THE SUBSTANCE 2024

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review, so plot points will be revealed for discussion purposes.

Have you ever come across one of those hysterical clickbait links with a headline screaming, “You’ll be shocked to see what (insert any celebrity ...99% of the time, a woman) looks like today!” only to discover that the person has simply aged naturally?

Or maybe you've noticed that—while the posting of heavily filtered, augmented, and body-tuned selfies is nothing new—they all now seem to be aiming for the same standardized mannequin aesthetic.

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

Or you may have seen the male fitness influencer (who stays mum about his secret cycle of HGH injections) who cloaks run-of-the-mill narcissism in the aspirational rhetoric of discipline and self-mastery. Employing aggressive Alpha language (fight, power, winning, conquer pain), it all feels like obvious compensation for an underlying unease with what might be perceived as a “socially feminine” preoccupation with one's looks. 

And then, perhaps you’ve had the misfortune of encountering the AI artwork of a “creator” who wants to share with you his/her depiction of the ideal in female beauty: Which somehow ALWAYS means a vacantly staring white woman with the exaggerated eyes and lips of a Bratz doll and a body of Jessica Rabbit cartoon proportions.

VEEP- 2019

The most successful form of oppression is when
you get the marginalized to enforce their own subjugation

Even my citing these examples reflects the hegemony of body politics that we all perpetuate, participate in, and endure. Underscoring how, as a society, we continue to intrude upon the personal, private domain of others (our bodies are our own and no one else’s business) by asserting that we all, collectively, have some kind of say in the matter. Consequently, our bodies and physical appearance come to significantly influence our experience of the world, our self-esteem, and in far too many cases, our mental health. 

Where once fashion magazines and advertising were the primary suppliers of unrealistic beauty norms,  now, selfie-culture (with its "take 500 photos to get the ideal one to post" standards of phone-filter perfection) makes sure that every moment of every day, we're bombarded with images of how we think we're supposed to look.  

In The Substance, French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat takes a laceratingly frank look at bodies- our own and the bodies of others- and our relationship with them. Using vivid imagery and startling symbolism, Fargeat confronts the attitudes, conflicts, phobias, and fetishes we attach to our all-too-weak flesh with a take-no-prisoners bravado. Forcing us to examine how our reckless pursuit of beauty standards has blurred the jagged line between self-care and self-mutilation. And Fargeat does so without offering solutions, reassurance, or much concern for our comfort zones. 

THE MIRROR CRACK'D (1980)

Only the second feature film from the gifted director/writer/editor, The Substance is a darkly surreal fairy tale exploring body image, beauty standards, aging, self-loathing, misogyny, disposable people culture, patriarchy, psychological violence, and two of my all-time favorite themes: dualism and the human desire to connect and be loved. 

Though in so many ways unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, The Substance possesses a visual richness that pays homage to classic cinema while blazing an audaciously unique path all its own. Psychological, cultural, and emotional truths merge with a barely-linked-to-reality narrative that evokes a monstro-mutation of the cinema of our past: All About Eve, Showgirls, Death Becomes Her, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Perfect, Black Swan, Carrie, and of course--

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

This movie is 75 years old. A society really must have a serious talk with itself to explain how a woman losing her mind because she's turning 50 is still a thing

Embodying the tagline of 1974’s The Day of the Locust: “It Happened in Hollywood, But It Could Have Happened in Hell,” The Substance is set in a present-day Hollywood of the mind—a Hollywood where it sometimes snows, people still read newspapers to find jobs, nighttime talk show hosts are Black, exercise TV programs are ratings blockbusters, and ‘80s/‘90s aesthetics...like legwarmers...have never really left. 

The film's anti-heroine is once-popular, Oscar-winning actress Elisabeth Sparkle (it’s her real name; for we learn in school she was called Lizzie Sparkle, “the most beautiful girl in the world”…at least according to Fred in 10th-grade homeroom). Elisabeth is on the verge of an existential crisis.

Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle

Margaret Qualley as Sue

The (de)evolution of Elisabeth’s career suggests perhaps ageism played a role in her no longer acting in movies (roles for women over 40 make up only 5% of available female film roles), leading her down the B-List showbiz path of TV aerobics guru -"Sparkle Your Life with Elisabeth" - and advertising spokesperson exploiting her catchphrase "You Got It!" A career in which her success and fame are entirely linked to her physical appearance and age-defying physicality. 

Alas, age-defying doesn't mean age-less. On her 50th birthday, Elisabeth receives (in the harshest way imaginable) the world-shattering news that she and her long-running TV show are to be put out to pasture to make room for a tighter, firmer, younger version of both. 

Dennis Quaid as Network Executive (wouldn't you know it) Harvey

These guys don't think you're hot enough. 

As emphasized by the film’s Kubrick-esque camera angles and macro closeups, The Substance is partially an allegory about distorted perceptions. TV executive Harvey's lack of self-perception makes him think he's a charming winner instead of a bullying sociopath whose inner sense of inadequacy manifests in external outbursts of psychological violence. Always targeting women.  

On the distaff side, Elisabeth's lack of self-perception is a kind of mind blindness. She has an inability to latch onto any yardstick of self-evaluation not linked to impossible aesthetic norms and the validation of the male gaze. Her lack of self-esteem manifesting in escalating internal (and later, VERY external) outbursts of self-directed violence...psychological, emotional, and physical. In fact, she hates herself.

The fact that an entire wall of Elisabeth's Barbarella spaceship-style penthouse is dominated by a
floor-to-ceiling portrait of herself tells us everything we need to know about her priorities 

It can be said that Elisabeth's lack of inner substance—exemplified in her complete embrace of superficial beauty ideals that undermine her worth as a human—is the fatal character flaw that sets the conflict of The Substance in motion. Instead of directing her anger at a social construct that diminishes her in every way, she directs her anger at herself for failing to live up to these ridiculous standards. Still, it's impossible not to feel empathy. 

One can always detect discernable traces of self-loathing behind the physical perfection-seekers of our culture, but since we're a society that values overachievement no matter how hollow the reward -as in celebrating "good" plastic surgery or the "quickest" fad diet- we reinforce the notion that "looking" like we're okay on the outside is more important than actually "being" okay inside.

That's one of the reasons why I think fame and celebrity are so sought-after by those plagued by self-disgust; though meaningless in the larger scheme of things, the external validation of strangers can work like lead to the kryptonite of introspection. 

Letting others define you and tell you exactly what you need to be, do, and look like to make yourself worthy of love is a doctrine that clearly works for a great many people. Religions have been doing it for centuries, and they swear by it (literally). 

Of course, the implicit caveat behind the conditional love and transitory admiration offered by celebrity and fame is the understanding that said "stars" must never change or age. 

"Youth and beauty are not accomplishments. They're the temporary happy by-products 

of time and/or DNA. Don't hold your breath for either."  Carrie Fisher -2015

For someone like Elisabeth, being told that she's at the end of her career is like telling her she's at the end of her life. The Substance—an underground youth elixir that promises a younger, more beautiful, and more perfect version of oneself—enters Elisabeth’s life at the exact moment she starts to feel its impending erasure. How convenient.

And while the promise of that little Day-Glo vial is irresistible and appears to be the solution to all of Elisabeth's problems, anyone who's read a Stephen King novel, watched an Amicus anthology horror film, or seen an episode of The Twilight Zone knows- 

...there's always a catch.

Whoopi Goldberg - Ghost (1990)

That image above of the injected and divided egg yolk will have to serve as summary of how the drug known as The Substance works. Fargeat is far too compelling a visual storyteller (and it's all too far-out and surreal) for anything I write to do it justice. 

I will say that The Substance does indeed create a new, fully formed, independent person from Elisabeth’s DNA (picture Botticelli’s "The Birth of Venus" reimagined by David Cronenberg); however, Sue, as she names herself, is more a “side” of Elisabeth than a new “version.” 

