All the hills. Longevity shills. And my love for a gory "clown show"
All the hills. Longevity shills. And my love for a gory "clown show"
Cupboard evasion has sent me to Primrose Hill this week, where I spent two hours screaming at Demi Moore in The Substance and the rest of the time agog at the absurdity of longevity medicine
Cupboard evasion had me shacked up in a five storey townhouse in Primrose Hill for four nights. Another kindly friend offered me their entire house in my efforts to avoid the thin crap mattress in the cupboard and the generalised misery of sharing a home with an ex who thinks you’re a complete cretin.
He came over to pick up the dogs up yesterday in his fancy fun showy offy bachelor car. I no longer have the other car, the one that was meant to be for moving dogs around in and other grunt tasks that a high performance motorcar is not really geared up for. What larks it was, trying to cram a large podenco on the back seat of a bachelorwagon.
I can’t buy a new car until I’ve dealt with the damp patch in the bathroom and had some pricy dental work. Feck. This is gonna be a hairy ride. Can’t wait for the Halloween budget, bet it cheers me right up learning any extra money I make to ensure my continued survival actually has to be redirected via HMRC. I suppose on the upside, if I went to prison I’d save on living expenses.
Not having the dogs for 24 hours has been equally and simultaneously a luxury and heart wrenching. Jeez, the whole custody thing must be excruciating in a divorce. If this is what sharing dogs feels like, kids must be harder. My friend Stacey says her dogs were the only thing that kept her from descending into a deep depression when the kids were with their dad after her divorce.
What does that mean for me, should I get some kind of dog substitute for when the ex has taken them off in his fancy vehicle. What is a dog substitute. A kid? A hamster? The dogs would just eat the hamster as soon as they returned. Best get a bulk order in.
Primrose Hill is a place I have been many times but have never had to shop here other than for coffee or late night booze runs when the price of anything is irrelevant. Blimey, it’s pricy. Even ordinary-looking shops are more expensive than Supermarket of Dreams the billionaire’s food store in Holland Park. Of the two glamorous and slightly ridiculous British hills of prime real estate, the Notting one is positively reasonable compared to Primrose. The streets are so calm and airy, so airy it feels as thought Primrose has extra oxygen on its hill. Notting’s Hill is where all the air is in my west side neighbourhood. I live down in Notting Dale, where we - soon to be I - live next to large social housing developments of various eras, that true London rarity now, a proper shit pub, and the grim mausoleum that is Grenfell Tower.
This hood used to be called “the potteries and the piggeries”. I don’t think that turns up in the Working Title movie. Charles Dickens's edited a magazine called Household Words, and it is after his role in publishing a story highlighting the poverty, crime and filth in Notting Dale, that a big chunk of social housing on a road near us is named. Household Words Vol 1, August 1850, he wrote that the area was, “scarcely equalled for its insalubrity by any other in London... In these hovels discontent, dirt, filth, and misery are unsurpassed.”
Of course, it’s different now. Right? After the Grenfell fire, it was at Dickens Court’s social hub that we all sifted our way through the bin bags of clothing that arrived in the neighbourhood by the tonne intended for the victims of the fire. In all truth, not one item would have gone to them. But hopefully some of it was useful to someone. I will never forget the crap that came out of some of those bin bags. I think it was possibly well intended, but broken toys and stained tatty old garments were not really what the survivors needed.
When I rang the specialist builder about the bathroom damp he went on a rant about poor building regs and corruption, and I said, “Mate!” in my best mockney - well, you have to, don’t you. “Mate, you don’t need to tell me that, I live on Grenfell Road.”
For how much longer I live here, who knows.
The hill of Beverly would trump all the LDN ones, which is a lame link to the film I took my lonely ass to last night at the fleapit Odeon on Parkway. I’m late to The Substance. This is the Demi Moore lead Working Title movie, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, that had everyone going, “Oh my god, have you that Substance movie, I really enjoyed it until the bit when ______ I couldn’t watch.”
It’s a bleakly comic gross out body horror movie written and directed by a French woman, which I already love before I’ve even seen it. The premis is a fading celebrity buys a cell-replicating drug that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself. Critics sort of liked it, with the corrollary that it is silly, or exploitative, a “clown show” as one said.
“Flawed and overlong,” said Peter Bradshaw in his 4* Guardian review (who I rate). It is a “cheerfully silly and outrageously indulgent piece of gonzo body-horror comedy, lacking in subtlety, body-positivity or positivity of any sort.”
Peter is a man. I should think most women saw The Substance very differently. For me it was a fine piece of satirical commentary on multiple levels. Skewering agism is nothing new, but there was something here that made me next level uncomfortable.
It is daft but I have witnessed the bleak erasure of character from the faces of my peers who are running away from the inevitable. I know many of us probably would take a substance that promised a stab at perfection and youth, even without knowing the potential downsides. As the films gross factor ramps up I can only think of the mutilation required and absurd appearance of heavily ‘done’ faces. So there’s the cosmetic story. We do look at overly ‘worked on’ faces as those of sorts of subhuman monsters.
Secondly, the rising field of longveity medicine is promising us more and more in the way of precious Substances to free us from the shame of the aging body. And, like the film, there are also potential lethal downsides though they probably end with less stray tits, blood and toothy humour, but you never know.
The rubber band will snap you back to reality at some point sister, it’s the only thing you can be certain of in life. The only way to stay forever young, is to die young. In this respect, The Substance is a metaphor for the horror of aging that made me cringe with pleasure.
The exploitative accusations again miss the point. Showing long lingering bum, tit, n fanny shots, force us to become the hideous critical gaze women especially are subject to. After I’ve graded Demi’s body out of 10 the thoughts start to turn to my own.
More below the money jump…
Demi Moore plays an aging beauty, the camera looks critically at her droopy nipples and less than pert buttocks, but for a woman of 60 she is about as good as anyone is going to look. And she will have toiled so damn hard to get that way. That camera’s gaze at my own body would have been grimmo. She was brave to go there and perhaps she will get some awards for doing it, I hope it was cathartic.
At a certain crucial climax, there are references to The Elephant Man, which is a film I love and have repeatedly gone back to despite it being an emotionally wrench entirely unfunny and difficult watch. It’s a film that has a strong moral message, and that same moral beams through The Substance’s horror and absurdity and humour. It’s not just a clown show. Or maybe it is, given life’s a fking clown show. Clowns are scary.
Meantime, can’t we be a bit more grateful for what we already have rather than endlessly pursuing more more more?
The film is a delicious metaphor for longevity medicine, a specialism that I am having to navigate. I only went to The Substance because I thought it might help me iron out my thoughts about longevity, as this is of a more immediate relevance to me currently than any saggy bottom, sub par nipples or crinkly skin.