Gabrielle #25 – New Flesh

Our quest for immortality is killing our sex lives.

The Substance (2024)

The body is material, as far as I’m concerned. The body is there to be destroyed and remade at will. Mould it, mutilate it, monetise it, inject it, bury it, burn it. What difference does it make? The body is sacred and obscene, beautiful and disgusting, a site of high power and deep humiliation. An unruly actor we are paired with at birth and forced to weather its constant changes until it reaches an expiry date, which it often determines by itself and keeps secret. It is no surprise, then, that we fear the body above all things.

I watched The Substance a while back. Fantastic sensory experience. I saw it in the cinema and highly recommend doing the same, because an audience elevates it into a social experiment. It’s ostensibly the physical carnage that divides responses, but that carnage has psychological roots, so people are also responding to the way the film confronts our anxieties around ageing. And it does that in a very crazed, head-on way that is both recognisable and horrifying. The effect in a group setting, then, is like turning one fun house mirror on another. Some delight in it, others can barely stand to watch. Personally, I thought it was hilarious.

A body horror about a fading celebrity who takes a black market drug that temporarily creates a younger, “better” version of herself, The Substance follows in the tradition of genre films that fall into the category of Women’s Bodies And The Things That Happen To Them. I’m thinking of Carrie, Rosemary’s Baby, Ginger Snaps, Jennifer’s Body, Titane – all of which riff on things like menstruation, puberty, sexuality, and childbirth. Monstrous, transformative experiences. Most of them unelected.

The Substance sets itself up as a cool social satire about the exploitation of women’s bodies, the shifting goalposts of physical perfection, and the resulting quest for eternal youth. (In short, it’s about Hollywood; David Cronenberg’s Showgirls). It begins at the end of Elisabeth’s (Demi Moore) relevance and says the quiet parts about the vacuous nature of celebrity out loud. A diminished star on the Walk Of Fame, lurid 2000s music video aesthetics, the sort of ambient, evil-but-wipe-clean dread that neoliberalism inspires (the substance itself comes in millennial start-up packaging with instructions in thick block capitals on flash cards, like Beyoncé’s self-titled album campaign). 

It feels like it’s going to play out as a straightforward cautionary tale with a moral backbone and bit of gore thrown in, but about halfway through The Substance reveals itself to be an outrageous film masquerading as a serious one. Unravelling in a hot flash of menopausal hysteria, it takes our fears around age and status and exaggerates them to deranged proportions. It has something to say, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. That much is clear by the time we see Demi Moore looking like Golum on the wrong side of a six day bender, tearing into a rotisserie chicken with grotesque witch hands in front of the shopping channel. 

I liked The Substance partly because it’s visceral in ways that many recent films have claimed to be in their marketing, only to chicken out in the edit. Surprisingly, The Substance goes further than advertised. Pushes past its promise and comes full circle, skewering our obsession with youth by depicting a body at war with itself, and then zooming out to skewer Hollywood by using some of the industry’s most iconic scenes to criticise the damage it has done to people. The way it handles the latter is deliberately funny. It’s too mental, too stupid, not to be. The way it handles the characters, though, is sobering. 

When Sue (the “other self”) beats Elisabeth (the “matrix”) to a bloody pulp, it's not because the two are opposing entities at war with one another. They’re the same person (“You. Are. One,” as the instruction kit insists) with the same fantasies of mass adoration and eternal beauty. Sue beats Elisabeth to death because that’s how Elisabeth feels about ageing, about ambition, and ultimately about herself. That’s where the film throws its hardest punch before letting you off the hook with its Akira-at-the-Golden-Globes style ending. The message is clear, because the source of satire is clear. Our fear of death is killing us.

The Substance arrives in the midst of the most youth-obsessed, reality-denying era in living memory. Tweakments and Turkey teeth; Ozempic and Tren; “post-pregnancy rejuvenation” surgery packages and that tech billionaire who is using his son as a blood bag. I’m not against any of these things per se (except the blood man, who is obscene), but I find their dissonance interesting. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that things like biohacking and BBLs are on the rise as sexual activity is declining, for instance. Alongside the broader technological and economic factors playing into the reasons why people are fucking less, these phenomenons perpetuate one another. Not to brag but my job often brings me into contact with celebrities and they can, in person, be quite strange looking. Sort of thick, waxy skin on them. Bodies hard and smooth, like El Capitan has been laminated. Faces beat to look good in a beam of artificial, not natural, light. I notice it now, because I remember not noticing it before. You see it among normal people too, of course, but it’s particularly pronounced in actors, pop stars, and the 1% of influencers. The more preoccupied we are with how we appear on a screen, the more uncanny we appear in real life. A modern day Dorian Grey scenario, legitimately visible for those with eyes to see.

