Of Course Bill Maher Didn’t Understand ‘The Substance’
As infuriating as Bill Maher is as a comedian, talk show host and belligerent drunken YouTuber, he’s somehow even more annoying when he attempts to discuss films.
As we’ve mentioned before, Maher’s baffling cinematic taste has previously prompted him to shit all over Martin Scorsese’s iconic Raging Bull, and heap praise on Jerry Seinfeld’s not-so-iconic Bee Movie. Now the star of Pizza Man is weighing in on one of the most talked-about movies of last year: Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance.
On the most recent episode of Dana Carvey and David Spade’s Fly on the Wall podcast, the hosts and guest Maher discussed the Golden Globes, specifically, Demi Moore’s win for her work as Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance. This led Maher to offer up his reaction to the film. “I couldn’t handle it. I was literally watching it through my fingers,” Maher said of the movie’s body horror elements. “They just take it to a degree that, for me, it was too much. But I get the idea.”
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If you haven’t seen it, The Substance is about a celebrity fitness guru who gets fired once she hits the age of 50, and turns to a mysterious drug that allows her to spawn a youthful alternate self through a brand new back cavity. The two halves of Elizabeth live life in alternating weeks, and it doesn’t exactly go super-well.
To prove that he understood the movie that he didn’t care for, Maher dismissively explained, “You know, it was making a comment about how we judge older people by their looks and that's not right!”
He then added, “To me, that's all ass-backwards, because if you were really mature, what you would understand is that life is a series of trade-offs. When you’re young, you’re stupid and beautiful, and then you get older and you get smarter and worse-looking and mature. People throughout the ages in all cultures have just accepted that. Not us. We have to be sexy.”
Wait, who the fuck is “we”?
Everyone is allowed to interpret art in their own way, but The Substance is clearly not a treatise on America’s attitudes toward aging in general, it’s very specifically and unsubtly about how women are treated by men.
A big component of that is the societal pressure on women to maintain a youthful appearance, and the destructive insecurity it causes, but the film is clearly making a far bigger point about institutional misogyny.
And again, it isn’t exactly subtle about showing us this. For one thing, at the beginning of the movie, Elisabeth is fired by a grotesque man played by Dennis Quaid, who’s nearly a decade older than Moore. And Elisabeth’s youthful genetic offspring, Sue (played by Margaret Qualley), is treated differently than Elisabeth, but she’s also very pointedly still subjected to a different kind of leering dehumanization from every manipulative man she encounters. As Fargeat said in an interview with Vogue, The Substance is “fundamentally about the violence of control.”
Maher claiming that the movie is just about good old fashioned ageism isn’t just a reductive misreading, it’s extremely self-serving, because it allows him to view himself as one of the story’s victims. Ten years ago, a 58-year-old Maher called ageism “the last acceptable prejudice in America,” in a Real Time segment that eventually descended into a rant about how young people today are too obsessed with large asses.
In reality, Maher is probably more like Quaid’s character than he would like to admit. Maher made headlines for comments he made about his dating life on the same episode of Fly on the Wall. Like 20 minutes after claiming that he totally got The Substance, Maher suggested that he and Spade should star in a version of The Golden Bachelor “but like our real lives, not with an age-appropriate woman, because that’s boring.”
It’s unclear whether or not he was eating a plateful of shrimp at the time.
