Alright so I didn’t exactly want to establish a pattern of writing about movies when my thing is kinda video games but I have a series of vaguely contrarian takes that I think will transition into a broader entertainment/culture discussion anyways. (This is definitely cope.)
Last weekend I finally got around to watching the Substance. My lukewarm reaction can be summarized thusly:
I think maybe I didn’t like the Substance, it’s female-coded Limitless but all the tension is tied to the main characters pointlessly self-sabotaging
Like I get it’s all heavy handed metaphors that I don’t really relate to but again I tend not to find misery compelling
I would have liked a version of this story where the characters problem solve their situation and again I know that was not the point but
I went in knowing there was a “crazy” last act turn but I was definitely expecting something way wilder I guess
I want to harp just a moment on my disappointment with the ending; I was expecting something more like Society, a different (1989!) film that’s also primarily thinly veiled, heavy-handed social commentary and that also takes a pretty wild abject body horror turn in the final act.
Come to think of it, my most common general complaint for many things that get critically acclaimed seems to take some form of Simpsons-did-it but like, it doesn’t bother me that a work recycles ideas (or rather, chooses to explore old ideas in new ways) so much as critics’ apparent ignorance of (or unwillingness to engage with) any complex idea or similar concept that has already existed in the cultural milieu for, in some cases, decades1.
This is my chief beef2 with something like Soma3, on one hand I guess it’s great that the game introduced people to the idea of subjective consciousness and things like the teletransportation paradox but it’s neither the first formulation of the concept (as the Wikipedia link indicates, the question was first asked as far back as 1775) and the game fumbles it pretty badly especially in its ending4.
Light spoilers for the Substance past here.
It frustrates me that it seems a lot of people think that characters being miserable and wallowing in their misery is good entertainment. This frustration is not specifically with conclusions that are not happy endings, rather for the general sort of dramatic presentation that requires the characters to be irredeemably miserable.
Similarly, I’m frustrated with scripts whose sequence of events rely heavily on nobody bothering to communicate with each other at all. The Substance falls into this particular trapping. The movie doesn’t make it clear what knowledge is innately shared between Elisabeth and Sue, but the characters don’t actually appear to communicate at all. Again, I very much appreciate that the women-in-Hollywood metaphor breaks down when you suggest a more interesting version of the premise that would engage with the characters working together, but the metaphor has already broken down in the last act as presented imo.
I compare the Substance to Limitless, which follows a similar central premise and even has some of the same odd writing pitfalls5, but whose plot instead follows more of a problem-solvey arc: hey this thing is great, but shit it has some really awful drawbacks and also crap we’ve accidentally got ourselves into some awkward situations, okay well how do we work around all this?
It’s to the point that I wonder if the real intended social commentary was on how self-sabotaging the Hollywood sisterhood is versus the surface level commentary on how ruthless and uncaring the studio system is6. Elisabeth viciously despises Sue for “stealing” her “youth” [work and/or attention] and yet every time she’s offered a solution to the problem she chickens out [needs people to be comparing her to the younger generation to stay relevant]. Sue resents Elisabeth for having it easy [capitalizing on the fruits of a successful career] and abuses the cycle, which okay young people are stupid and irresponsible [not much to add here], but she voluntarily ignores that her own long term survival depends on Elisabeth’s [women’s roles broadly and/or long term career prospects for older women] continued well-being7.
The 7-day requirement is already the perfect fulcrum for interesting drama in the form of “how do we make this work?” in the same way that Limitless’ “this drug will make you a supergenius but will destroy you if you ever keep or stop taking it” is an interesting terminal conflict. Like it’s going to be the kind of thing that makes holding steady work extremely difficult so even in the best case scenario you’re going to have to find something sustainable where you can leverage one half’s connections and experience and the other half’s young-girl social capital.
