Coralie Fargeat injects us with five insights into her satirical splatter-fest The Substance • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

2. Queen of the butt shot

One of the strongest trademarks in Fargeat’s oeuvre: the subversive butt shot. In both her 2017 debut feature Revenge and this sophomore follow-up, her camera fragments the human body into pieces. Throughout The Substance’s 141-minute runtime, viewers are constantly bombarded by close-up frames of Sue’s impeccable posterior (and breasts, achieved through prosthetics. “Perfection” isn’t real!)—but don’t mistake this choice as an acquiescence to male pleasure. Rather, it’s a scopophilic confrontation.

“The ass is a very strong symbol of how our body is not neutral in the public space,” Fargeat explains. “How our body is constantly scrutinized, has been shaped to please the man’s eyes, has been seen as a body part that was objectified, that was detached from the person who was simply bearing it.”

Fargeat recalls growing up on Facebook, recoiling at the number of comments written by men that would joke or drool over women’s bodies, their butts in particular. “It’s crazy insane how free the speech was without anyone noticing that it could be, maybe, unpleasant to speak like that,” she laments. “I strongly felt that I had to be so self-conscious about my body parts, about how perfect or imperfect they were. It was, for me, a major complex.”

Her intention with the copious butt shots was to show two things: the first was to think about “how much it is the focus of so many different gazes that we have to live with, that we have to take into account, that we have to endure. That’s something that has defined the way we can inhabit the public space. [That] shapes a lot of our behavior.”

Her second point: “It represents the way a woman should be totally free and entitled to use her body the way she wants, to show it if she wants, to be as sexy as she wants, to be totally at ease and happy, to be whoever, however, whatever she wants,” Fargeat emphasizes. “To get to this place with real freedom without it being an injunction, without it being something that you reproduce because you feel that it’s your only way to exist… That’s what those shots represent to me.”