Thoughts on The Substance (2024)

Whit Vann

Demi Moore won a Golden Globe for her performance in The Substance. The Golden Globe, which does not matter and is often, if not always, on sale, is an apt accolade for Demi Moore: Cultural Figure, who played – and did not play, of course – Demi Moore: Cultural Figure in The Substance. The threads of Demi Moore’s career and the Golden Globes are tangled in my mind. By following them, we can understand the film itself.

Demi Moore, who was once so famous that she could stop the world, worked with major directors, or appeared in major films, or starred with major actors, throughout her heyday. Joel Schumacher is not a good director, usually, but St. Elmo’s Fire persists. Edward Zwick is not a good director, usually, but David Mamet won the Pulitzer two years before and two years after …About Last Night. Savage Steve Holland is a legend, even if One Crazy Summer isn’t Better Off Dead. Neil Jordan is occasionally a good director and Robert DeNiro and Sean Penn are usually good actors. Whoopi Goldberg won an Oscar for Ghost; Demi Moore is her scene partner for a lot of that film. Rob Reiner used to be a good director. Robert Redford is an icon. Andrew Bergman is reliable and Hiassen novels should make for great films. (And who better than Bergman to adapt Hiassen?) Ridley Scott is a good director. Demi Moore got paid more money than any other actress to be an actress and yet there’s not a performance she gives throughout this high period, which ends after G.I. Jane, the movie that ended Will Smith’s career, that is undersung. She can be good and she can be bad and the movies can be bad and they can be good. Construct a matrix of those outcomes on which to plot each one of her films and still you will not find a single performance that is now thought of as overlooked. Demi Moore, Movie Star, hit in a moment that lasted a generation, and then the moment was gone and she did not linger.

That moment, though, was perhaps the last one that sustained the popular notion that the Golden Globes are real awards. While the HFPA has been fielding accusations that its superlatives go to the highest bidder since the 50s, and Pia Zadora’s 1982 New Star award was openly purchased, the Golden Globes maintained an air of respectability – and the award held some cachet among the moviegoing public – into the 2010s. Before the cynical let’s-all-watch-celebs-get-drunk schtick of telecast hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poelher, Jim Carey’s back-to-back wins felt like popular rebuttals to the snooty Academy. In the 90s, an ad for a prestige picture flashed its bona fides by announcing Golden Globe winners in the cast – after Academy Award winners and, tellingly, Academy Award nominees. And if you go in for Oscar predictions, then the Globes were once a precursor for those as well. A Golden Globe may not have meant much but it did mean something. No one was advertising SAG awards on posters.

Though there’s not a single near-miss Oscar nom in Demi Moore’s acting filmography, much less an Oscar snub, she has a litany of missed Globes. With its divided Drama and Musical/Comedy categories, the Globes gets to hand out twice as many awards to twice as many celebs. The Golden Globes have the downmarket taste of Hollywood hangers-on and, even without the bribery, fawn over movie star performances. Thus, Disclosure, Indecent Proposal, and The Scarlet Letter all could have been positioned for that meager reward. G.I. Jane and Striptease nearly demand it for a star of her magnitude in that era. And while my recollection of all of these films is through the lens of TNT replays (perhaps no other actor was more predestined for cable reruns than Demi Moore), at the very least: you can’t nominate the woman for Ghost? Jesus Jones.

Moore’s speech at the 2025 Golden Globes read as genuine, and it took me aback to learn she wasn’t overstating how little professional recognition she had received. In fact, most of those films I cited above as worthy of this comparatively cheap laurel got Golden Raspberry nominations. To hear her discuss how circumscribed her personal measures of success became made me wonder how personal those measures of derision might have felt. Now, maybe those movies are bad. Maybe the performances are limited. But I don’t think you could argue that Demi Moore tried to buy herself some hardware, because we know that Golden Globe nominations can be had for a price. (I’d also note that her …About Last Night director has the most famously bought-and-paid-for Oscar in modern history.) I think we can assume that she didn’t buy it this time around, either, and, at the risk of sympathy – well, that speaks to her character.

All of this is to say that Demi Moore, who has good odds to get an Oscar nomination for The Substance, won the right award already. She won it for being Demi Moore: Cultural Object, who played a Cultural Object in a movie about how culture treats its objects. That she did it opposite Margaret Qualley, whose own mother was a contemporary of Moore’s and racked up a sizeable number of Golden Globe nominations herself, is telling. Qualley perhaps already deserved an Oscar nomination for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and while she did pick up a Globe nomination for The Substance, she is destined for a career heaped in plaudits and awards that do not have the tang of false gold. Her talent will be acknowledged throughout her career. Perhaps Demi Moore will get an Oscar nomination for The Substance, but it doesn’t matter. The Golden Globe is the type of award that Demi Moore always should have won, and it is fitting that she’s getting it now for playing someone who was overlooked while delivering, with artistry, base entertainment.

2024: A Year in Review

Whit Vann

Part One

The most significant thing that happened to me in 2024 was that I got laid off. In practical terms, it was not my fault – cash flow was exhausted, my salary did not move from the capital project to the operational budget, and when the company madly stripped out every non-essential cost, I was sacked. The details make for a galling story, but then, everyone has one. They cut me unexpectedly, without warning, and without any runway. That said, I was not caught in a thresher. My role was singular, my contributions my own and significant. When the bosses evaluated me, I was on a list of one. Someone had to say, and everyone else had to agree, that they thought they could do without me. Given what I know about the organization, someone probably thought they could do better without me. I have a fondness for the English term here – redundancy.

What I did next was precarious. I was in a lonely state. Work can mean many things, but for most folks it means a job and the things you do within that job. Once I was laid off, and once I had finished a period of retching – sprawling on the bed and moaning was my style – I was perilously of my own devices. I had no work to occupy my time, and more importantly, I had no grounds to consider or reflect on the work I had done. That work was not mine anymore. I had done it for pay, for someone else, and I had left it with them when they weren’t going to pay me anymore. Pretty shortly after I dusted myself off, I concluded that it would be a bad idea to spend any time thinking about that work, trying to learn from the experience, or contemplating what I might have done, especially at a personal level, to make myself redundant. Otherwise, I would conduct arguments with imagined versions of my enemies, false interlocutors who nevertheless possessed an eternally accurate rejoinder: it doesn’t matter how right you are, because you don’t work here now. Coming to that conclusion was, of course, a decision I made – a decision to creates parameters for my thinking. When I say that this was a precarious decision, I mean that it established a limit to self-reflection. It took six months to get a job, so I spent six months in stasis, not learning from my mistakes or trying to grow from my experience. To do anything other than that was to risk a depression that I feared would become too powerful to overcome.

So I rode it out. Thus, a full half of 2024 – at least, the part that was wholly my own, not shared with family or in the company of friends or as a citizen or a person in the culture – was static suspension. In that way, I lost the year.

Drawing

Whit Vann

I have never quit drawing, but my skill rises and falls alongside my interest – usually at a lag. The most common habit is to become satisfied that I can still do it and walk off. At my heart, I am a cartoonist, not a draughtsman, and my depictions, while personally satisfying in creation, are fundamentally unserious representations. Anyway, I think often of how I have never seen Maestro.