Circling back to misery in media. Again, my first instinct is to wonder if this is something people actually like, or is it bad writing like the characters-not-communicating problem? Or am I just being an invert-edgy contrarian here? I can think of lots of examples of this that people seem to really like, here are some that come to mind:
Grave of the Fireflies: I watched this in my early college obsessed-with-anime days but even back then it utterly frustrated me with how Seita seems to do nothing to deliberately affect his own or his sister’s survival and then the movie expects us to be devastated when tragedy predictably befalls them because of it.
Breaking Bad: Specifically, the final season (I quite liked everything up to here), it seemed to be mostly preoccupied with ruthlessly torturing all of the main characters in a deeply unsatisfying way.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners: To quote myself, I enjoyed the first half pre-timeskip especially as a companion piece to the game but everything after was disappointing inasmuch as “the characters didn’t learn anything and died hopeless” isn’t compelling or satisfying to me. There are minor problems here related to how it’s trying to echo how Cyberpunk 2077 chooses it’s theming around going out in a blaze of glory versus living the quiet life. The game, too, kind of wallows in misery a little bit in that V is grappling with a terminal diagnosis but it’s also more bold in asking the question “okay you’re fucked but what are you gonna do about it?” I feel like the latter chapters of CP2077 are sort of overwrought and forced in this regard but it’s also way more satisfying even in the endings with kind-of-miserable outcomes anyways. Where Edgerunners fails here is that the blaze of glory doesn’t seem to have been a meaningful choice; David is inescapably doomed to cyberpsychosis (disappointingly subverting the interesting early idea that he may be uniquely immune or resistant to it) and is meaninglessly forced into a suicide mission that kills most of his friends.
Caveat, I can think of examples that do this but that I like, can I come up with good reasons for why this might be:
Pathologic8: I’ve mentioned this before but the Pathologic games are experiences where frustration and misery and definitely part of the intended experience, and one of the few examples in games where this is executed well. Depending on where you stop to interpret an ending as being the final point of the story, some of these are miserable in a conventional sense and some of them are miserable in an unambiguously meta sense. Pathologic is a case where I like this conceptually. I, uh, haven’t actually played any of them fully to completion9, but these are games that are beloved because of how it captures a unique milieu. My guess here is that the misery is cathartic in some ways because its survival is endured and earned, in the same way people tend to believe suffering can give meaning10.
Texhnolyze11: Texhnolyze is the lesser-known follow up from the folks that made Serial Experiments Lain. Without revealing too much, it ends in abject misery but it’s also…I mean, like Lain it’s ends up being very weird. You’re left with a lot to think over, and perhaps it’s that the misery is literally nihilistic with a sense of finality—you’re not dwelling on suffering so much as witnessing a dying world, misery is almost coincidental to the situation.
So I’ve stumbled across one final theory in the course of writing my way through this: suffering as a path to meaning. Do I think this holds up as justification for writing miserable characters? I suspect that might be part of the intention, but it doesn’t seem to quite explain why much of it is indulgent and mean-spirited. The Substance and the last season of Breaking Bad both strike me as somewhat self-spiteful, brutality purely for the shock value. Edgerunners seems like it simply can’t imagine a different outcome, it has to be that way because, uh, just because okay. Grave of the Fireflies seems to prefer its nihilism, the world sucks and then you die don’t even try to struggle.
None of those are stories where the suffering has a payoff, although perhaps this is what works about Pathologic, Texhnolyze, and Cyberpunk 2077.
I suppose somewhat confident and satisfied with the conclusion arrived at here: misery in media tends to fail when it tends towards self-indulgence and tends to succeed when it’s tied to a more concrete payoff. Importantly, that payoff doesn’t have to be a positive spin, but there needs to have been a sense of agency—that something has been fought for and lost, not merely having been inflicted on the protagonist.
I think the final corollary here is that stories of feeling hopeless and not in control as a conceptual exploration need to be unsatisfying, but it also probably ought to be a clear intention12. I can accept that this is maybe what the Substance et al. are reaching for and failing to grasp in a way that fits for me.