Self Care
"I guess I just try to be myself. To be sincere and grateful for all that I have. And to always remember to lead with my heart." - Sue, spouting the empty affirmations of selfie-caption psychology 

The ultimate Odd Couple, Elisabeth and Sue, share an apartment and an irksomely inconsistent consciousness while living an alternating existence of one week on, one week off. 

It’s a bit like if the adult, self-possessed part of me and the side that still compulsively bites my fingernails existed as two separate people. It’s definitely ME biting my nails; however, in most cases, it’s something I do without conscious awareness. I often “catch” myself biting my nails, which sounds absurd since it’s ME, yet that’s how it works. You’re one, yet it’s still possible to act as though you are disconnected from yourself. 

Sweet Sue

No one else, it seems, ever shared my dreams.
And without you, dear, I don't know what I'd do.

In Robert Altman's 3 Women (1977), Sissy Spacek plays a character named  Pinky Rose (!) who cultivates a hyperfeminine personality that comes to dominate and drain the life force of her roommate Millie (Shelley Duvall). A similar dynamic develops between Elisabeth and Sue in The Substance, turning this already ingeniously assaultive allegory into an absolutely demented roar of anger confronting the horrific violence we’re willing to inflict upon ourselves (body and psyche) in the pursuit of unattainable perfection.

The Violence of Beauty
Hard to imagine a male director including a detail like this. When Elisabeth is taken to the hospital after an accident, there is a brief shot of her bare legs dangling over the edge of the table. Barely visible are the callouses of friction blisters...the kind that come from wearing high heels

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I don't often write about contemporary films, but when I do, I've noticed that most of them tend to be of a "sort": Hereditary (2018), Black Swan (2010), Midsommar (2019), Maps to the Stars (2014), Nocturnal Animals (2016). This sort being movies that convey a sense of auteurist vision, independent daring, and a kind of artistic audacity that reminds me of that unpredictable, "Only in the '70s," off-the-wall quality that made so many films from that era so great. And so insane!

I love everything about The Substance: its immersive use of sound (incredible!), color, camera angles, editing, and locations. All is in service of the film's meticulously-crafted worldview. A worldview wherein absolutely everything feels excessive, yet nothing feels wasteful. 

Best of all, I think it's a very smart movie. It knows what it wants to say and, by refusing to spell everything out, doesn't mind if what's being expressed is misunderstood. Indeed, in some ways, it could be said that The Substance dares you to like it. 

A valid argument could be made that the film's points are made with a sledgehammer, but to that, I'd say, if in the year 2025 we're still having men legislate women's bodies, then perhaps a sledgehammer is necessary to get these (to me) obvious points across.

These guys don't think you're hot enough.
Daniel Knight and Jonathan Carley as Casting Directors

I have four sisters, and according to them, the "Seinfeld Syndrome"—their term for the phenomenon of utterly unprepossessing guys expecting physical perfection from women—is far from a social exaggeration. 

I found The Substance to be compelling, grotesque, ingenious, and as sharp as a razor. It moved me and grossed me out, and the ending, in particular, is so poignant (major waterworks) that it’s a shame the scene itself is so difficult to watch. Speaking of which, I've seen The Substance four times—well, make that three; the first time shouldn't count because I spent so much time covering my eyes—and each time, I continue to discover new things. There's something powerfully honest about a movie that examines how the marginalized can internalize and identify with society's hatred of them. 

The Final Metamorphosis

"Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous." 
                                           Nathanael West - The Day of the Locust -1939

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

For a film about an actress, set in Hollywood (filmed in France) and exploring the pressures placed on women to be perfect, I appreciate how Coralie Fargeat and her team utilize a visual storytelling style that has the viewer perpetually processing this new story (The Angry Young Woman has yet to become a trope, but I think it might be on its way) through the echo of familiar cinematic imagery. 

The power of images is immense, which is why it's crucial to ask ourselves who is behind the representations we see of ourselves in movies, TV, and advertising. If those controlling what we see are also the people who hate us, then their only vested interest is in teaching us how to hate ourselves. 

