#20: I want to take The Substance and you can't stop me
Death By Consumption
9/17/24 - 9/23/24
Last week, I was reminded of an age-old question: why do gay men desperately love actresses? In only two movies, I got to watch five great actresses performing their asses off, and each time the experience left me feeling positively gleeful. Have we always felt this way? Did the ancient queers feel a flutter in their hearts when, say, Dionysia stepped into the torchlight? I'm sure many a sociologist has theorized on this phenomenon — something about a knowingly false performance making you feel real emotions, and how that correlates to the way we start our lives living falsely and suppressing our real emotions, blah blah blah — but whatever the scientific reason, this week I'm just grateful for the caveman part of my gay brain that lights up when a famous woman is doing incredible things on a giant screen in front of me.
The Substance (2024) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
This was kind of an indescribable experience? If you’re going to see this movie — and I recommend you see this movie, even though a lot of you might absolutely hate it — I would suggest seeing it in theaters. It helps to hear other people screaming in gleeful horror alongside you. It’s nice to know you’re not the only one seeing this. No one likes to ride a roller coaster alone.
I don’t want to spoil the movie so I won’t say much, except to echo the reviews you’re probably already starting to see: Demi Moore is transcendent, Dennis Quaid is having so much fun (the nasty way he eats shrimp in one scene might destroy the shellfish industry for a little bit), Margaret Qualley is suddenly an actual star instead of just Andie MacDowell’s daughter and/or Jack Antonoff’s wife, and the final 30 minutes will have you either barfing or screaming or both. I spent the back half of this movie in a literal cold sweat, occasionally feeling dizzy (I don’t like blood, sorry I’m just a little baby boy!!!) while also laughing at the absurdity of… all of it.
The movie is genius and also not subtle on any level: the message is clear from the start, the substance in it is literally called The Substance, the #1 talk show in this universe is just called “The Show”, I’d say about 20% of the film consists of close-ups of butts, and, well, there’s the ending. But literally who cares about subtlety — you are there to have fun, feel disgusted, and to squeal with laughter the whole time. This is destined to become a gay cult classic by, like, tomorrow.
His Three Daughters (2023) — on Netflix
I could not have picked two more opposite new movies to watch this week! Where The Substance is loud, flashy, and hilariously horrifying, His Three Daughters is quiet, layered, and beautiful. It’s more like a play than a film, which is normally something I would say as a devastating critique, but the style worked here. You spend almost the entire film in one apartment, with almost exclusively Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon, and Elizabeth Olsen, and you just watch these three women act their asses off at each other.
I did find the script felt a little too theatrical and overly crafted at first, which took some adjusting to, but once I was in it I was completely swept away, and I truly could have spent hours with these women. It’s a meaty display of three very talented actors doing a hell of a lot of acting, bouncing off each other in increasingly interesting and complex ways. Natasha Lyonne brought out levels we haven’t seen from her in a while, Carrie Coon is as powerful as she always is, but the real star is Elizabeth Olsen, who’s finally back to her indie acting roots after being lost in the Marvel machine for so long. (Forget Avengers 14 or whatever, the real sequel we need Elizabeth Olsen in is Martha Marcy May Marlene 2. Who do I talk to about this?!) They should just announce her Oscar nomination for this right now and get it out of the way.
Like a dog needing its anal glands released, I need to force a good cry out twice a year, and His Three Daughters really did the trick!
"Survivor" season 47 premiere — on CBS/Paramount+
I’m going to do my best to not turn this into a weekly Survivor recap email (and minor spoilers ahead if you haven’t watched!), but I just have to say about Jon Lovett’s Survivor appearance: LOL. Imagine you go on Survivor and then, months later, AOC is making fun of you to millions of people. Humiliating! America needed something to unite our politics at this dangerous time, and Jon Lovett flopping on Survivor could be thing that brings both sides together. And though I don't want only famous people on the show, the Jon Lovett/Mike White level of celebrity (also known as the "oh, that guy?" level) is the perfect type of stunt casting for Survivor, and I need them to keep sprinkling people like that into the mix, just to see what happens. Sometimes they’re great, sometimes they’re flops, either way it’s entertaining!
"Outlast" season 2 — on Netflix
While this didn’t have the “what the fuck?” factor of the first season, I still found season 2 compelling. If you put dynamic people in harsh circumstances and watch them go crazy, it’s usually going to be interesting! (To avoid pulling an Olivia Nuzzi, let me disclose my journalistic conflicts here: my friend did the casting for this season. But I will always promise to publish the TRUTH. No one can silence me!)
I did miss the absolute chaos of season 1, but I understand why producers didn’t necessarily want to continue down that path. Once you’ve established that it’s okay to basically hold production at knifepoint so you could watch back footage (seriously, if you haven’t seen season 1, it’s insane), you’re running the risk of people, like, beheading each other by season 4. So realistically they had to dial back the insanity, but that doesn’t mean I can’t miss it a little! (Last week I was like “is reality TV bad?” This week I’m like LET REALITY STARS GET VIOLENT WITH EACH OTHER.)
"The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives" season 1 — on Hulu
Is this a good show? No. Are these women individually compelling? No. Are these women even individually distinguishable? No. Will I finish the season? Ugh, probably.
