The Substance as Mythological Storytelling

Non-Fiction by TJ Rowley

TJ Rowley’s "The Substance as Mythological Storytelling" explores Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a modern myth. The piece examines the tale’s ambiguity, its societal implications, and its influence on contemporary storytelling.

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“Everything is true,” said Robert Louis Stevenson. “Only, the opposite is true, too.” His novel, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, lives in this ambiguous space where everything and its opposite is true. The sketch of this classic tale is well-known: Dr. Jekyll is an upstanding member of society who – through means of a pseudoscientific potion – transforms into the powerful, unrestrained, and eventually monstrous Hyde. In the standard telling, Stevenson’s novel shows the risks of giving into one’s dark side; Hyde’s animalistic, conscience-free behavior lives inside Jekyll and, once the door to that side is opened, it cannot be closed. But as Philip Ball points out in The Modern Myths[1], the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde is much more ambiguous than light-versus-dark. He asks if Jekyll is really so virtuous: Jekyll is an upstanding member of society only because he represses his “gaiety of disposition” below a mask with “an almost moribund sense of shame.” Though Jekyll believes that Hyde’s “love of life is wonderful,” he suppresses that love to comply with societal expectations. Is enslaving his desires to civility so admirable? The tale’s ambiguity leaves the answer elusive, even a century later.

Ball’s Modern Myths argues that mythology did not end with figures of antiquity like Achilles and Hercules; mythology is a tradition, a mode of storytelling with modern examples. Those examples include Frankenstein, Dracula, Robinson Crusoe and – in particular -- Jekyll and Hyde. Like the mythological figures of antiquity, these modern myths echo through repeated retellings. Since the stage adaptation in 1886, Jekyll and Hyde has been re-told in over a hundred stage and film versions, transforming and pollinating other stories along the way. For example, Ball argues that depictions of Hyde as a snarling beast inspired werewolf stories. Depictions of Hyde as the murderous dark side of a seemingly respectable man inspired the slasher genre.

But many modern stories have enduring appeal; why do some stories become modern myths? Among many factors: ambiguity.

Ambiguity is critical: if a story dogmatically asserts a social or ethical code, it is akin to a prescriptive religion; if the story arrives at a clean resolution, it is a moral fable. Thus, a story becomes a myth only if it has moral ambiguity. Their lack of moral fixity allows myth to escape authorial control, to influence and be influenced by popular culture across generations, and to seed multiple potentially contradictory retellings.[2] Because they permit multiple interpretations, modern myths do not give easy answers. Rather, they are vehicles for thinking about problems – often unsettling ones we are only unconsciously aware of.

So Jekyll and Hyde is so fertile for retellings because it isn’t a morality tale about light versus dark. The tale is ambiguous and, as Ball points out, its interpretation depends on whether you read the potion as “an elixir of liberation or a draught of doom.”[3] That ambiguity is the source of the myth’s potency: Jekyll and Hyde can be endlessly retold with different desires repressed by different societal codes yet retain the same basic form. For example, if we apply that storytelling form to masculine desires repressed by consumerist society, we have 1996’s Fight Club. (That novel makes the connection explicit: when the narrator says it “seems like I have more than one side sometimes,” his lover replies: “More than one side? You’re Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass!”)

We see ambiguity play out in the recent re-telling of Jekyll and Hyde, 2024’s The Substance. In that story, Elisabeth (Demi Moore) is an aging Hollywood star fired from her aerobics show because the show’s producer believes she is too old. Seeking a second chance in a younger body, Elisabeth takes “the substance,” an intravenous drug, and births a new self named Sue (Margaret Qualley). Elisabeth and Sue do not exist simultaneously; while one is awake, the other is in a vacant, catatonic state. This lasts for seven days, after which they fall unconscious and the other awakens for her week. The instructions delivered with the substance make clear that they must switch places every seven days to regenerate the preserving fluid. If one body remains awake for longer, the other body begins to degrade. Thus arises the tension between the older self (called the “matrix”) and the younger self (the alter ego).