The obsession with perfection is the core theme of both
The Substance and Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan 

The Substance and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey
Grids and Richard Strauss' " Thus Spake Zarathustra feature in both films

These bold callbacks to Kubrick's The Shining heighten The Substance's use 

of confined spaces to create tension and convey a sense of imminent violence.

PERFORMANCES

This is a two-hander as far as I'm concerned, with both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley delivering full-throttle, pull-out-the-stops performances that are each unimaginable without the other. Qualley is new to me, but she had me in her pocket in the silent scene where Sue comes upon an indented easy chair and TV remote- evidence that Elisabeth has been wasting her allotted time doing nothing but watching television. The acute level of disapproving judgment and disgust that comes across Qualley's face at this moment speaks volumes about her character.  I don't know how she did it. 

American Beauty / Black Dahlia

I have to confess I'm not the best Demi Moore fan. I checked on IMDB to see how many of her films I'd seen...grand total: five (my favorite being Mortal Thoughts -1991). Before The Substance, I had not seen Moore in a movie since the 2007 Kevin Costner thriller Mr. Brooks, and I hadn't even REMEMBERED she was in it!

Moore came back into my awareness when a relative gifted me her 2019 memoir (which I initially met with a WTF? but it turns out the book is really terrific). And then, last year, she turned in a brief but powerful performance in the FX series FEUD: Capote vs. The Swans. And I was besotted. 

"You got it!" 

I would like to say that Demi Moore in The Substance gives a career-best performance, but it's already been established that I'm ill-equipped to make such a call. What I will say is that she gives my #1 favorite performance of this year. There's no better testament to the truth and humanity she brings to her character than the fact that The Substance works at all. In some ways, it is an absolutely lunatic movie that takes risk after risk with the audience's suspension of disbelief. Yet, it stays grounded due to the reality and meta-authenticity Moore delivers. 

In a largely silent role, Moore is wonderfully expressive in conveying everything that Elisabeth feels and experiences. Much like what I've always admired about Julie Christie, Moore meets the challenge of giving an essentially superficial character enough depth for us to relate to and empathize with.

BONUS MATERIAL

Reality + (2014)

In this early short film by Coralie Fargeat, she touches upon many of the same themes

explored in The Substance, only from a male perspective. You can watch it HERE.

Men aren't immune to the prevailing pressure to conform to unrealistic beauty standards--though, being men and inherently fragile, we find it necessary to disguise appearance obsession in "action" language: strong, fit, athletic, healthy, muscular, powerful, and so forth; or label it a "masculinity standard" and infuse it with an alpha illusion of self-actualization ("The only reason I work out is because I'm always my BEST me, and it gets me lots of sex. I'm the one in control."). In other words, anything to mask acknowledging the inherent passivity and loss of power that goes with courting the objectifying gaze.    

Revenge (2017)
Coralie Fargeat made her feature film directing debut with this action thriller
starring Matilda Lutz and Kevin Janssens

Actor Vincent Colombe, cast as one of the silent "suits" in The Substance, has featured roles in both Fargeat's Revenge and the short film Reality +.

Jurassic Fitness

Having enjoyed a long career in the fitness industry myself (1985 to 2019), I absolutely loved that Elisabeth Sparkle was an aerobics instructor! That brief "Sparkle Your Life with Elizabeth" sequence was like watching my past flash before my eyes. Every move executed in her class was one I'd done thousands of times. Even the toxic inspirational/abusive language rings true - "Think of those bikini bods! You wanna look like a giant jellyfish on the beach?"

The photo on the right is an outtake from a mercifully unproduced step-aerobics video project.

As a group instructor and personal trainer, I was pretty much immersed in a world that feeds on and perpetuates everything that The Substance is about (explaining in part why this movie so resonated with me). The promotion of oppressive beauty standards has always been a part of our culture, but the kind of perfectionist extremes The Substance speaks to have their roots in the "exercising for the aesthetics" trend of '80s fitness culture. 

In fact, that tiny figure in the far left side of the movie screencap at the bottom is me working as an extra in the 1985 John Travolta/Jamie Lee Curtis aerobics exercise opus called...you guessed it, "Perfect." 

