequence, Elizabeth’s spine cracks open and out comes Sue (Margaret Qualley), her young, smooth, poreless counterpart. Sue prances off to take up her maker’s mantle, filming her own jazzercise show and swanning around town enjoying many admiring glances.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s life is bleak and empty, her only sense of fulfilment coming from the knowledge that Sue, who is technically an extension of herself, is continuing her legacy. As the mysterious ‘Substance’ company branding continually reminds her, they are ‘one’. Of course, tensions soon arise between the two halves of Elizabeth, leading to an unsurprisingly bloody climax. At its core, the film poses an interesting question: if you could split yourself up and cut away the bits of yourself you don’t much like, would you? And what would drive you to it?
The Substance (2024)
Other works have also delved into this thought experiment, confronting us with characters who decide to split themselves up. Like Total Recall (1990) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) before them, The Beast (2023) and Severance (2022–) both deal with procedures that split away unpleasant things not within the body, but rather within the mind.
The Beast, Bertrand Bonello’s decades-spanning sci-fi romance, set the scene in a not-so-distant future in which humans are offered a procedure to sever themselves from their past lives and, by extension, their deep-seated traumas. The procedure, it is thought, will make them more stoic and less emotional, thus more productive and less volatile at work. Léa Seydoux’s Gabrielle undergoes the procedure and two of her past lives flash before her eyes. For some reason though, it doesn’t work on her. But Louis (George MacKay), her sometimes soulmate, sometimes tormentor in each lifetime, also undergoes the procedure. He does forget his past lives, and by the end, Gabrielle is horror-struck to realise he is missing the part of him that made him who he was – he remains only a shell of the man she knew and loved.
The Beast (2023)
Then there is Apple TV+’s Severance, the smash-hit series that was released in 2022 and returns for its second season in January. The show features an imagined procedure that splits the mind based on location, allowing workers at Lumon to forget their time at work when they are at home, and forget their time at home when they are at work. Effectively, they are split into two different people in the same body – the ‘innies’ who live only at the office, and the ‘outies’ who exist only outside of it.
All three works are tapping into the same fear: the boundaries of technology’s capabilities are constantly being pushed further and further, and, simultaneously, humans are being pushed more and more aggressively towards integrating this technology into our lives. As tech grows, our own human flaws seem to have become more and more distasteful.
Severance (2022–)
What if a quick injection could ‘fix’ you and make you better? In The Substance, it’s a procedure that promises to break away the part of you that is ageing and unmarketable. In The Beast, it’s one that breaks away your past and, with it, your trauma. And in Severance, it’s one that breaks you away from the tedium of a 9 to 5.
Interestingly, each is ultimately career-driven, offering the user a way to self-optimise so they are more productive and more hireable. Our current attitude to work is, of course, productivity-obsessed. Although the mania around hustle culture may be out of fashion, it still has its claws in all of us. We are constantly bombarded with tips and tricks to self-optimise; to eke out more and more working hours from the day; to produce more and more profits. It’s inevitable that the next natural step will be the introduction of technology that makes us more like the AI bots that threaten to outperform us at our own work.
The Substance (2024)
In each case, the procedure in question initially seems to offer a purer version of the true self. After all, we like to imagine that the true self hides beneath the wrinkles and the painful memories and the boring hours spent behind a desk. Without those pieces of ourselves, wouldn’t we be more ourselves than ever? These works, which are, interestingly, all thrillers or horrors, think not. The moral of each story is that without these flaws, we would in fact lose key elements of what makes us, us. Sure, we would be more marketable or more productive – but at what cost? As this recent trend in film and TV warns us, the prospect of a race of humans without their humanity is a chilling one.
WATCH THE SUBSTANCE IN CINEMAS