In the cultural mind, beauty (as it relates to the cosmetics industry) and sex appeal are inextricably linked. Not the case. They communicate similar messages, but they're entirely different languages. Beauty relates to social attitudes, style trends, standards that are designed to be fleeting. Sex appeal is disruptive, psychological, primordial. Most importantly, sex is ugly. Sex is sweat and spit, skin pushed around and fat grabbed in handfuls, undignified facial expressions and involuntary noises. It’s distinctly not poised, not self conscious. Obviously beauty and sex appeal can overlap, we’ve all seen Rihanna, but one doesn’t equal the other. Beauty (again, in a cosmetic sense) is deliberate and precise. Sex appeal is inherent. It’s manners and movement. You can’t pin it to a particular physical attribute or way of doing your hair.

The more artificial something feels, the less sensual it feels. The uncanny is a neutering force in that way. Though, ironically the emergence of rapid-cycle micro-trends – fox eyes, pearl skin, glass hair, whatever the fuck – might be bringing that to an end. I saw an article recently claiming that “natural imperfections” are going to be the next “status symbol.” If there’s a sign that Western beauty standards have reached their nadir, that’s probably it. The body has run out of fads. Which is why we are looking, now, towards technology.

Kim Kardashian's photoshoot with Elon Musk's Tesla Bot.

The driving force behind all this is the fear of death. The beauty industry has always exploited the distress of ageing, especially in women, but there’s now a parallel industry, whose spokespeople are mostly men, dedicated to the avoidance of death altogether. Biohacking is, for all intents and purposes, a collection of natural non-invasive techniques to reverse or prevent visible ageing. Some of them are (largely) innocuous. Mushroom tea, cold water therapy, intermittent fasting, etc. But a huge chunk of the industry is in bed with big tech, which is where things get interesting.

Let’s start with the blood man. Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson is famous for his very expensive dedication to turning back time on his body. Last year he syphoned blood from his 17-year-old son, a literal Mad Max plot manifest. He eats precisely 1,950 calories a day. He takes 104 pills. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t go out at night, always sleeps alone (as part of his ‘longevity’ practise), blew up his face injecting “a donor’s” body fat in an attempt to reverse how gaunt he became by not eating properly, and founded a neurotech company intended to develop brain implants that would link human thoughts to computers (with apparently little bearing in medical reality… his business plan was described by one scientist as “metaphysical”). Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are making similar forays into neuroscience, which is considered to be the new frontier of philanthropy. (Supposedly to help “solve” health problems ranging from paralysis and blindness to depression and addiction, though I won’t comment further. If I give my full thoughts on why the CEOs of the biggest social media platforms happen to be interested in “brain data,” I will be put on some kind of list.)

“One of my friends has a theory that the rest of the country tolerates Silicon Valley because people there just don’t have that much sex,” Peter Thiel, arguably this generation’s most culturally influential billionaire, once said. “They’re not having that much fun.” He’s probably right. The tech hub is famously sexless, and that probably has everything to do with its role as a tech hub and the breed of utopian workaholics it produces, rather than anything widespread (normal people in the Bay Area, I imagine, are fucking). It’s funny that he should be the one to make that point though, because incidentally there is no one in North America more terrified of death than Peter Thiel. The story begins in 1970 – 

At the age of three, little Peter Thiel was sitting on a cowhide rug in the family home and became curious as to where it came from. His dad, who is German, explained the concept of death in a very German manner. Something to the effect of: all animals die, all people die, and one day you will die as well. Under ordinary circumstances this could have led to a life of fruitful meditation practice or animal rights activism, but instead it has become his Joker origin story. He’s been at war with death ever since. In a 2009 essay on libertarianism, he wrote that he stood against "the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual." On Bloomberg TV in 2014, he explained that he was taking human-growth hormone pills as part of his plan to live 120 years. Alongside Jeff Bezos and the guys who founded Google, he is pouring millions into immortality research. He has asked to be cryogenically preserved when he dies so he can be revived in the future, just in case the technology happens to be available.

It’s fascinating, really. Instead of enjoying a delicious meal and having full, fat, olive oil sex, these men are subsisting on pills and doing electroshock therapy on their dicks. They could be making memories with their children and partners, but they’re working over 100 hours a week to ‘optimise’ existence. Instead of parting with the insane amount of money they each have acquired to make life better across the board right now, they’re hell bent on extending it in the future for a handful of people who have replaced pleasure with an algorithm that decides what to have for breakfast. Nobody on earth lives less than these men, and yet they want to go on forever.

Both big tech and the beauty industry exist in opposition to death. Together, they pose a united front to eradicate it entirely, from both a biological and cosmetic standpoint. That, more than any political force or fleeting opinions a 17-year-old might have about seeing full frontal on Euphoria, is what defines our current culture of erotic decline. Sex and death are two sides of the same coin. You cannot have one without the other. To deny death is to deny sex. That bleeds over into art and culture, which is partly why contemporary films are so rarely erotic. When they are, there is a familiar, nostalgic, almost classic feeling about them, harkening back to the dominance of erotic thrillers and body horrors of the 80s and 90s. The Substance is a body horror about the immortality fetish bestowed on us by modern tech and beauty, but erotic body horrors do the opposite by fetishising death itself.