Sue's "Pump It Up" exercise TV program is satirically over-the-top, but from 1980 to 1982, the cable network Showtime ran a truly hilariously overheated "erotic exercise" program called "Aerobicise" that makes Sue's show look like a documentary. There's a YouTube channel devoted to it HERE.

Take Care of Yourself 

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 -  2024

THE DRIVER'S SEAT 1974

Spoiler Alert: Crucial plot points are revealed in the interest of critical analysis and discussion

Elizabeth Taylor as Lise

Ian Bannen as Bill

Mona Washbourne as Mrs. Helen Fiedke

Andy Warhol as The English Lord

Guido Mannari as Carlo the Mechanic

Maxence Mailfort as Pierre The Right Type

The Driver’s Seat (alternate title: Identikit) is a dreamlike, metaphysical grim fairy tale whose non-linear narrative—in its recounting—sounds a little like a collaboration between Edgar Allan Poe and David Lynch. This visually distinguished Italian production casts a game Elizabeth Taylor (during her quirky, art film phase) as Lise, a raven-haired Goldilocks who visits Rome on a determined quest to find a man who is not too hot, not too cold, but “just right” to serve as her Dark Destiny escort. 

Whereas Goldilocks’ curiosity led her to three domesticated bears, Lise’s schizophrenia-fueled search for her Wizard of Odd merely yields three unmitigated bores: one ideologically overbearing (Ian Bannen), the other sexually assaultive (Guido Mannari), and the third, empathetically apathetic (Andy Warhol).

But like Joseph in the Bible—the one who also favored the conspicuous masquerade of a coat of many colors—Lise, whose name means “Pledged to God,” isn’t one to let a few setbacks and disappointments shake her faith in the incorruptible purity of her morbid pilgrim’s progress.

Every detail of Lise’s journey is planned to be just so. She purchases a violent paperback novel (The Walter Syndrome by Richard Neely, a 1970 thriller about a serial killer) and throughout her trip, holds it in front of her like an airport greeter. 

"It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a lesson: never talk to the sort
of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room
 for the servants to pick up"  - from the novella "The Driver's Seat"   

As is the wont of fairy tales, Lise is assisted on her journey by a Fairy Godmother figure (Mona Washbourne) who supplies the crucial athame for Lise’s tryst of fate with her (literal) “man to die for.” It’s also traditionally fitting that through her guidance, Lise comes to the Dorothy Gale-esque realization that the very thing she has been searching for so intently, has been there all along, right under her nose, the entire time.

Getting to the Point
"It's in my mind, and I can't think of anything else but that 
you and my nephew were meant for each other."

A movie as confounding as it is compelling, The Driver’s Seat is based on the 1970 novella of the same name by author Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). Spark, who considered The Driver’s Seat to be her best-written novel, labeled the book a “whydunnit” murder mystery because the story begins in the middle (Lise’s madness is already full-blown...we know not its source or duration, only that she has reached the end of her tether) and calls on the reader to disregard the story’s openly divulged victim and killer, concerning themselves instead with the motive. 

Easier said than done.

The Driver’s Seat is a mesmerizingly loopy movie that, while leaving me with more questions than answers, is imbued with such a poignant air of despairing sadness that it impressed me as something of a distaff Death in Venice. Which brings me to note that thus far in this essay, I’ve been being needlessly coy about something the novel reveals right off the bat: that Lise—in a perverse distortion of the fairy tale trope of the heroine waiting to be rescued by the idealized man—is searching for the perfect man to kill her. 

As a damsel in emotional distress who’s more desirous of release than rescue, Lise is staunch in her belief that the right man will “Recognize me for the woman that I am right away,” but is willing to leave only so much to chance. To speed things along and better facilitate the precise outcome she seeks, it’s necessary for Lise, like a Grim Reaper Dolly Levi, to be a woman who arranges things. 

Indeed, in taking the driver’s seat and micromanaging her predestined demise with the fastidious attention to detail of an overconscientious party planner, Lise, in this identity-crisis puzzler, assumes the identity of both murderer and victim.

