Bakhtin’s Model of the Grotesque Body in Coralie Fargeat’s Film The Substance and Split Personality

Coralie Fargeat’s film The Substance (2024) presents a model of the modern subject’s personality, a key feature of which is the internal conflict between the structures of the self. On the one hand, there is the outwardly ideal, successful narcissistic self-embodied by the young copy, Sue; on the other hand, there is the ‘bad’ part of the personality which must be hidden, denied recognition, suppressed, and exploited. The interaction between the new and the old, the dying and the nascent evokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue and carnival, particularly the idea of the ever-becoming grotesque body that unites death and birth, youth and old age, praise and abuse into a continuous whole. However, the film’s system of imagery excludes the optimistic component of the carnivalesque grotesque body model. Neither part of the protagonist’s split personality is capable of engaging in a dialogic exchange, the process of interaction based on the awareness of one’s own wholeness and understanding oneself as the Other. The impossibility of synthesizing the fragmented parts of the personality results in a monstrous mutation — a pseudo-grotesque body of the characters, incapable of sustaining life.