our substances, our selves
In The Substance, Severance, and the just-released film Mickey 17, protagonists choose to separate one self into two. I hear popular media reflects the anxieties of the times: the lurching zombies of exploding consumerism, the robotic women of networked relationships, and now the splitting self of continued voluntary isolation.
The decision to split is, like suicide, a desire to escape one’s life as-is. Mark (Adam Scott) undergoes the titular “severance” process to be free of the pain of grief; Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) consumes the titular Substance to regain the career capital provided by her beauty and youth; titular Mickey (Robert Pattinson) takes a split-adjacent job to flee a murderous loan shark. Splitting is a way to inhabit a different world by inhabiting a different self.
Splitting implies a fixity of identity: you can be this self, or this other self. Once split, reintegration is impossible or doomed. In each narrative, the selves develop an antagonistic relationship, despite being reminded incessantly that they are one (The Substance), encouraged to share a life (Mickey 17) or soothingly told of the other’s positive qualities (Severance). The warring selves see the other as an enemy, an interloper. There can only be one true self. This town ain’t big enough for the two of us. The split is a “version” of oneself that is beyond comprehension. It suggests that we each have an internal quality that if excised and reified could lead to our complete annihilation.
This anxiety seems to me to be a logical progression from the “influencer” era of self-as-brand. When your selfhood is your livelihood, your well-being is contingent on your social palatability. Even after pandemic restrictions were lifted, loneliness and self-imposed isolation has continued, as noted by Derek Thompson in the Atlantic. Our relationships are more likely to be mediated by technology, or nonexistent, and so our relationships with our selves become deeper—or more alienated. Modes of being used to be driven by external communities. There was the self you were at work, school, church, teams, the self you were with your partner, your friends, alone. Now, “versions” of yourself are internal shifts of attitude mediated by online structures. And so the self becomes a series of fixed selves with little external contextualization, a stack of selves shuffled like cards, instead of a vast and fluid self that is eager to change and change often.
Before splitting depicted a terrifying self beyond our comprehension, we had werewolves. In Victor Pelevin’s sexy little 2004 satire The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, the narrator, an immortal fox spirit named A Hu-Li, explains the difference between her method of transformation and a male werewolf’s. “Since the existence of things consists in their perceptibility,” she says, “any transformation can occur by two routes - either through the perception of transformation or the transformation of perception.”
The fox uses illusions: she changes how others perceive her, while remaining the same herself, controlling her reality from within it. The werewolf perceives his own transformation, and his belief in his self-perception makes it real to others. In both circumstances, there’s agency. The monster decides how it is revealed, and how it alters the world in which it walks. The split, by contrast, happens to the person. Once the choice to split is made, the process is out of their control. It is a fixed material reality. The chip is in Mark’s brain. Mickey’s limp body is spit out of the printer. Elisabeth’s back rips open so her younger self can step out. And there’s the other you, the same as you, except a little different, doing things you can’t believe you’d do.
Of the three, The Substance, written by a woman and about women, is the closest to a werewolf narrative. It’s bloody, for one, and the split includes a body coming from a body, and eventually, a body transformed. Elisabeth’s doomed reintegration of selves is dubbed “Il Mostro,” but the self-hating selves are the ones who behave monstrously, goring each other in a beautiful apartment.
We want to split because we want to remove the part of our selves responsible for our lives being unbearable. Our lives suck because there’s something wrong with us. And so the split is an attempt to excise and flatten. But the split selves can’t exist in harmony, so the story always ends with death or doomed reintegration. The desire for reintegration shows a desire to still be the unpalatable self, and to be known as both that self and more than that self simultaneously, which is contingent on knowing, not perception: reciprocal connection instead of judgmental surveillance.
At the end of The Substance, the doomed reintegration Mostro Elisasue fastens a mask to her face and stands on stage in front of her audience. She wants to transform the audience’s perception, but the audience only perceives her horrible transformation. She wants to be accepted and loved. Sometimes nothing feels more monstrous than that.