Mrs. Fiedke- Will you feel a presence? Is that how you'll know?
Lise- Not really a presence. A lack of absence. That's what it is.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 

Directed and written with idiosyncratic assurance by Guiseppe Patroni Griffi (screenplay co-written by Raffaele La Capria), The Driver’s Seat is a dark (occasionally darkly comic) and melancholy portrait of a woman well past the verge of a nervous breakdown. 

Faithfully adapted from Spark’s oblique novella, the filmmakers have crafted an equally abstruse, illusory film that combines elements of a road movie (Lise’s journey being both literal and psychological), murder mystery (again, the why, not the who), and character study (everything that’s not presented as part of a police investigation into events that have yet to occur, is seen from Lise’s point of view). Along the way, The Driver’s Seat toys with concepts of perception-interpretation/identity-self as they relate to one of my longstanding favorite “human condition” themes: emotional alienation and the innate need to forge a connection with others.   

Our introduction to Lise is abrupt and totally lacking in qualifiers. First, encountered mid-argument with a saleswoman over a stain-resistant dress: “Do I look like the kind of person who spills things on my clothing?”… then Medusa-maned and mascaraed within an inch of her life as she embarks upon her gloomy Roman Holiday dressed like a color TV test pattern. 

The film takes the novel’s starts-in-the-middle story and future-intrudes-upon-the-present narrative structure and translates it into a deliberately fragmented, disorienting cinematic style that forces the audience to filter reality through Lise's alternatingly distracted/laser-focused gaze. Potentially mirroring Lise’s intensifying sense of isolation, the vision of the world we’re given feels lacking in warmth, subtly hostile, and ever on the brink of some sudden outbreak of violence. In this paranoid landscape of shadowy faces and elliptical conversations, everything and everyone feels just a little bit off.

Not the least, Lise herself, who, when her eccentrically flamboyant appearance isn’t drawing stares, eliciting giggles, or the haughty disdain of near-identical coil-coiffed salesgirls, moves about in an almost trancelike haze.

Lise, the Kook Magnet
Scottish actor Ian Bannen is positively brilliant as the macrobiotic food nut whose diet requires an orgasm a day. Nearly everyone Lise comes into contact with either fuels or feeds off of her erratic mood swings and neurotic compulsions. 

It’s ultimately revealed that there is a method behind Lise’s behavioral madness and that everything from her provocative appearance (we've seen that in her day-to-day life she dresses very conservatively) to her attention-getting conduct is calculated for deliberate effect. She’s seeking to make an impression, to leave a mark, to be remembered, to be identified. An attempt, conceivably, to achieve in death something she lacked in life.  

The Driver's Seat was released as Identikit everywhere but in the US. An Identikit is a system of criminal identification that collects facial feature details from witness descriptions and combines them to create a composite portrait of the individual they are seeking.  

The Driver's Seat narrative unfolds in a time-warp fashion, with Lise and the Italian police engaged in a simultaneous, dual manhunt. Both are in search of a killer, Lise before, and the police after. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The first time I became aware of The Driver’s Seat was in 1973 (was I the only kid who read Weekly Variety in high school?). At the time, Taylor and Burton were in the throes of the first of their eventual two divorces, so despite Taylor’s comparative irrelevance vis-à-vis the New Hollywood, both she and the film were generating plenty of publicity traction. With Glenda Jackson, Jane Fonda, Karen Black, and Faye Dunaway crowding my movie infatuations back then, Elizabeth Taylor was more a gossip magazine stalwart and movie star for my parents than an actress I paid much attention to. 

Taylor had been effectively off my radar since 1968’s Secret Ceremony (which would make a great double bill with The Driver’s Seat, by the way), but my interest was reignited when she starred in the surprisingly effective mystery thriller Night Watch (1973). When I read that the forthcoming The Driver’s Seat (made between the movies Ash Wednesday and The Bluebird) was also to be a thriller, I was seriously stoked and eagerly anticipated its release. 

