In films like Babygirl and The Substance, casting choices and plot lines are offering meta commentary about the violence and labour of beauty work in our culture today
In the latest season of The White Lotus, old girlfriends Jaclyn, Kate and Laurie come together in the series’ signature luxury hotel, this time set on Thailand’s Ko Samui. Their conversation quickly turns to aesthetics, with the group making hyperbolic compliments of one another’s appearances. “No you look amazing,” they bleat. “You look the same as you looked 20 years ago.” “Who’s your doctor?”
“To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work,” writes CJ Hauser in her book The Crane Wife. In our era of increasingly normalised ‘tweakments’ and cosmetic work, the expectation to control and mould one’s appearance continues to intensify. This optimisation work, or ‘self-erasure’ (define it as you will), where the body’s individualism is chipped away at, bit by bit, is finally being confronted on-screen. By spotlighting the gruelling mental and physical labour of modern beauty routines, cinema and TV are illuminating the gendered standards frequently rendered invisible by ever-advancing cosmetic procedures.
In 2024’s The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s body horror tackles the female body as a site of violence and oppression. Halina Reijn’s Babygirl also explores – less overtly – the constricting beauty standards for the high-flying corporate women, while season three of The White Lotus satirises the aesthetic concerns of upper-class women. Hollywood, it seems, is beginning to trepidatiously hold up a mirror to its own problems and those of the patriarchy at large. These on-screen moments examine how youth and beauty endure as currency, particularly when you‘re a successful, public-facing woman.
In Babygirl, Romy (Nicole Kidman) is a high-flying CEO working in an Amazon-like robotics corporation, her character defined by an oeuvre of tightness, constraint and self-optimisation. Alongside Botox, she routinely undergoes cryotherapy and intensive therapy, straining to reach a plasticised kind of perfection, both mental and physical. This job is relentlessly exhausting, on par with the late nights at the office and corporate hustle culture, the body mirrored as a site of industrialised productivity. It’s fitting that the film’s fictional corporation seems to deal with robotics, mirroring the frequently non-human new heights of body standards. It’s the sub-dom relationship she strikes up with her intern Samuel (Harris Dickenson) that offers her a release – a way to surrender to her body and carnality outside of the realms of corporeal control.
Exploring parallel themes of work and image, The Substance follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a former fitness television star, as she grapples with the fallout of her ageism-fuelled job loss. She is compelled to take the dystopian, yet uncannily realistic biotech ‘substance’, periodically allowing a younger version of herself to emerge from her body – split open in scenes of grotesque bodily transformation. ‘Remember you are one’ is the warning continually issued by the manufacturers, but age and youth cannot converge in this epoch of ageing-phobia. Needless to say, such a dual bodily existence reaps dire results, the rules of the substance bent until Elisabeth emerges as an unrecognisable, mutated, monstrous version of her former self.
When we get under the skin of such aesthetics, beauty reveals itself as a form of labour and the body as a site of oppression. Speaking on The Substance, Moore said, “What really struck me was the harsh violence against oneself. It’s not what’s being done to you, it’s what we do to ourselves.” Through the fabricated promise of youth and beauty, her character drives herself to self-destruction. In Babygirl, Romy’s daughter similarly asks of her procedure, “Why do you do this to yourself?” It’s a confronting moment – an overt examination of women’s complicity in these beauty standards.
Where cosmetic procedures were once vehemently denied by women, procedures are now being confronted head-on. To see Nicole Kidman reclined in a surgery chair, Botox being injected into her face, a blue-tinged bruise marking her cheek in its wake, felt like something of a watershed moment. Of course, she (actor or character) is getting Botox, the scene seems to say – it’s the new standard. Tackling these topics is a meta move, aided by the casting choices of Kidman and Moore – an intentional nod to the same pressures and public scrutiny these actors have faced for their own appearances, particularly when it comes to their dabbling with cosmetic procedures. When Moore walked for Fendi Couture in 2021, for example, comments on her ‘botched’ facework came in thick and fast.
To be an audience to these films thus takes on a duality, probing an uncomfortable awareness of the role we play as the audience. In both films, other characters comment on the bodies of these women: alongside Romy’s daughter, Dickenson’s character observes the post-Botox bruise on Kidman’s face; TV execs comment on Elisabeth’s body, while the camera is filled with body shots of Magaret Qualley and Elisabeth in a replication of the male gaze. How are we gazing upon these women in real life, both films seem to probe, and do we need to confront the complexity of our own gazes? What discourse on women’s bodies have we silently and unquestionably nodded along to?
“The trend now is towards treatments that are undetectable,” says Dr Anatalia Moore, NHS GP and aesthetician. But what The Substance and Babygirl both achieve is the rendering of bodily violence, detectable in an age of undetectable procedures. They cut through the guise of neoliberal ‘choice’ feminism, resituating the female body within a multilayered web of beauty-gender politics, where bodily autonomy has to be sought outside of the beauty industry. To think of a cosmetic procedure as a form of empowerment, a decision for the individual alone, is clearly an oversimplification.
It’s optimistic, then, that Babygirl resituates the female body’s potential as a site of radical pleasure, not merely shame, alteration and pain. Romy, seen dirtying her knees crawling on the floor of a hotel, hair loose as she orgasms with an animal carnality, embraces feralness-as-resistance. The sexual body is set in direct contrast to the earlier montages of the optimised body, deconstructed as glossy and picture-perfect and reclaimed as a living, breathing, carnal thing. Pleasure manages to evade heightened beauty standards, its appetite unforsaken. The Substance alludes to the liberation that Elisabeth too might have found had she gone on that date with her old classmate, but her insecurity gets the better of her. Furiously rubbing at her painstakingly crafted face of make-up, lipstick smeared across her cheeks like blood, pain trumps potential pleasure. The solitude of feeling imperfect eclipses any chance at connection.