Crash (1996)

Crash, the novel, is rooted in death. J.G. Ballard wrote it after his wife Helen died suddenly of pneumonia, leaving him to raise their three children alone. It’s a book concerned with many other things – sex, celebrity, and technology among them – but death is its main preoccupation. I don’t mean to ascribe intent where none has been stated, but it strikes me that Vaughan, the leader of a group of car crash victims-turned-fetishists who stage and participate in recreations of celebrity accidents, has devised a ‘formula’ for the death of Elizabeth Taylor (who he dreams of dying in a head-on collision with). Through Vaughan, Ballard portrays death as something that can be orchestrated, performed, and ultimately perverted by artifice. Death not just as inevitability, but as aspiration.

Crash is also about obsessively pursuing something until it kills you – an erotic impulse at heart, but the result is the erasure of pleasure altogether. The eroticism comes from the fact that their pursuit is both lethal and, largely, futile. You see a similar dynamic in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, when Max (James Woods) hunts down a snuff channel that may not even exist, and Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool, when James (Alexander Skarsgard) is forced to watch the execution of his clone for a hit and run that he committed (and enjoys it, leading him to become a libertine killer himself). Fetishism, dehumanisation, and death. One and the same.

Videodrome (1983)

The characters in Crash predate the tech billionaire phenomenon by decades. Individuals deprived of interiority and agency, stimulated only by the combination of man and machine. Blood, semen, engine coolant. Their eyes are dead, their voices monotone, their sex often abandoned before orgasm. They are, both in the context of the book and Silicon Valley, as hollow and mass produced as the things they make. What’s worse about the billionaires however is that their wealth sets them apart from humanity to start with, so sexual pleasure doesn't factor into things all. They're a step beyond Ballard’s isolated, automated predictions of the future. If death drive is an erotic impulse, then the quest for immortality is a post-erotic one.

When writing Crash, Ballard was inspired by the slow creep of technological advancement and the displacement of desire onto other, usually material, things (cars, for instance). "Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man's life in today's society,” he wrote. “As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way. Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape."

Published in 1973, Crash is a product of the sudden widespread availability of images of war, tragedy, and pornography ushered in the decade prior. “Vaughan’s behaviour – filming the mutilated or dying accident victims, resisting those who try and pull him away, even fighting with the ambulance staff – is a manifestation of that death of affect which Ballard had noted during the 1960s,” Mike Holliday writes in this brilliant essay on the ideas behind Crash. “Images of war and disaster – Biafra, Vietnam, the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination – were failing to elicit the expected human responses of pity or horror, which had been replaced by the fascination of the spectator.”

We are, now, drowning in such images. Open Twitter to see an OnlyFans girl face down arse up beneath a photo of a beheaded Mexican mayor on a verified news channel. Every day a fresh tidal wave of footage showing children’s bodies broken or buried in Gaza, murdered by Israel. Oh, look,. Sephora has a 25% sale on Anastasia Beverley Hills. Someone tried to assassinate a presidential candidate, twice: a meme within moments and out of the news after a week. Ariana Grande just looks like that now, I guess.

Against this backdrop it’s no shocker that destruction, technology, and porn have become so muddled. The spectator is no longer fascinated. The tech billionaire has become the pornographer. Pornography has become a day job, on par with retail. Desire is politicised, politics is desire.

Naturally, the people most obsessed with cheating death are those who enjoy living the least. Perhaps Peter Thiel and the blood bag man and the Hollywood figures who disappear for months on end and reappear with a new face lead lives of great satisfaction, what do I know, but I find it hard to believe that someone predisposed to hoarding wealth and status feels a deep and complete joy in being alive. More often, you find that characteristic in someone who has almost nothing. It’s easy, when you have nothing, to feel pleasure. A gritty espresso and a cigarette on a mild autumn afternoon. Lovely. As soon as you breach a certain income threshold, it seems, you have to start eating charcoal and filling display cabinets with thousands of bottles of baby oil. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who spend their life trying to warp the world to their own ends, and those who delight in the face of a world designed to break them.

Sex, for me, is the ultimate form of rebellion in that sense. That’s why I will always guard it from being considered a cosmetically-influenced or aesthetically-driven experience, because it’s more than that. Good sex, at least, does not rely on physical attributes. You have to be drawn to someone to want to drill them down in the first place, of course, but once you’re past that the body is merely a spokesperson. The public-facing surface for an invisible energy. The best sex isn't just physical. It's an act of brutality and spirituality, because what you want lies behind the surface. Sex is body horror. Sex is rebirth. Sex is prayer. It is the process of grasping, impossibly, beyond the material and towards something else.

You want my advice? Choose sex. Choose life. Die.