Quitting ‘the substance’: her age anxiety and her resistance in the AI era

In an industry that long privileges youth, generative AI is challenging Hollywood performers’ presence and turning their age anxiety into an existential and ontological threat through algorithmic classification and replacement. This article examines how Hollywood actresses embrace ageing and identifies multiple technologies of the self that help transform ageing from a taxing burden into narrative capital. By combining Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological account of the actor’s four bodies with Don Ihde’s postphenomenological analysis of the technological body, this enquiry conceptualises how actresses resist age anxiety in the age of AI into a framework that spans material–physiological, cultural–representational, role–performative, and symbolic–capital dimensions. Taking (2024) as a cyborg allegory of rejuvenation, the study reveals the meanness and multi-(in)stabilities of curative yet toxic quasi-AI technologies. Demi Moore, as the film’s leading actress, extends the cautionary themes of ageing, technology, and fractured subjectivity through her own star body, career trajectory, and cultural capital. To quit the substance is not to renounce technologies, but to inhabit their multi-(in)stabilities critically, to re-imagine ageing, embodiment, and authenticity within an algorithmic culture, and to reconceptualise mobilising age anxiety into techno-ethical self-formation.