I can’t fairly make this criticism without recognizing that I, too, am almost certainly falling for this trap time and again. I try to temper it by remaining vigilant that what I think may be novel as a discovery via some piece of media has likely been explored before, and I relish in discovering this so that I can broaden by range of experience versus POGGERS THIS MOVIE IS GENIUS end thought.
Heh.
Her and Ex Machina are some of my favorite examples of this too; as someone who grew up reading lots of Heinlein it’s vaguely bewildering to me that those are the first exposures many have to the idea of social relationships with the artificial.
The game spends much of its runtime hitting the player-via-the-protagonist over the head with concepts related to the copying of consciousness and yet up until the last moments the protagonist has learned nothing, despite multiple very-impactful examples of the phenomenon including multiple other characters grappling with this in their personal logs and a very on-the-nose scene where the protagonist has to deal with an instantiation of his own past consciousness directly. This fits in with the rest of this post wrt more thoughtful writing providing more satisfying conclusions, in that it would have been more satisfying to me if the protagonist just straightforwardly understood the implications of what he was doing, as he learns what’s happening same as we do, and has to grapple with choosing to make the sacrifice at the end anyways, with tacit acknowledgement of the bitter pill in knowing that living on in some other form means that his present form has to die horrifically.
My opinion on the teletransportation paradox is here.
An insane sci-fi drug that causes basically miraculous changes that somehow nobody outside of the main character and the people that introduce them to it know about and that they’re also somehow (one of) the first to use at scale successfully? Details on this level of granularity aren’t important, certainly, and part of the fantasy here is that such a thing isn’t widespread, but otoh it would be interesting storytelling (to me anyways) to dwell on a world where it was.
“I’d like to introduce you to our shareholders!” and it’s a bunch of stuffy old white guys strikes me as too dumbly on the nose for a film that’s otherwise fairly clever.
I feel it’s bordering on uncharitable to think too far into the voice on the phone and the person who introduces her to the substance both being male. Probably worth pointing out at least here that the Substance’s writer-and-director is a woman.
The HD remaster of the original and it’s remake/sequel. Part 3 has also been announced.
I got maybe a fifth of the way through Pathologic 2 and that was plenty enough to have kind of a unique experience.
Hm, now I’m wondering if I’ve struck oil here.
Would be a crime if I didn’t also link its banger opening.
Again, Pathologic is our shining example here.
One thing that annoyed me in this movie was the absence of communication between the characters. There is a lot of movies/books where the main character has to face some interaction with alternative version of self, and obviously as a big science (and not-so-science) fiction reader I've read a lot of those and I've tried to fit myself into those stories and figure out ways to game the interaction to best results. Hells, I (just in case) have a pre-prepared combination of thoughts that are known only to me (in case of having to prove to myself that I am me from the future), a thought-out game-theory based plan how I would interact with a parallel me, what would I be willing to sacrifice for my alt and what is not negotiable. And I have considered whether it's wise to fuck the female version of myself if it ever appears in my life. And having all of those thoughts I feel somewhat disappointed each time another "interact with alt version of yourself" movie appears and the characters don't attempt even the most obvious models of self-negotiation.
I'm finishing up a second playthrough of CP2077 now (with Phantom Liberty) and I think post-Act 2 (after Takemura/Anders/Evelyn) it's quite easy to read V as no longer being miserable. They accept that they're almost certainly going to die soon and are gleefully trying to cram the life of a legendary merc (i.e., every single gig and side mission) into their last two weeks on Earth. What are they actually missing out on? 30 years of being an old timer sharing stories over drinks in the Afterlife? That's not what V cared about anyway.
This is a good and meaningful way out of misery traps — accepting your impending doom with a felt sense of relief, enjoying that you can go for something great in the remaining time with nothing left to lose. Sue could've used her last week of hotness for some grand gesture on live TV to stick it to the studios, but instead she just sinks deeper into resentment and remains the studio's slave till the end.