Demi Moore's latest film The Substance satirically takes aim at the commodification of women. Photo / Getty Images
Demi Moore's latest film The Substance satirically takes aim at the commodification of women. Photo / Getty Images
She has become known for baring all (or, at least, a lot). But her work, including her newest film, The Substance, should be understood in a wider context.
By the end of the 1990s, after years of giving her all to Hollywood and baring most of her all, too, DemiMoore began her fade-out. She had been a major film star that decade, complete with huge hits, humbling flops, famous friends, a celebrity marriage and headline-making magazine covers. Like all stars, she put in the work and sold the merch, herself included. And, like a lot of female stars, she made movies with male filmmakers who turned her into a spectacle of desire, a spectacle that she partly sought ownership of via her body.
You see a lot of her body in Moore’s latest movie, The Substance, from French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat. It’s a body-horror freakout that satirically takes aim at the commodification of women, and Moore is ferociously memorable in it as an actress who’s fired when she hits 50. It’s a performance that’s strong enough that you stop thinking about the fact that she’s naked in a lot of the scenes, strong enough to make you stop wondering what her exercise regime is or what work, if any, she’s had done. By the end, I admired how she had risen above the material; I also hoped she has better movies in her future.
She deserves them. Her performance in The Substance is a gaudy, physically demonstrative role that requires her to convey a range of outsize states that dovetail with the movie’s excesses, from her character’s plasticky on-camera smiles to her private despair and boiling rage. Like some of Moore’s best-known movies, The Substance also requires her to shed her clothing. Even after decades of watching her perform in states of undress, it is startling to see Moore, now 61, stand naked before a mirror as the camera slowly travels across her body. There’s a near-clinical quality to how she looks at herself and, I think, a touch of defiance.
Demi Moore as an actress coping with issues of ageing in Hollywood in The Substance.
The 1980s weren’t a welcoming period for women in the mainstream movie industry, yet Moore gradually succeeded in making a name for herself in between hanging with her pals in the Brat Pack and appearing in mediocre films (St. Elmo’s Fire) and flat-out rotten ones (About Last Night, ugh). Her big break came with Ghost (1990), a dreamy, sad romance in which she plays a dewy-eyed artist whose lover (Patrick Swayze) is murdered. Moore looked “terminally wistful much of the time” in the film, as Janet Maslin observed in The New York Times. Yet Moore also “combines toughness and delicacy most attractively,” which nicely expresses her gift for characters who often seem compelled to safeguard their vulnerabilities.
Ghost was the top-grossing movie of the year, racked up more than a half a billion dollars at the global box office and catapulted Moore into true stardom. She followed this by starring in, as well as producing, Mortal Thoughts (1991), a deliciously nasty noirish drama about two working-class Jersey friends (Moore and Glenne Headly) who cover up the murder of one of their husbands, played with relish and persuasive vulgarity by Moore’s husband at the time, Bruce Willis. One of her finest movies, it gave her a chance to express her range partly because she was working with a real filmmaker, Alan Rudolph. In contrast to many of her earlier directors, he didn’t treat Moore like a sex puppet but instead helped her create a nuanced, teasingly elusive woman.
With the exception of Ghost and some other notable releases, the early and mid-1990s weren’t much better for actresses than the previous decade had been. The month after Ghost opened, Meryl Streep, speaking at the Screen Actors Guild’s first National Women’s Conference, shared some bleak statistics that the organisation had compiled. With their top guns, dashing adventurers and hyper-muscular heroes like Rambo, the 1980s had been so bad for women that in 1989, Streep told the audience, men had hogged 71% of the roles in feature films and were earning more than double what women did. “If the trend continues,” Streep ominously warned, “by the year 2010 we may be eliminated from movies altogether.”
Moore opposite Patrick Swayze in her breakout film, Ghost, from 1990.
