Umm… There’s been a slight misuse of the Substance (Parthiv Chhabria)

Since its release, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) has evaded explicit taxonomy—seemingly a hagsploitation horror, a sci-fi thriller, and a surreal comedy, at once (that is, if you ask the Hollywood Foreign Press, who distinguished the film under their unspecific Comedy/Musical categorisation). The latter designation has drawn much criticism, particularly from those who subscribe to Aristotelian definitions of comedy, as outlined in his Poetics, which depicts human folly in a manner that inspires laughter without evoking pain, ultimately descending in a pacifying resolution that restores morality—a definition that The Substance, with its glory and gore and existential dread, decidedly subverts.

However, Bakhtin argues that this limited understanding of the comic arts is a consequence of the rising bourgeoisie, and alas, the loss of a subaltern folk culture. He remembers that, “At the early stage of percales and prepolitical social order, the serious and comic aspect of the world, and of the deity, were equally sacred, equally official.” Although, it appears that through the proselytising structures of the Church and the feudal hierarchy, the uninhibited humour of the carnival has become hostage to its perception as low-art. The Substance, nevertheless, challenges this assumption—premiered at the prestigious Cannes film festival, this French art-film transposes the grotesque and the glossy aesthetics of low-art, to the most bourgeois film-industry circuits.

Trigger warning: Graphic Violence. 

If you’re done reeling from that video-clip, you can see traces of Hegel’s definition of the grotesque in The Substance. He lists, “the fusion of different natural spheres, immeasurable and exaggerated dimensions, and the multiplication of different members and organs of the human body”—which, although misguided in its Orientalist reference to “archaic Indian forms”, accurately describes the material bodily principle of the grotesque. The Substance‘s achievement is bringing this sensory experience to life, and reawakening the mass hysteria of the carnival.

In this scene, the audience of Elizabeth Sparkle’s performance is a parody in microcosm—meta-cinematically alluding to our own codified traditions of spectatorship. “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it.”, Bakhtin argues. This proclamation is manifested in the formless horde and the shower of crimson-red blood that they are engulfed by, demonstrating the democratising quality of the medieval pageant. He argues that the corporeal self is “presented not as a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people.” Even Monstro Elisasue appears to be one of us, although regurgitated through the upside-down and inside-out world of the carnival.