If we could wish just one new acting Oscar into existence, there’s a decent chance it’d be Best Performance While Shoving Shrimp Into Your Suck Hole, and the only person who’d ever win it would be Dennis Quaid. Quaid has only a small part in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, but it’s a textbook case of understanding the assignment: Representing the entire gaze of male patriarchy by playing a network exec who conducts his dissection of the female form while schlorping down crustaceans with grotesque, hyper-focused gusto. It’s not subtle, it’s not pretty, and it’s a great introduction to just how invasive Fargeat’s camera intends to get.
Can you believe that someone tried to take this from us?
This is per a recent interview Fargeat gave to Variety, talking about the various notes she got on The Substance during the beief period when Universal was involved in plans for its distribution, including a request that she “Calm down with the shrimp.” Noting that all of the critiques were related to the film’s full-tilt pursuit of extremity, Fargeat nevertheless said she was genuinely surprised to get the note about Quaid’s performance/lunch. “From all the things in the movie that I thought could bother people, the one that I could have never imagined was the shrimp. It came only from guys, I might say. Like, ‘Come on, calm down with the shrimp.’ And I think it made them uncomfortable because it was portrayed in a way that felt over the top.”
In her conversation with Variety, Fargeat makes it clear that none of these notes were heeded, which might explain why Universal departed the film with a quickness. She says she was especially resistant to any proposed alterations about the final form taken on by Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley’s characters, a.k.a. “The Monster.” “The monster, I think, is the most vulnerable part of myself that I expressed in the film,” Fargeat explained. “So when people rejected it, I doubted a lot. But then I thought, ‘Even monsters have to conform to some beauty standards?’ That was absurd to me. I wasn’t allowed to express my vision of a monster? How many women have been able to express what a monster is to them? I decided to take the risk until the end, to trust me. If I don’t love [the monster], if I don’t accept it, who is going to?” Fargeat stuck to her guns, Universal departed, and now the movie is nominated for Best Picture—even if our own Shrimp Suck Hole Oscar dreams remain sadly unfulfilled.
