The Substance of the Deal

I just finished watching a movie — The Substance — the first film I’ve seen in many months. I don’t spend much time watching movies, but one with a more mature Demi Moore and a storyline that felt a little twisted seemed like it might offer something.

It did. Value, and a quiet kind of discomfort. Not shock. Not fear. Something closer.

On the surface, it’s a story about aging, relevance, and the cruelty of an industry that feeds on youth. But underneath that, something else is happening — something more familiar, and more unsettling.

It’s a story about a deal.

The deal is simple. It always is. Give something essential, and in return you get to stay in the game.

In the film, the older self agrees to an arrangement to remain relevant, significant, timeless. A solution to the inevitability of fading away — of losing identity and status.

The younger version, Sue — we’ll call her daughter — is birthed from mother’s spine. She doesn’t replace mother. She displaces her, one week at a time. She takes her place in the world. Takes the spotlight. Takes the fame, the popularity. Not as the same person, but as the role mother once played.

“Remember You Are One.” 

A repeated warning. A rule. A boundary.

Increasingly disregarded.

Daughter begins to feed on mother while she lies immobile in periods of “regeneration.” Essence is extracted — life energy — to sustain performance and extend time in the spotlight beyond what the deal allowed. Each week the extraction increases. Each week the original body weakens, aging by decades, unable to intervene. And each week daughter wants more: 

“The balance is not working!”

The deal still technically exists, but the dynamics have been unilaterally altered by daughter.

This is how deals like this always work.They are not regenerative. They are extractive.

Addiction takes over. The benefits are immediate. The consequences are delayed or externalized. The system accelerates.

What struck me wasn’t the horror of the imagery, but how recognizable the pattern felt.

In the eyes of daughter, mother increasingly becomes a resource. The future is undermined by present consumption. Desire, addiction, and delusion drive behavior into incoherence.

Even when signals appear — when it becomes obvious that both will perish — the system cannot stop. The daughter is addicted not just to the benefits, but to the identity the deal provides. The arrangement no longer serves both sides. It serves itself.

And that’s when the deal reveals what it really is.

This isn’t just a story about one woman or one industry. It’s a story we’re living inside.

We’ve made a deal like this with the planet — mother.

At her expense, we’ve gained immense power, benefit, and delusion.

We traded presence for performance. Truth for optimization. Connection for scale. Freedom for convenience. Adventure for control.

For a while, it seemed to work. Or at least it looked like it did.

But like in the film, the costs don’t show up all at once. They accumulate quietly, offscreen. And when the original system — the body, the land, the psyche — begins to fail, the response isn’t reflection.

It’s increased extraction.

More fuel. More speed. More denial.

Some media have framed The Substance as a critique of beauty standards. That reading barely scratches the surface. The film is holding up a deeper mirror — one that shows a deal that can only end one way.

Seeing the mirror isn’t really about intelligence or interpretation. It’s about presence — the capacity to stay with what’s unfolding long enough to see the patterns, orient within reality, and register cost, imbalance, and consequence.

Deals like this don’t hide themselves. They reveal themselves slowly. And without presence, what we see is only the surface.

The final question, however, isn’t whether we can see ourselves in that mirror.

It’s whether we’re willing to stop living the story it reflects.