For anybody who hasn’t seen The Substance, Quaid’s character is a slimy TV producer who is constantly portrayed as a vile, misogynistic, gross pig in the most in-your-face way possible. You’re supposed to loathe that guy and that point is driven home so hard that i would call his character painfully one-dimensional, but unfortunately, his total absence of an interior life that goes beyond hustlegrind and horny is part of why he’s such a realistic portrayal of that kind of man. And in the scene shown here, this visceral repulsion is extended to the entirity of the media industry by showing that the entire board of directors is just a bunch of braindead, gerontocratic awooga ghouls.
major spoilers
BTW, after that scene the main character, who is destroyed by a radical anti-aging treatment that literally tears her in two like a replicating amoeba, mutates into a decaying, monstrous pile of flesh in a desperate attempt to save her career as a beauty icon. Think end of Akira, but with growing tits out of your eye sockets. This is clearly shown as the fault of Quaid’s character and the pressure he exerts on the protagonist.
This tweet is “the fascists in Starship Troopers look so badass” lows of media literacy.
I hate animal abuse in movies, but the “Kick the dog” trope really seems necessary in media for Western audiences to explicitly show you should not like this person
Yeah that sounds like an interesting movie but also probably one that would make me physically ill.
ngl i thought about quitting it halfway through. It already hits hard if you have ever struggled in any way with misogyny, and for me as a woman in her mid 40s, it was downright crushing at times. It brings aging and towering beauty standards across in ways that are painful at times. It’s very well-executed, though, especially if you like Kubrick-style cinematography, and it has some interesting ideas about the relationship between the body and our sense of self.