But like several other ‘70s releases that pinned their hopes on the Nostalgia Craze appeal of faded-luster Classic Hollywood (Mae West’s Sextette; Billy Wilder’s Fedora; Marlene Dietrich and Kim Novak in Just A Gigolo), The Driver’s Seat opened in theaters with all the fanfare of an ex-mobster entering the witness protection program. Despite Elizabeth Taylor’s star power, The Driver’s Seat (Taylor’s first completely foreign-made film) struggled to get American distribution and was barely shown outside of a handful of major cities. In fact, it wasn’t released in my neck of the woods (San Francisco) until 1978, by which time I had graduated from high school and moved to Los Angeles. 

Instead of opening in arthouses where it belonged, when The Driver's Seat finally had its San Francisco release in August of 1978, it played at one of the grindhouse theaters on Market Street on a double bill with a Sophia Loren movie I'd never heard of.

For the longest time The Driver’s Seat existed as one of those movies more talked about than actually seen. And, as so often happens in such cases, its unavailability gave it a cult cachet. When I finally saw it in the mid-to-late ‘80s (a VHS rental, I think), The Driver’s Seat had earned the reputation of being one of Taylor’s so-bad-it’s-good camp-fests, surpassing even BOOM! (1968) in outlandishness. 

Armed with little else to go on, that's the perspective through which I approached it and enjoyed it. But as I’ve learned in the years since—after several revisits and reading the novella—watching The Driver’s Seat exclusively through the prism of its arthouse camp appeal is like not really seeing it at all.

Nothing goes well for Lise when she's not in the driver's seat

If the tenets of camp embrace artifice, stylistic excess, and a preoccupation with offbeat sex, then The Driver’s Seat more than qualifies for the classification. With its dialogue that wouldn’t sound out of place in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: “When I diet, I diet. When I orgasm, I orgasm. I don’t believe in mixing the two cultures,”; Neely O’Hara-suitable outbursts: (Lise) “Well then, don’t just stand there staring at me like a chicken with one eye! Help me!”; and scenes of Taylor writhing around on a bed clutching her breasts, or Andy Warhol popping up like he’s en route to his Love Boat cameo, 12 years early…there’s no denying that The Driver’s Seat can be a delightfully kitschy howl.

I've never been sure if the bandage on Lise's left wrist is a character clue related to what was briefly disclosed early in the film regarding her history of mental illness, or merely evidence of the famously accident-prone actress' latest mishap.

But I contend—and this goes back to my interpreting the movie as something of a fractured fairy tale about a lonely and unbalanced woman’s romantic obsession with death—that The Driver’s Seat is such an unusual, even impenetrable story told with so few narrative guardrails that responding to it purely as camp was just the easiest, most entry-level route of access for me (laughter often being the go-to when one is confused or made uncomfortable by something ). But when I stopped trying to laugh at The Driver’s Seat, it surprised me how much I was moved and disturbed by it.

Lise-  I feel homesick.
Bill- Homesick for what?
Lise- My loneliness. I want to go back home to feel all my loneliness again.

Okay, I admit it. That exchange gave me waterworks. 

PERFORMANCES

While the results of her efforts tended to vary significantly, I nevertheless have to hand it to Elizabeth Taylor for not taking the predictable career path her global motion picture celebrity afforded. She could easily have gone on churning out formulaic, commercially successful potboilers like The Sandpiper and The V.I.Ps, but throughout the late '60s and ‘70s, she instead pursued daring, unconventional roles in often aggressively offbeat films.

I rank Elizabeth Taylor’s performance in The Driver’s Seat as one of her most emotionally resonant of this period, especially in the film’s latter third. It's then that the heretofore performative aspects of Lise’s madness grow more internal, evoking a weary despondency that’s truly heartbreaking. 

But paradoxically speaking, while I think Taylor is definitely the best thing in the film and its principal driving force (see what I did there?), I also think she’s its biggest liability—or rather, her inescapable Taylor-ness is. The Driver’s Seat is one of my favorite ‘70s films, capturing the darkness of Nixon-era nihilism, post-Women’s Lib uncertainty, and “Me Era” selective self-delusions. But how accessible can any of this be when the most significant obstacle anyone watching The Driver’s Seat is faced with is trying to forget you’re watching Elizabeth Taylor? 