Despite this sombre landscape, Moore thrived in the 1990s until she didn’t. After Ghost, she again became headline news in 1991 for appearing hugely pregnant and beautifully nude on the cover of Vanity Fair, sending puritans to their fainting couches. (The accompanying article was as unflattering as the cover was flattering, a foreboding sign that she had become an easy target.) She held her own alongside Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in the military court drama A Few Good Men (1992); starred in the schlocky drama Indecent Proposal (1993) as a married woman who sleeps with a billionaire for a million bucks; and played a villain opposite Michael Douglas in Disclosure (1994), a disingenuous, sleazy thriller that tries to say something about sexual harassment but is really about male fears of female power.
Moore kept her clothes on in her movies more than she took them off, but it’s the ones in which she ditched her outfits, in part or full, that predictably sparked reams of publicity and some nitwit outrage. They’re still the films that she’s often most closely identified with, for better and for worse, with the bottom-barrel crummiest being the inept, grimly unfunny comedy Striptease (1996). She plays an exotic dancer who likes shimmying to Annie Lennox and is trying to recover custody of her daughter while navigating a byzantine, politically freighted intrigue. Moore has some nice moments in which she gets to show off her comic timing and the dancer’s humanity, but the movie is mostly interested in showing off her body.
Demi Moore with daughter Rumer Willis in a scene from the film Striptease, 1996. The film is still one of the movies she’s most closely associated with. Photo / Getty Images
By the time Moore shot Striptease, star salaries had skyrocketed to previously unseen heights; or, rather, salaries for actors like Sylvester Stallone had soared. Bruce Willis, Moore wrote in her engaging 2019 memoir, Inside Out, was paid more than US$20 million ($32m) for the third Die Hard flick. Moore was paid US$12.5m ($20m) to star in Striptease, which earned her the nickname Gimme Moore. Hard-body male stars like Willis, Stallone, Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger and others were lavishly rewarded for flaunting their six-packs and bulging biceps in ridiculous, giddily violent action flicks while Moore was skewered for having the audacity to bare herself in an equally nonsensical comedy about a heroic, loving single mum.
Looking back on the period, I wonder if all those professional macho men factored into her decision to star in Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane (1997), another career high point in which she bulked up to play a Navy SEAL. I love the film, despite its flaws, including an unfortunate scene in which Moore executes some very impressive one-armed push-ups in short shorts while her nipples stand at attention in a sleeveless undershirt. I get why the scene was shot. Moore was a celebrated, bankable sex symbol. She also had a buzz cut for much of the running time and was otherwise so deglammed that I imagine she, Scott and company felt that they needed to eroticise her to peddle the film. It didn’t work; the movie flopped badly.
A deglammed Moore in G.I. Jane. Photo / Getty Images
In her memoir, Moore spends a lot of time on her kids, husbands and movies, but what’s striking is the space she devotes to her body. It makes for painful, at times infuriating reading, as when she revisits her experience with Indecent Proposal. She writes that while she agreed to the sex scenes, director Adrian Lyne promised that he’d cut anything she found objectionable. “Still, I would be on display again,” she writes, “and all I could think about was my body, my body, my body.” So, once again, she threw herself into an exercise regime until she felt good about how she looked. In response, Lyne told her she was too thin, the perverse reverse of what director Ed Zwick said to her before About Last Night: She was too fat.
Moore deserved better from Lyne, from Zwick, from the movie industry she made a lot of money from and from all those media types who eagerly fawned over her until they gleefully fileted her. Over her career, she has gone through the usual stages of Hollywood stardom – invention, exploitation, idolisation, rejection and resurrection – with what seems to be a lot self-actualising work along with grit, sweat and, yes, talent. In a career filled with box-office highs, derided lows and states of undress, she has been by turns celebrated and mocked for being precisely what the movies asked her to be: a fantasy, one that is emblematic of how the world continues to look at women and that now finds Moore staring right back, naked and defiant.
The Substance is in New Zealand cinemas from September 19.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
