Coralie Fargeat’s latest cinematic satire, The Substance, reintroduces the gothic double to a modern audience, in all its gory and histrionic splendour. The pulsing red of Demi Moore’s lipstick, as she tears it from her face, parallels the bloody battle within human nature of our ‘good’ and our ‘evil’; her character cannot stand the ageing face in the mirror, and longs for the sexuality of her double.
This reminds us, an audience consistently exposed to standards of appearance, attitude and altruism, of the impossibility of living in our own bodies forever, this yearning to be perfect. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, the eponymous main character abuses his double—the portrait—in pursuit of this eternal beauty, and the hedonistic freedom of a never changing form. However, just as Elizabeth in The Substance, as her counterpart Sue steals the fluid of life from her, his double begins to become deformed and damaged as result of his indulgence.
Terror that the clone flourishes under this false life, while its original struggles and is eventually brutalised is ironic; the gothic double is not necessarily two separate entities—but one soul split between two forms. There is a futility in this physical separation, as shown through Robert Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as the same being takes on a split life, a Christian allegory of this aforementioned good and evil in mankind.
The reader cannot see until the novella’s end that Dr. Jerkyll and Mr Hyde are the same being—and then it hits. The realisation that the evil within us cannot be driven out, repressed or hidden, it will remain and sometimes it can overpower and take over—just as Mr Hyde commits his crimes, or Sue attacks Elizabeth, or Dorian Grey plunges a dagger into his portrait.
The gothic double is an omen of death; with myths age-old detailing doppelgangers as foreshadowing of one’s impending demise, and in a modern perspective, we visualise how self-scrutiny leads to our downfall through this doubling.
It is visible in our world of media, where public figures endorse abrasive surgeries and products to remove the ‘ugly’ and ‘imperfect’ parts to meet this gold standard, perhaps this is why the plot of The Substance is so poignant to its audience—it addresses the internalised violence against oneself, especially for the modern woman, and it forces us to witness this brutality surface.
Illustration courtesy of Lydia Kempton