I'd read that at one time, director Luchino Visconti had once hoped to make The Driver’s Seat with Glenda Jackson. Oh, my God! Jackson's casting would have been ideal, what with her talent and no-nonsense gravitas making the film easily imaginable as a totally camp-free experience (as much as a Visconti film can be divested of camp, I suppose). While I'm sure Taylor's participation was integral to financing and getting the film green-lit, I can't help but mourn the subtleties lost. Take, for example, the dramatic significance of Lise's adoption of such a luridly flashy appearance for her sojourn in Italy. Signaling as it does Lise's identity crisis and mental disintegration, its impact was considerably defanged by the fact that by the 1980s--when I saw it---Taylor had adopted this very look as her personal style during her José “Shake your head, darling!” Eber, big hair, big-makeup period.

Lise's "madwoman" eye makeup was all the rage by 1980 (Brooke Shields, Vogue, 1980).
No wonder the only thing I thought about the first time I saw The Driver's Seat
was how incredibly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor's eyes are.

Documents in the Muriel Spark Archives at the National Library of Scotland reveal that the author was happy with the casting of Elizabeth Taylor, and the two exchanged Mutual Admiration Society letters before production began.

In later years, Spark has maintained that she thinks Taylor did a good job in the film, only that she was perhaps miscast: “Elizabeth Taylor was very good, but she looked too healthy to be the neurotic girl. 

There was no way in which Elizabeth Taylor could look as if she wanted to die. She looked as if she wanted to drink.”   Muriel Spark -  SF Examiner May 21, 1986

It's unclear whether Lise is pursuing or following her destiny, but I love how
the film signifies her being on the right path by its use of a glowing orb of light. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Dangerous Women. 

Lise’s last words in The Driver’s Seat are “Kill me!” Gloria’s (Jane Fonda) last words in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? are “I’m ready.” Theresa’s (Diane Keaton) last words in Looking for Mr. Goodbar are “Do it!” 

Was this a trend or something? I kinda think so.

To me, these films, with their tragically bleak conclusions, form a trilogy that encapsulates the male-centric New Hollywood's perception of what I call the 'Dangerous Woman.' This character, a contemporary, post-The Feminine Mystique iteration of the disillusioned Angry Young Man of ‘50s New Wave cinema, is seen as a threat to the established order, and her only 'out' or 'Happy Ending' is often depicted as self-destruction.

"It was as though something came out of her--some force that all women feel latent in themselves...stifled. A potential for catastrophe. In her, it was terrible. Terrifying." 
- A witness describing Lise to the police

What connects The Driver’s Seat to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Looking for Mr. Goodbar is that they are all about women…angry, frustrated, or rebellious women…who, for one reason or another, have reached the frayed end of what Alexandre Dumas called “the slender thread” by which life and fortune hang. 

 Movies in the '70s gave us literal armies of angry, disillusioned, and rebellious men who were perceived to be heroic in their discontent. Not so much with women. 

Female characters embodying the same disillusionment were viewed differently onscreen. Maybe because there are audiences, male and female alike, who can identify with the male desire to stick it to "The Man" easier than they can get behind a woman sticking it to "Men" in general. 

I like to think that the time has passed when death is seen as the only recourse and outcome for cinema’s 'Dangerous Women.' But provocatively, in this day and age where the fundamental human right of body autonomy is still a debated subject, it gives me food for thought to ponder how The Driver’s Seat presents Lise’s suicide (or assisted suicide, if you will)—the kind of act traditionally associated with the loss of control—as something so controlled and plotted that it takes on an air of self-actualization. As though Lise is exercising the only power she may feel she has, the power to do with herself as she pleases. The ultimate exercising of her right to choose. Even if it's death.

And if that doesn't sound like a Grim(m) Fairy Tale, I don't know what does.

Into The Woods

BONUS MATERIAL:

In 2015, The National Theater of Scotland staged a theatrical version of The Driver's Seat adapted and directed by Laurie Sansom. Starring Morven Christie as Lise. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2024