elisasue is brat
the substance, charli xcx, and the long tail of pc music in the the year of slopcore
My goal with this newsletter is to semi-regularly write about new films as they reach general release. Around this time of year, I might jump back to awards contenders that I haven’t gotten around to writing about on their release date. I am sort of implying that I have been doing this for a long time in this little blurb to convince you that I am an experienced film critic who just jumped over to Substack; is it working? Anyway, sorry if you saw this movie in November and already forgot about it.
The Substance is a film about feminine beauty standards that is so on the nose that at one point a boob literally falls out of someone's nose. I don't necessarily mean this as a criticism - sometimes the point of a metaphor is to be as blatant as possible. A monster amalgamation of two famously beautiful women spewing buckets of blood and body parts over a live-TV audience presents about as clear a moral as the end of Little Red Riding Hood.
People really like The Substance, so my assumption is that Coralie Fargeat must be doing something interesting with her audience's familiarity with the obvious. There a lot of ways to play with obviousness, which I suppose Fargeat would call “cliché”: there’s camp (celebration of the cliché), there’s irony (subversion of the cliché), there’s deconstruction (recontextualizing and transformation of the cliché). It would be uncharitable to assume that an artist has just fallen into a run-of-the-mill cliché, that they’re doing something that’s been done a million times before because they’re just doing it.
What sort of fun is Fargeat having with cliché in The Substance? She opens with a time-lapse of a gradually degrading Walk of Fame star, tosses out some feminist-cinema-101 exposition, and then plows through a series of dark-side-of-Hollywood scenes that we've seen 100 times before: the mysterious envelope, the secret alley-warehouse, the gross executive, the taunting billboard. Even the body horror components, from the reverse-chestburster to the Playdoh-smush monster, feel routine. It’s so re-cooked that when the Also Sprach Zarathustra needle drops - a joke so obvious that it shows up everywhere from Blink-182 concerts to Pampers commercials - I didn’t wince. It all comes together to create a portrait of Los Angeles composed of references with no grounding: Hollywood as two-hour-long commercial break, every 30 seconds contextualized only by their adjacency to the 30 seconds immediately preceding and proceeding.
The commercial break comparison becomes particularly apt when, about halfway through, the movie turns into something indistinguishable from a commercial. Margaret Qualley, presumably thirsty, cracks open a Diet Coke. The sun hits the can, and the camera laps up every glistening drop of moisture framing the logo. I might be projecting, but I’m pretty sure you hear the crack of the tab, the surge of the soda, and a satiated sigh. To call this product placement is an understatement: it’s basically the equivalent to a Charmin ad popping up in the middle of a movie streaming on Tubi. It evokes mid-2010s hip hop videos that blantantly hawked Beats by Dre and EOS lip balm, where the language of advertisements fit so comfortably into the language of music videos that the entire clip was transformed into a commercial. The same thing happens in The Substance: a decontextualized world composed of fast cuts, bright colors, and generic props, suddenly rendered into the backdrop for Coca-Cola.
My assumption is that Fargeat is doing something cheeky here, that she's deliberately leaning into the sponsored-content-music-video aesthetic of the 2010s. It’s hard to say though, because her whole movie is composed of audiovisual context-less-ness, equal parts modern-ish and squeaky-clean retro. Jane Fonda exercise routines, twerking, landlines, iPhones, the chunky sneakers, the white skirts, the mod decor, the subway tiles - every visual reference temporally muddled but somehow grounded in a shared reality that existed in an Obama-era internet that was both frozen in time and definitionally up-to-date.
Watching this mid-2010s aesthetic mishmash brings me back to the last time I felt excited about something happening in popular culture, the rise of the UK scene centered around the label PC Music. PC Music rolled out image-focused singles overproduced to the point of being deliberately painful, ranging from icy-clean baby pop (Hannah Diamond) to hyper-aggro EDM (GFOTY, the late, great Sophie). Behind the scenes were artists who may or may not have been the same as their video avatars, pitch-modulated beyond the point of organic humanity and exploring at-the-time bold experiments with gender. Depending how you felt going into it, it was either unsettling in a David Lynch sort of way or exhilarating as a transhuman escape. It occupied the same uncanny that an Italian-American from Boca Raton with a fake ponytail singing Swedish labratory music might occupy, but it burrowed deeper into the valley, mining out the latent horrors and pleasures of the contemporary pop experience.
