Episode 177 - The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) (with Deborah Jermyn)
The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
The belated Fantasy/Animation Halloween special arrives with this examination of The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024), a gruesome body horror that functions as a pointed commentary on femininity, aging, and the cultural currency of women as disposable images of gender. Chris and Alex are joined in this episode by Dr Deborah Jermyn, who is Associate Professor in Film and Culture at the University of Roehampton. Deborah’s key research and teaching interests lie in the fields of women, feminism, culture, contemporary media industries, gender and aging, US cinema and genres (particularly the work of women practitioners), and celebrity across a breadth of media and creative industry contexts. Deborah’s recent work on “the menopausal turn” examines the social and cultural implications of the burgeoning attention to menopause across UK and global media. Listen as the trio discuss the film’s reflections on the revulsion of aging and the casting of Demi Moore as central to its depiction of an aging star; gerontophobia and the abject as it is found in spectacular images of decay; the politics of youthfulness, eating disorders, and exercise addiction; Coralie Fargeat’s resistance to anti-de-aging technologies via the presence of Margaret Qualley, and what the practical effects work provides the film’s ageist narrative; and how The Substance uses horror to negotiate bodies that are ‘aged out’ of the entertainment industry.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**
Suggested Readings
Bell-Metereau, Rebecca, and Colleen Glenn, eds. 2015. Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press.
Blaikie, Andrew. 1999. Aging and Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dolan, Josephine. 2013. “Smoothing the wrinkles; Hollywood, “successful aging” and the new visibility of older female stars,” in Cynthia Carter, Linda Steiner and Linda McLaughlin, eds. The Routledge Companion to Media & Gender, 342-351. New York and London: Routledge.
Jermyn, Deborah, ed. 2014. Female Celebrity and Ageing: Back in the Spotlight. London and New York: Routledge.
Jermyn, Deborah, and Su Holmes, 2015. Women, Celebrity and Cultures of Ageing: Freeze Frame. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sontag, Susan. 1997. “The Double Standard of Aging,” in The Other Within: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging, ed. Marilyn Pearsall (Boulder: Westview).