The following contains spoilers for the films The Substance, The Last Showgirl, and Maria.
In the 1990s, Demi Moore became the kind of movie star whose off-screen activities made more headlines than her acting did: She formed one half of a celebrity power couple with the actor Bruce Willis, posed nude while pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair, and prompted a bidding war between the producers of Striptease and G.I. Jane, resulting in her being crowned the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. Her fame, when contrasted with some of her forgettable films—The Butcher’s Wife, The Scarlet Letter—turned her into an easy punch line. As the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane sneered at the start of his review of the latter: “What is the point of Demi Moore?”
Look at Moore now. Since the writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last May, Moore, who stars in the movie, has solidified her position as a serious awards contender for the first time in her career. The actor plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging celebrity who takes the titular elixir to produce a younger version of herself. What follows is an excessive and unsubtle display of body horror: After Elisabeth’s nubile clone, Sue (Margaret Qualley), bursts out of her spine, she quickly becomes a starlet who antagonizes Elisabeth. Moore is tremendous, imbuing Elisabeth with a haunting vulnerability as she injects herself again and again with a body- and soul-destroying concoction. On Sunday, the 62-year-old won a Golden Globe—her first—for her performance; she delivered the night’s best acceptance speech, eloquently reflecting on how her career has evolved. “Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a ‘popcorn actress’ … that I could do movies that were successful, that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged [for them]—and I bought in,” she said, choking up. “That corroded me over time to the point where I thought a few years ago that maybe this was it, maybe I was complete, maybe I’ve done what I was supposed to do.” Now Moore is experiencing the classic comeback narrative: the Hollywood veteran reminding audiences that they’ve underrated her talent all along.
She’s one of several actors doing so this awards season, and with roles that explore how rapidly the entertainment industry can turn women into has-beens. In the Gia Coppola–directed The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson, 57, plays Shelly, a Las Vegas dancer left to confront her feeling of expendability when the revue she’s been in for decades is set to close. Throughout the intimate film, Shelly insists on her value, echoing Anderson’s own trajectory as someone whose work was never taken seriously. Meanwhile, Pablo Larraín’s gorgeously rendered biopic Maria stars the 49-year-old Angelina Jolie as the opera singer Maria Callas in her final days, struggling to repair her voice and maintain her composure. Jolie, like Callas, has endured an especially tricky relationship with the A-list; she’s been a tabloid mainstay in spite of her artistic ventures.
[Read: What is it about Pamela Anderson?]
Elisabeth, Shelly, Maria—all are women who can’t resist the spotlight despite its cruelty. The films about them interrogate the true price of their fame, exploring how their chosen field turns youth into an addiction. Films such as All About Eve, Death Becomes Her, and Sunset Boulevard have long proved the endurance of these themes. The Substance, The Last Showgirl, and Maria go further, however, exemplifying how this lifelong pursuit of beauty is also an act of constant self-deception. Fear, not vanity, animates each woman; losing their celebrity means losing their sense of worth. “It’s not about what’s being done to us,” Moore said of The Substance in an interview. “It’s what we do to ourselves.”
The actors who portray these characters have all coincidentally, and conversely, returned to the spotlight by embracing their age. Each has achieved a so-called career renaissance as a result. But such appreciation can be a double-edged sword: Anointing older female performers as “comebacks” concedes to, and maybe even reinforces, the rigid expectations Hollywood has placed on them. Of these three films, The Substance most clearly establishes that tension as something more than just tragic. The effort to retain an ingénue-like appeal, Fargeat’s fable posits, is both irresistible and preposterous.
The Substance almost immediately pushes the idea that the endless quest for beauty produces its own kind of overpowering high: After she emerges from Elisabeth’s back, Sue—housing Elisabeth’s consciousness—begins to examine her body in the mirror. She relishes her appearance, gazing at her face and running her hands over her smooth features; Elisabeth, meanwhile, clings to life, sprawled on the floor with her hair fanned out and her spine split open. Sue then auditions for the television executive who had just fired her older self. Never mind that the network callously discarded Elisabeth once she turned 50: Given the opportunity to be gorgeous and “perfect” once more, Sue heads straight for the gig that she knows cares about little beyond her looks.