The hook of the show is that these are the infamous “swinging Mormons,” who went viral on TikTok, first as something called #MomTok, which as far as I can tell is just a group of Mormon moms who do, like, TikTok dances together? But then they went even more viral after one of their members outed them as swingers. That juicy gossip item is used as a Trojan Horse to try to get you hooked on the real focus of the show: how TikTok ruins your brain.
The premiere, it must be said, is a triumph of trashy reality TV. In one episode we follow a woman as she has a sex scandal, gets divorced, loses all her friends (and brand deals, oh no!), meets a new problematic guy, has a miscarriage, gets arrested, and then gets pregnant. Girl, slow down, you're going to run out of plot points! What then follows that wild ride, unfortunately, is several episodes in which various women — all with the exact same face — bicker about issues such as, “How do we get #MomTok back to what it was” and “is this brand deal good for #MomTok?”
In some ways, this does feel like a more honest look at “real life” (or rather, a very specific type of real life) than we get on similar shows like the Housewives, who almost never talk about their brand deals in such blatant terms. (In comparison, during the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City premiere last week, Lisa Barlow’s family was conspicuously eating a Wendy’s meal at their kitchen counter during a scene. The credits clarified that, yes, she has a brand deal with them.)
So through that lens, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives could be a postmodern reality show, one that is just blatantly about the desire to be famous no matter what, and how to continue wringing every last dollar out of your 15 minutes. It helps that the husbands are all, without exception, complete losers — they’re either closeted, gambling addicts, have anger issues, or some combo of all three — so the women and their all-important brand deals are the actual breadwinners for their husbands and 3-8 children. That certainly adds some needed stakes to the endless discussions of, say, whether it’s okay to accept $20,000 for a single Instagram post about a vibrator. But is that enough to carry an entire show? I mean, I just wrote 5 paragraphs about it, so I guess I’m more interested in it than I want to be.
If, like me, your brain is already useless mush, go ahead and watch this. But if you're still capable of having normal thoughts, run far away.
The Pine Barrens, by John McPhee (1968) — paperback
The Pine Barrens are such a strange, still-mysterious place to me. Other than that Sopranos episode and the Jersey Devil, they’re just a blank space in my mind. Turns out, they’re fundamentally unknowable, even to the few people who live there, but I now have a clearer image of the Pine Barrens, thanks to John McPhee’s 1968 book. It’s a very pleasant, slim read, with sentences that flow effortlessly, perfect for a lazy Sunday. The book feels aimless in a lovely way, like you’re on a casual hike through the woods with John McPhee as he tells you local stories that come to mind. One paragraph loosely connects to the next, like following a train of thought. McPhee is such a natural with language that he can make anything feel vivid without much effort. Like this description of a frog:
Anderson’s tree frogs live in the Pine Barrens in abundance. They are only one and three-eighths inches long with their legs stretched out. At night, they go wonk, wonk, wonk, and the art of stalking them is to follow the sound and, at the key moment, surprise them with light. This is not simple, because the frogs are ventriloquists. But they are worth seeing, for their skins are a brilliant green, trimmed with white, and they have lavender stripes down the sides of their legs. They look like state troopers.
I googled Anderson’s tree frogs and, in addition to that memorable little description, they were further eternalized in a print by Andy Warhol. These little iconic frogs! Sadly, McPhee’s 1968 claim that they live “in abundance” didn’t last long. They are now endangered, due to habitat loss.
The book ends with the developers and planners virtually drooling over the potential of the Pine Barrens, all the fresh water, and all that cheap, beautiful land. Back then, they had plans to build a jet port for supersonic planes (“flights to Paris in 90 minutes!”), surrounded by a series of planned communities, all connected by high-speed rail to NYC and Philadelphia, which, sorry if this is problematic, sounds like it would have been great to have! Based on that vision, McPhee ends the book painting a picture of “the great unbroken Eastern city,” a time in the not-distant future when New York and Philadelphia and New Jersey and DC and all the rest (not you, Boston, you're not invited) are so developed and overlapping that there is no longer any use in distinguishing one city from another. Thankfully, this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore — 10 years after this book, and partly due to it, the Pine Barrens were declared the first National Reserve, to preserve the ecosystem and specifically the vast underground water reservoir. The unbroken Eastern city remains held at bay, for now, as do our dreams of jetting over to Paris for lunch.
Latex Hybrid Mattress — from Saatva
Why is shopping for a mattress such a uniquely humiliating experience? By the end of it, your head is so turned around with all the options and research and firmnesses and scams and other people’s opinions that you’ve lost all trust in anything. You’re overwhelmed by options that are all the same — all of which have thousands of positive reviews and also thousands of “this mattress ruined my LIFE” reviews — and you’re questioning every single thing about what you believe and know about the world until, exhausted, you just hand over like $2,000 for a mattress that feels maybe, if you’re lucky, marginally better than your old one.
We’ve been sleeping on this new mattress for a little under a week now and so far it’s fine? Honestly, I’m so exhausted by the process of trying to hold the memory of the sensation of our old mattress up against the feeling of this new mattress, which is, of course, impossible to do. How do you compare two feelings? It’s like a zen koan, one designed to give you the momentary experience of what it must be like to go completely insane. The mattress has a 365-day trial period, which is great security for us, but if I’m still mentally comparing how I feel on this mattress vs. others by September 2025, please smother me with a pillow.