The parallels with Jekyll and Hyde are clear: the protagonist consumes a substance that creates a new self. Jekyll says that upon transforming into Hyde, he “felt younger, lighter, happier in my body.” Though Sue’s striking beauty contrasts with Hyde’s monstrous appearance, she, like Hyde, leads a much freer life than Elisabeth. Her good looks win her the role as Elisabeth’s replacement on the aerobics show and also afford her greater social status and recognition. And as Hyde does to Jekyll, Sue begins to overwhelm Elisabeth’s life. Defying the instructions to return consciousness to Elisabeth after seven days, Sue draws from Elisabeth’s time and stays awake for months. Only severe physical side-effects force Sue to return consciousness to Elisabeth, who wakes to find her body rotting. In response, and just like Jekyll, Elisabeth tries suppressing her alter ego by withholding the substance that causes their transformation. And, just as in Stevenson’s novel, those efforts are unsuccessful: the alter ego wakes without needing the substance.

The Substance makes its critiques boldly and very overtly. There is nothing subtle, for example, in our disgust at seeing the producer (Dennis Quaid) wetly stuff shrimp into his slapping lips with sauce-smeared fingers, nor in the firehose of blood Elisabeth sprays on her audience in the movie’s climax. My objective here is to enquire what The Substance leaves ambiguous and how that ambiguity participates in Jekyll and Hyde’s mythological storytelling.

The primary ambiguity is whether Elisabeth and Sue are separate consciousnesses. This is important because it determines how the substance fulfills Elisabeth’s wish. We all, consciously or unconsciously, want the vigor of youth; in Elisabeth’s position, we would want to be able to step into Sue’s youthful shoes. The substance fulfills this wish only if Elisabeth has some consciousness of Sue’s experiences. If she doesn’t, then her joy is only vicarious. Their psychic connection (if any) is thus crucial to the type of wish the substance fulfills: to live vicariously through someone else, or to live as someone else.

The answer initially appears straightforward: the instructions delivered with the substance explain that only one of Elisabeth and Sue may be awake at one time. Certain aspects of the film confirm they are psychologically separate. Both Sue and Elisabeth refer to one another in the third person. Both mistreat one another’s bodies because the one suffers no ill effects from leaving the other on a cold floor for a week in whatever manner they fell. And both are surprised by what the other has done during her week of activity: for example, Sue is shocked at the disgusting state Elisabeth leaves their living room, implying she had not seen it while Elisabeth was conscious.

But other aspects of The Substance imply that Elisabeth and Sue have a psychological link. For one, a scene deleted from the original screenplay demonstrates that Elisabeth has Sue’s memories. Before she meets the casting directors to become the new face of Elisabeth’s old show, Sue is stopped at the building entrance by a security guard. Though the guard initially refuses Sue entry because she does not have ID, he is spellbound by her beauty. “It sure is pretty windy today,” he says, and notes that if the wind happened to cause his pen to fall on the ground, he would have to pick it up and wouldn’t see Sue sneak by. He then drops the pen, allowing Sue access. But when Elisabeth tries to access the same building later to recover her belongings, the guard forbids her access because she also does not have ID. He does not offer to let Elisabeth by in the same way he did Sue, prompting Elisabeth to remark: “I guess it’s not ‘windy’ today?”[4]

The original script also suggests that Sue has some awareness of inhabiting Elisabeth’s body. When Sue discovers the decrepit state Elisabeth has left their apartment, the original script has Sue mutter to herself that “I can’t go back inside her…she’s gross.”[5] But the final script trims this to: “I just can’t…she’s gross.”

