February 28, 2025
by Titus Techera
There are at least two ways that women can dominate the Academy Awards, which are being bestowed this weekend for the 97th time. Titanic (1997) represents one possibility. It was a pastiche of grand melodrama by a macho, technology-obsessed writer-producer-director James Cameron that nevertheless appealed to young women across America and across the world. Titanic quickly became the highest-grossing movie ever made and then won eleven Oscars. It gave the world a new star, Leonardo Di Caprio, and took from those of us who were boys amazed by Terminator any opportunity to see something cool again from Cameron’s hands.
This year’s Oscars provide another example. There are no truly popular movies likely to win awards, nor any real stars left. There’s only one movie aimed at young men nominated, Dune. And everyone seems sure it’s a loser. Women and women’s tastes, on the other hand, dominate the nominations in all the major categories.
At one end of the range, we have a musical about a cartel gangster seeking castration to become transgender. Emilia Perez was an Oscar favorite until it turned out that the actor (or actress) who played the title character is a Hitler fan. Hitler embarrasses Oscar voters more than trans-activism excites them, so Emilia Perez is unlikely to win.
At the other end, there’s a romantic comedy about a lady of negotiable affection who sweeps a Russian gangster’s son off his feet. Anora was also much praised. Yet almost nobody watches these movies. So let’s move on to the one movie that affirms that the future is female with some real artistry and commercial success—The Substance, a horror-comedy starring Demi Moore
Unlike the other two contenders, The Substance is written and directed by a woman, Coralie Fargeat. Fargeat is French and makes feminist movies distinguished by their violence and interest in genre conventions. She won the Best Screenplay award in Cannes this year and competed for the Palme d’Or (won, humorously enough, by Sean Baker, for Anora, from a jury led by Greta Gerwig). Now there’s a chance for a reversal: Fargeat is nominated for the three major awards, Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Director, while Demi Moore is nominated for Best Actress, the first time her acting has been considered.
The Substance is a satire on Hollywood’s favorite genre, the Hollywood story. This kind of film can be lovely, like Singing in the Rain (1952), or worthless pastiche, like The Artist (2011). Either way, it’s likely to win lots of awards.
In this case, the joke is that The Substance is an example of the problem it satirizes. Demi Moore, who’s about to enter her Social Security years, plays an aging bombshell who fell into TV work and is now getting fired for being old. Her career was all about sex appeal, and that’s long gone. Moore, of course, was the famously well-paid star of Striptease (1996). She is herself a case of the dilemma that her character embodies in the story.
The cleverness of The Substance, however, lies elsewhere. To begin with, it seems a familiar complaint that it’s a man’s world and men only want one thing, money. You know—capitalism, the favored strawman of wealthy Hollywood leftists. They say sex sells. But for stereotyped businessmen like Moore’s producer, played by Dennis Quaid, the selling is more important than the sex.
Yet the movie pulls a fast one on its liberal intended audience. Women dominate the Oscars and they dominate Hollywood and the rest of the culture industry. In Hollywood or New York publishing houses, no one would in that world dares utter a word against the power of women, who are most of the customers as well as an increasing number of the bosses. Men are outdated, irrelevant. So they can’t be effective villains.
Instead, the natural predator of the somewhat deluded, somewhat hopeful middle-aged woman is the young woman. Before the world was democratic, it was insulting to ask a woman’s age. Today this discretion is wiped out. Democracy promises that you can have whatever you want—so we suffer from the tyranny of youth.
Everyone wants to live forever, but in the case of women in "the industry", this turns out to be not a theological proposition about an immortal soul, but a demand for plastic surgery. In The Substance, instead of the voice of God, there's a disembodied voice that speaks with the authority of science, dispensing the medical technology that creates the new immortal woman. This is a recreation of modern woman comparable somehow with the work of Ibsen.
Once Moore makes her deal with the devil, so to speak, she must face herself—or rather, she must face what she was a generation back when she was making her own career. She actually gets what she wants. Of course, it turns out to not be good for her. Moore’s rejuvenated self (played by Margaret Qualley) preys on her and steals her life, for reasons that seem paltry: to enjoy herself and to make seductive images. After all, the fittest female is the leader of a potentially worldwide army of millions of aspiring other influencers. The Substance seems to be about patriarchy, but it’s really about the power of women over other women.
This far, The Substance is funnier and smarter than most movies these days, especially compared with its Oscar competitors. But then there’s the “body horror”, a kind of high-brow grossout cinema pioneered by the director David Cronenberg. The conquest of nature through medicine turns out to create monsters. You might think old age is ugly, but there may be worse things out there.
There are many other things to consider—is not the older women’s fear of younger women a horror of what they have done in creating a liberated society, i.e. one without men to protect them? On the other hand, is it not natural for the generations to succeed each other—is there not cruelty as well as self-cruelty in the older women’s refusal to be replaced?
Fargeaut is no reactionary. Perhaps she’s the harbinger of a new wave of feminism that can’t simply blame men for women’s oppression. When woman has no other enemy but herself, she must double, as old and young, to try to articulate her suffering, incompleteness, her attempt to be everything—complete—invulnerable. She must take over the modern scientific experiment in life prolongation, control of reproduction, all aspects of life. This enterprise is doomed, so the new woman of power must suffer the horror that, for example, the weird fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft had reserved for men. They’re taking that from us, too!
Titus Techera is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation and hosts the ACF podcasts. He tweets as @titusfilm.