The Substance' is a Hollywood horror film that feels too close to home

Times of discover News: Ms. Tamblyn is a writer, actor, director, and editor of the anthology "Listening in the Dark: Women Reclaiming the Power of Intuition." When I was a little girl, my ears stuck out like big butterfly wings. Some of the kids at my school in Los Angeles teased me, and I often looked at myself in the mirror and wished my ears were right on the front of my head.

But it wasn't until I got my first major role on a TV show at age 12 that I decided to have ear pin surgery, a decision I have never made public until now. For years, my parents watched me struggle with personal embarrassment, even though they thought I was a tough kid who could handle it. But knowing that millions of people around the world would be judging me not just on the playground, but also on their television screens, that information changed everything for me.

I also wrote a poem about the kind of aesthetic I was seeing in the entertainment business, especially in women. This poem was published in my first book many years later, and in it I described women who have gone through many things to stay young and attractive — including facial plastic surgery that makes them look like “victims of third-degree burns, or bodies with … parts that don’t look natural, “a nose that looks like a dead poodle.” I consider myself a young radical feminist angry at the patriarchy.

Yet in changing my body, I’m also hypocritical in accepting it — because how could anyone not? Going under the knife is like choosing a weapon I can use to defend myself against my disability. It showed the world that I understand the work of assimilation — that I can do anything to fit in, never to look different, as my ears once did.

Now that poem seems to describe a scene from "The Substance," director Coralie Farguet's body horror film about a celebrity named Elizabeth Sparkle, played by Demi Moore. According to Hollywood evangelicals (and a TV executive named Harvey), Elizabeth, now 50, has reached her peak -- and the film reveals in gory and graphic detail the price she's willing to pay to regain the best physical condition she's ever been in, to regain perfection and to remain relevant by any means necessary.

I grew up as a child actress in the entertainment industry's erotic spotlight. Over three decades, my responsibility to not only my acting skills but also my youthful acting chops has been strengthened -- no matter what a director in my 20s says, the key to a long career is to be as good as possible. This type of distorted thinking has become the status quo -- and women may become our greatest rivals. Would I be less happy if I fought the urge to turn my ears back on if they still popped up today? I don’t know — but I think about it often, and I have a desire to keep up with industry expectations.

My experience and “The Substance” aren’t just a Hollywood story. These are universal realities for any woman, regardless of her background or profession. Subtle messages of sexism have been handed down as wisdom to us from generation to generation, almost from birth. As girls we’re taught what our bodies can be worth, and then we go into debt throughout our lives trying to get them. Yes, there’s plastic surgery, but there’s also a few periods of self-pity that teach us that no matter what we say, do, weigh or desire it’s always perfect — we could make fewer mistakes.

I'm not saying that plastic surgery is bad or that anyone who chooses to alter their body regrets their decision — including my 12-year-old. The choice can involve agency and even self-love, and for some of us there are very personal reasons for doing so. But Elizabeth Sparkle is a warning to all of us about what we might be willing to destroy in the name of desirability; what kinds of monsters we might be willing to become in the pursuit of perfection.

In an interview with The Times, Ms. Moore, the veteran actress and cultural icon, bluntly addressed what she saw as the film's theme: "It's not about what's been done to us — it's what we do about ourselves." And in the brutal final moments of “The Substance,” we see it: Elizabeth finally eats herself, living in the animal body she created as part of her relentless effort to meet society’s impossible ideals, ‘there is nothing else’ except a closed mouth

There’s a different version of “The Substance” I’d like to see someday, in which Elizabeth chooses not to chase youth and instead learns to love it as she grows up, no matter how much the rest of the world does. That version of the story might seem too radical for the world right now; it reminds us