PC Music was both ahead of its times and almost immediately dated by the world it anticipated, an internet dominated by a genre we now know as slop. The digital world is now inundated with audiovisual experiences so deep into the uncanny mines that they aren't even interesting. It’s strange to realize that something ubiquitous to the point of being uninteresting was, 10 years ago, the subject of an avant-garde art project. And that part of what that avant-garde art was saying - that technology has reached a point of transcending our ability to differentiate our humanity - is now so obvious that it seems silly that we needed an art movement to say it.
Is it PC Music’s world, and we’re just living in it? The breakthrough of long-time PC Music collaborator Charli XCX last summer struck me as bizarre, a) because Charli and her producers have been doing this same basic thing for 10 years now, and b) because everything in pop music, from Hannah Diamond to the slop bots to a whole slew of pop stars who I won’t name out of fear of their fan armies but who were all nominated for Album of the Year this winter, sound the same. The ability for AI to create music that sounds exactly like PC Music, and then for commercial artists to imitate what the AI is doing, sort of eliminates the need for avant-garde artists to keep doing it.1
The Substance isn’t a music video, but it nevertheless seems to have spawned directly from the aesthetics of PC Music. The fashion, the colors, the bass-glitch soundtrack, even the title cards - and then you toss in the body horror that shines through in the gnarlier ends of PC Music2 and you have a 2024 movie that is playing with the language of a 2014 audiovisual art movement as if its subsequent slopification never happened. The Substance is Brat in cinematic form, but without any of Charli XCX’s self-awareness or acknowledgement of her PC Music forebears. Coralie Fargeat lets herself get lumped in with artists like Cronenberg, Lynch, and John Carpenter; in reality, her film looks a lot less like the work of 1980s art-creeps and a lot more like the fake movie trailers that have taken over my Youtube homepage.
I'm not interested in whether or not Fargeat leaned into all of this or if she and Charli XCX just happened to rise up in the same slop bubble. But it's fascinating to me that, in the same year that AI might have destroyed the internet, two of our most celebrated works are evidence of the long life of the art movement that predicted the apocalypse. Both are completely absorbing as pop products; both are rich enough in context-free referentiality that they offer up tons of a fun with armchair post-structuralism; both are obvious enough that someone who hasn't been following the past 50 years of feminism might think they were saying something fresh and interesting. And both are products of a world, predicted by PC Music, that requires a new category of cliché manipulation to our original list of three: camp, irony, deconstruction, and slop.
If Charli XCX reads as a self-aware goodbye to a culture where real ideas still existed, The Substance feels like an embrace of slopworld so complete that the difference between naïvety and cynicism is moot. Maybe that's the point of the movie, but it's the same point that my Youtube algorithm makes every time it tosses me another fake trailer for a Star Wars remake featuring a naked Princess Leia with huge boobs. Ten years ago, this was the next frontier of art. Now that frontier is plowed and we're watching recreations of it in the common spaces of the new-build apartment that were built on top of it, glancing up every once in awhile past the vestigial pool table and out onto the empty streets, wondering where everyone went.
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The same thing happened to Lana Del Rey, who started out doing something masterfully post-structuralist and ended up creating a genre so ubiquitous that her music is indistinguishable from the ideas she was deconstructing. The difference is that Lana's imitators were real-live organic sad girls; in 2025, they're robots.
I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but watch the video for Sophie's "Faceshopping" and tell me that Fargeat didn't base her entire movie on the first 30 seconds, down to the Coca-Cola branding. Or at least tell me there isn't an obvious visual similarity, both of which are symptomatic of the same slop stew that reached its apotheosis with the phrase "kamala is brat."
wow this is good