Filmmaker and writer Lucas Murphy returns to discuss Coralie Fargeaut's very French body-horror flic depicting Demi Moore's LA starlet facing devolution and mutation.

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Decadence and degradation at the movies; Youth and sexiness; polymorphic affect in The Substance; parodying the male gaze; how the body changes the self; foreign projections of LA and Cyberpunk 2077; Fargeaut's detached French affect; obsolescence, ageism, and sexism; how does the struggle to preserve one's legacy besmirch it? does the substance look down on the body image issues it depicts? reading JK-Rowling-esque fear of transitioning; DJ Sprinkles' critical analyses of glamour; what does Margaret Qualley's character want? Is there pleasure in this movie? Why is The Substance both so pointed and so dubious to pin down?

Sometimes it feels like something went wrong and that’s why we’re here, that we’re in some kind of cosmic cage or simulated psy-op. We become in the face of simulations and psy-ops, and from wrongness spring. Syncretism is for the honorable and dishonorable alike. In thought and in body, no one, not two, in sky and seed sewn, we dream up shadows to love through and hold their calloused hands, shaping change in the nether pool from breath to breath and coming up again and again seeking vistas of freedom.

Learn from the labyrinths in breathing mountains. How do you look and where are you looking? Note when you’re stuck, put sugar on your tradition pills, and record before breaking. How’s that feel to rot with glee--to decay me?