Demi Moore Blasts Beauty Standards While Chasing Them Herself

“The Substance,” a new award-winning film about an over-the-hill celebrity desperate to recapture her youthful appearance and the attention and validation that come with it, immediately caught my attention. Unfortunately, the movie’s whole premise suffers from one fatal and hypocritical flaw in the form of its leading actress, Demi Moore.

“The Substance” is a “body horror film,” a horror subgenre that depicts the grotesque transformation of the human body. Demi Moore plays leading lady Elizabeth Sparkle, a former Hollywood star-turned-fitness guru who is being cast aside by her network for being too old. She accepts a mysterious syringe from a stranger, which she is told will recapture her younger self along with all its fame and adulation. She accepts, and thus “Sue,” her younger alter ego, is born. They are meant to alternate every other week in the world, and the one on her “down week,” i.e. not in the world, lies motionless on the bathroom floor awaiting her turn.

To no one’s surprise, Sparkle prefers being Sue and violates the “rules” of The Substance, spending more and more time as her younger self. The punishment is that she becomes a disgusting, deformed creature who rears its head (literally) on Sue’s big Hollywood night. The hunchbacked, earless, toothless beast has Moore’s face poking out of its side and spews blood onto the audience for about 20 minutes. That is the consequence of chasing youth: You become even more disgusting than if you’d just accepted aging.

The Curious Case Of Demi Button

Demi Moore hasn’t acted much after her stint as the highest-paid actress in Hollywood in the 1990s with films like “Ghost” (1990), “Striptease” (1996) and “G.I. Jane” (1997).  After divorcing Bruce Willis, who is nearly eight years her senior, she married Ashton Kutcher, who is 15 years her junior — which feels like chasing youth in relationship form. Kutcher became a stepdad at age 26 to Moore’s tween daughters. The couple tried to have kids, but Moore miscarried. The relationship ended, and he moved on to same-aged pastures and married Mila Kunis, with whom he went on to have two children.

After the Moore-Kutcher marriage ended, the actress reportedly relapsed into alcoholism before landing in recovery. At that point, it seemed like Moore was content to be a mom to her grown daughters and the friendly and participatory ex-wife of Bruce Willis, who now suffers from frontotemporal dementia, and to make an appearance here and there in a film.

Though Moore faded into the Hollywood background for a while, she seems to have continued obsessing over her appearance. She looks stunning — don’t get me wrong. Whatever work she gets done is high quality and not so overdone that she looks ridiculous. But make no mistake, it’s a lot of work. She looks like she even had hand rejuvenation; no 62-year-old woman’s hands look naturally smooth like hers do. 

So now, as she markets “The Substance” and LARPs in the media as a women’s hero who is abandoning the “male gaze” and unattainable beauty standards, it all seems quite hypocritical. This is a woman chasing beauty standards with all her might.

Lacking ‘Substance’

It’s thus difficult to disentangle the movie from Moore’s person. While she is being celebrated for “teaching Hollywood a lesson” about not valuing women solely for their looks, she is the embodiment of conceding to a system that values women solely for their looks. She hasn’t fought back. She is teaching no lessons. She is actively altering her appearance. Just because she is doing it better than Madonna doesn’t mean she isn’t chasing the same absurd 25-year-old aesthetic. 

But it’s not just Moore’s real-life beauty pursuits that feel hypocritical. Her character spends a chunk of the film naked, and it feels like she is saying Look at how hot I am. You don’t look like this at 42, much less 62! This leaves viewers feeling inferior and Gollum-like by comparison. For Demi Moore, being naked isn’t brave, it’s boastful. Moore is the system while pretending to be both the victim and the solution.

As a 55-year-old woman myself, I think about beauty and aging — but only in a fleeting fashion. Most of us normies aren’t out here fixating on our looks. We’re busy with kids and jobs. Our work isn’t dependent on our looks, and our partners don’t care that we are aging because we’ve built an actual life together. Yet as a woman who was once a teen with an eating disorder, the substance of “The Substance” left me wanting. The film promised to explore how the societal ideals of femininity and beauty can contribute to women hating themselves and feeling worthless, but instead “The Substance” and its lead fueled that feeling.

The movie offered plenty of other reasons to dislike it, such as its inconsistent aesthetic and sheer senselessness. Is Sparkle conscious as Sue? Does Sparkle get to enjoy the spoils of Sue-ness? If not, what’s the point of the whole affair? There’s also the fact that Sparkle seems to have no friends, no children, and no family — and perhaps that’s the main reason she isn’t grounded in anything real. The movie doesn’t explore that as a reason for her superficiality though.

All told, the film and Moore’s presence in it feel out of touch. Plenty of other female movie stars have resisted Hollywood’s insistence on staying forever young. These women are not Moore or Nicole Kidman or J.Lo. They are Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, and Olivia Colman. Colman is 51 — a full 11 years younger than Moore — and looks her age. And she’s won an Oscar, two Emmys, and three Golden Globes. Colman is proof that women aging in Hollywood can still have careers. Unfortunately, Moore doesn’t have her talent. 

A much more interesting film would have been about an aging former starlet who realizes the folly of chasing youth but does it anyway. There would be internal conflict in presenting an image of confident aging while secretly chasing youth in surgical form. 

Demi Moore would have been a perfect fit for that film.

Jennifer Sey is a National Gymnastics Champion, author of “Levi’s Unbuttoned: The Woke Mob Took My Job But Gave Me My Voice,” and founder and CEO of XX-XY Athletics.