Then again, this is the only life Sue knows. Her identity is rooted in Elisabeth’s experiences; Elisabeth believes that her value is her supposed flawlessness—a punishing worldview that neither she nor Sue can escape. The film’s most penetrating terror, then, is rooted not in the way Fargeat makes every mutilation squelchily gross, but in how Elisabeth and Sue sabotage themselves as a result of their insecurities. The pair are supposed to switch consciousnesses every seven days for the drug to work, but when Sue spends more time awake than she should, Elisabeth ages. The sight of her wrinkled skin repels her, and she responds with searing self-hatred, chastising herself by binge-eating. One especially chilling sequence doesn’t involve body horror at all: It just shows Elisabeth readying herself for a date, only to give up as soon as she catches the smallest glimpse of her reflection in a door handle.
The women in The Last Showgirl and Maria similarly cannot move past their fixation on the fame they enjoyed when they were younger. Shelly, the Las Vegas dancer, reaches out to her estranged daughter, only for the relationship to fall apart as Shelly insists on the importance of the revue. Jolie’s ailing Maria finds comfort in a dangerous sedative called Mandrax, which causes hallucinations of a journalist pressing her to discuss her legacy. The more these women attempt to figure out who they are beyond their profession, the more they fall back into old habits.
All three films also suggest that their protagonists find their twisted actions thrilling. Maria hides her pills from her household staff with the glee of a child stashing her Halloween candy. Shelly, unlike Elisabeth, makes it to a date with the revue’s stage manager, Eddie (Dave Bautista). She glams herself up in a slinky silver dress and a full face of makeup; as she sits down, she compliments Eddie, and then pauses. “Do I look nice?” she prompts him, grinning widely when he responds affirmatively. And when Elisabeth goes to pick up more boxes of the substance, she acts as if she’s carrying out a pulse-pounding robbery, darting into alleyways and glancing suspiciously at passersby. Keeping up appearances, in other words, delivers an adrenaline rush that justifies the never-ending chase for perfection and acclaim. “Being an artist is solitary, but if you’re passionate about it,” Shelly insists, “it’s worth it.”
[Read: Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with Angelina Jolie]
Still, as much as these characters may perpetuate their own pain, the movies aren’t seeking to condemn their choices. Instead, they scrutinize the consequences of a lifetime spent facing society’s insurmountable and fickle pressures. These women don’t seem to consider those who have wronged them to be their antagonists: Eddie is a sympathetic character despite having to close Shelly’s revue, Maria’s critics rarely faze her, and Sue continues to chase the approval of the network executive who fired Elisabeth. Rather, the women’s age and perceived attractiveness pose ever-present threats to their livelihood. The Substance captures this best; the camera leers at Sue and Elisabeth both, closing in on their hyper-sexualized bodies. The costumes are replete with garish hues. The production design transforms Los Angeles into a phantasmagoric nightmare from which Elisabeth cannot be roused—as herself or as Sue. Her only solution is to allow her burdens to consume her. Turning external pressures into brutal obsessions is a metamorphosis as visceral as that of a younger self bursting forth from your back.
In its high-concept outrageousness, The Substance lands on a catharsis that’s missing from The Last Showgirl and Maria. The two latter films end with a mournful—and frustratingly hollow—air of resignation: Shelly is seen performing in one of her last shows after enduring a humiliating audition for a new program, and Maria dies at home after a final hallucination, of an orchestra accompanying her while she sings an aria. The Substance’s conclusion is anything but elegiac, however. Sue, after killing Elisabeth during a violent showdown, takes the substance herself, even though the drug is supposed to work only on its original subject. Out of her spine emerges a creature with too many appendages, body parts in the wrong places, and Elisabeth’s face protruding from her back. Yet she—dubbed “Monstro Elisasue”—does what Sue did when she was “born.” She admires herself in the mirror. She primps and preens. As she gets dressed, she even pokes an earring into a strip of flesh.
Yet as soon as Monstro Elisasue steps onstage, she repulses her audience. They gawk, and then they scream, and then, drenched in the blood that starts spewing from her body, they run. It’s an utterly ludicrous ending—and a liberating one. Only Elisabeth’s face remains as Monstro Elisasue stumbles out onto the streets of Los Angeles and melts into a bloody mess. She leaves with the last laugh, cackling as she pauses over her star on the Walk of Fame. And Moore, in those frames, is transcendent, her expression ecstatic and maniacal and unhinged. What is the point of Demi Moore? Perhaps it’s to reveal how sophomoric such questions were in the first place.