These modifications to the original script thus contribute to the ambiguity – perhaps intentionally. Reviews of the film evidence this ambiguity: Indie Wire says that Elisabeth and Sue “are a single consciousness between two bodies” and Medium calls them “dual bodies, interconnected by a shared consciousness.” But BFI is not so sure, saying only that “they clearly share some slither of consciousness” while Mashable comes to the contrary position that "When they swap, Elisabeth remembers nothing of Sue's experiences." The SF Chronicle confidently says "Fargeat gets across a remarkable amount of information” so that “we…understand the extent to which the two selves share a consciousness and the extent to which they don’t." But the New York Times says that "The logic is also not airtight, especially when it comes to whether, and how, Sue and Elisabeth share a consciousness” and The Observer says that “this is not the film to look to for realism and internal logic. Fargeat rather glosses over the question of whether there is a shared consciousness between the two women.” [6]

The extent to which Elisabeth and Sue share a consciousness is turned on its head in the film’s climax by showing that they can be conscious simultaneously. As Elisabeth attempts to kill Sue, Sue wakes and defends herself. From then on, both matrix and alter ego are simultaneously conscious in separate bodies.

The ambiguity compounds when Sue – physically disintegrating and needing a new double - injects herself with the substance, which causes her to birth a monster composed of both herself and Elisabeth. Is this monster a culmination of their consciousnesses, or a separate entity altogether? Is there a Sue at all, or is the substance itself a delusion to explain a split personality? The film eschews a firm grasp, escaping between fingers like liquid viscera.

The same ambiguity is present in Jekyll and Hyde. The novel is neither told from Jekyll nor Hyde’s points of view, but from a friend of Jekyll’s. Almost everything about the potion we learn from a letter by Jekyll read only after he is dead and no longer available to be questioned on its contents. His letter that says that – much like how Sue breaks the rules we knew by being awake at the same time as Elisabeth – Hyde began manifesting without Jekyll taking the potion. The ambiguity invites the reader to question whether the transformation from Jekyll to Hyde is a scientific one or a psychological one. Perhaps the physical substance is irrelevant to Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde; perhaps all that was needed was for Jekyll to open the psychological door to Hyde’s conscience-free life. The potential for debate is what fuels retellings of the story.

The point is not that this is confused storytelling. It is mythological storytelling, a fever dream that avoids conclusive interpretation. Perhaps The Substance is about society turning a woman’s nostalgia for youth into a pathology. Perhaps it is about a parasocial relationship between fan and celebrity, tinged with all the longing, jealousy, and self-hatred that those relationships can have. Perhaps it is the story of two women pitted against one another by society, but who – via a firehose of blood in the finale – have the last laugh. Our answer depends upon the unconscious need the myth answers: “Myth is where we go to work out our psychic quandaries: to explore questions that do not have definitive answers, to seek purpose and meaning in a world beyond our power to control or comprehend.”[7] The Substance may be far away from Stevenson’s original myth, but as Ball says, myths “permit…new readings beyond their author’s horizons”[8]

The myth retold in The Substance is the myth of the hated self, the parts you loathe, the parts you long to recover, the parts you want credited by society, the parts that resent society for the demands it makes in return. Future adaptations of this myth may probe these ambiguities further – for how conscious are we of these parts of ourselves, and who would we become if we were?

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[1] Philip Ball, The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination. University of Chicago Press, 2021.

[2] Ball, Modern Myths, 12-19.

[3] Ball, Modern Myths, 158.

[4] Coralie Fargeat, The Substance. 23 December 2020, pages 34, 44.

[5] Ibid, page 107.

[6] David Ehrlich, “‘The Substance’ Review.” Indie Wire, May 19, 2024.

Cy Alcala, “The Substance (2024).” Medium. October 12, 2024.

Kelli Weston, “The Substance: a thrilling but ultimately hollow body horror.” BFI. May 24, 2024.

Kristy Puchko, “‘The Substance’ is the perfect movie to kick off 2025.” Mashable. January 3, 2025.

Mick LaSalle, “‘The Substance’ review.” San Francisco Chronicle. September 16, 2024.

Alissa Wilkinson, “‘The Substance’ Review: An Indecent Disclosure.” New York Times. September 19, 2024.

Wendy Ide, “‘The Substance’ review.” The Observer. September 22, 2024.

[7] Ball, Modern Myths, 19.

[8] Ball, Modern Myths, 156.

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TJ Rowley is a speculative fiction writer whose debut dystopian novel Persistence of Vision (Dixi Books, UK) came out in 2023. You may have seen him at the When Words Collide or North American Science Fiction Convention.