Narcissister’s “Voyage Into Infinity” at Pioneer Works (Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk)

“What has been used on one side is lost on the other side. There’s no going back,” lectures a stern voice at the other end of the telephone after Demi Moore’s frantic has-been actress turned Suzanne Somers’-like exercise guru Elisabeth Sparkle calls customer service to whine about a hitch in her new, ill-advised foray into experimental age-reversal technology called “The Substance.” The issue? Elisabeth wakes up from her 7-and-some-change-day corpse coma on her tiled bathroom floor to find that her idyllic youthful clone-alter Sue, played gleefully by Margaret Qualley, strayed too far past her allotted week-long consciousness time frame, sucking up an extra couple of hours from Elisabeth’s Stabilizer spinal fluid. This results in Elisabeth’s waking discovery that her index finger withered into a decrepit, dried-up witch talon that wouldn’t be out of place in a Target-purchased Halloween display. It’s this gnarled finger, alongside the fatalistic warning of “There’s no going back,” that sends Coralie Fargeat’s much-hyped, over-memed, gross-out shock-a-thon spectacle The Substance careening from a body horror endurance test to an instant entry into the canon of aging-phobic hagsploitation.

Things going poorly with futuristic snake oil cure-alls or dystopian medical advances aren’t too surprising. Medically induced disaster seems inevitable as soon as Elisabeth arrives at a dingy back alley, crawling through a riot gate, to grab her Substance kit from a sterile lockbox, or even earlier when she’s encouraged as a perfect patient by a hospital aide who looks like a cross between Matt Rife and incel-produced chad memes. But what is Elisabeth’s choice? She’s been humiliated and shit-canned from her tacky exercise show by exaggeratedly sleazy entertainment exec Harvey, played by Dennis Quaid who I’m convinced, with his over-the-top delivery of lines like “Pretty girls should always SMILE!” and sauntering walk, is channeling Vince McMahon. Obviously, the only solution is to back-birth another, younger version of herself, the singularly named Sue who dominates the exercise market with a new porny take on the genre. “Pump It Up!” is less about getting housewives off the sofa and more about men cranking it in their man caves. Yet it, to Elisabeth’s dismay, propels her into superstardom.

Demi Moore as Elisabeth in The Substance (Courtesy of Mubi)

At two hours and twenty-ish minutes, The Substance is a tad long and could have used some culling. I mean, how many scenes do viewers need of Elisabeth being tormented by Sue’s billboard-level success from her gorgeous (and increasingly chaotically destroyed) Los Angeles penthouse? And even I, a lover of movie references, feel like we’ve hit a tipping point in which filmmakers equate nods to other films with “good” filmmaking. The Substance tips its cinematic hat to Cronenberg’s The Fly and, with a certain chicken drumstick scene, Videodrome, Carrie, The Shining, Basket Case, Society, and, with the final strained head-shot, the iconic Medusa-like poster art for Andrzej Sulawski’s wacko Possession. Outside of the horror genre, some of the highly saturated, high-camp exercise shows, along with Sue and Elisabeth’s growing animosity, reminded me of Showgirls.

However, The Substance manages to transcend film-buff-pleasing pastiche for a few reasons, not the least of which are the stunningly raw and relentless performances by the two leads. Demi Moore, in particular, is an inspired casting choice, leaning into women’s visceral and, at times, terrifying level of self-criticism and self-loathing. One of the most memorable—and scary—scenes centers around Elisabeth frantically getting ready for a date. She repeatedly returns to the mirror in her sterile bathroom to fix her makeup or add a scarf. Ever unsatisfied, she loses it, mussing up her lipstick and rubbing it all over her face in a violent fury that is somehow more deeply unsettling than the intended gag-inducers like giant stitch-sewing, pus-oozing injection wounds, or fire hoses of blood splatter. I was waiting for her to pluck her own eyes out! Of course, that wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility in a film designed, from its in-your-face visuals to its malignantly aurally abusive sound design (the worst being Harvey’s shrimp-slucking), to be as balls-to-the-wall batshit as possible. Much has been made of The Substance’s audience-walking, dry heave-inspiring appeal yet, while the film is certainly nasty, it’s also so outrageous that it’s hard to take seriously. Purposefully so. The Substance is, at its heart, a comedy. A dark, dark, DARK one, sure, but even the film’s opening image of an egg birthing a second yolk with a quick ploop courtesy of a Substance injection is funny.

A warning from The Substance (Courtesy of Mubi)

The film’s humor and its series of bolder and bolder shockers are hard not to admire as Elisabeth’s losses and rapid, increasingly monstrous insta-aging don’t stop with one nasty knobby fingie. At its heart, The Substance is a female take on The Picture of Dorian Gray if both Dorian and his portrait were sentient and fighting for control as they accelerated toward mutually assured destruction. Once started—or really, injected and created, their dual fate seems unavoidable, like a teeth-and-ear-losing ball rolling downhill. Again: What has been used on one side is lost on the other side. There’s no going back.

That quote not only perfectly defines The Substance but also fully illuminates another jaw-dropper I saw recently concerning clones, oppressive beauty standards, female rage, exercise balls, equal parts action and reaction, and anarchic shockers: artist and performer Narcissister’s Voyage Into Infinity at Pioneer Works. The only Substance-ial thing missing was eggs; eggs being a particularly thrilling prop in one of Narcissister’s endless yoni-centered performances. Rather than a balancing act between an aging star and her sci-fi replacement, cause and effect in Voyage Into Infinity was rendered kinetically through a ginormous Rube Goldberg machine that filled the entire expansive main hall of the Red Hook art space like a gigantic version of the board game Mouse Trap. Even before the performance began, the machine itself inspired awe: scattered yet clearly precisely placed ladders, pipes, Home Depot buckets, curtains, tires, swings, a see-saw, a tilt table, and, standing on a platform, the only recognizable “fine art” object, a Greco-Roman sculpture of a male discus thrower. It was equal parts utilitarian and whimsical.

Narcissister’s “Voyage Into Infinity” at Pioneer Works (Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk)

Rather than enacted by invisible hands like Fischli & Weiss’s Goldberg-ian video The Way Things Go, one of many inspirations for Voyage Into Infinity, this Rube Goldberg machine activated through the manipulation of three—I’ll call them all—Narcissisters. Each performer wore a froofy girlish dress, a bowed wig with bratty doll-like curls, and what would a Narcissister performance be without the ever-present 1960s mannequin mask. This mask is 20th-century white woman ideal incarnate: wide-set cat eyes, a pert nose, and full (but not too full) lips. The pinched Caucasian features on the mask are not neutral despite its uncanny emotionlessness. Similarly, the only thing that distinguished these Narcissister copies was color—not only the shades of their dresses and wigs, but their skin tone with a white, light-skinned, and darker-skinned Narcissister.

Instead of elbowing their way out of a soon-to-be hag’s body like in The Substance, each Narcissister entered the stage, one by one, from a small dollhouse like Alice in Wonderland, playing up the childlike element reflected by their costuming. The first appeared holding a flaming candelabra, searching around the busy set-wide kinetic sculpture as if drifting around an abandoned junked mansion in a Southern Gothic ghost story. Despite her wandering candlelit curiosity (or presumed anyway since the mannequin mask doesn’t exactly leave room for perceivable emotions), the arrival of the entire trio revealed this aimlessness as a ruse. These industrious triplets had a job to do! Their mission? To set this Rube Goldberg machine in motion in fits and starts that included some sparking pyrotechnics. In one of the first acts, the machine knocked over that inconveniently masculine discus thrower statue with a thud. Pause. The Narcissisters individually stepped into his spot, mimicking his throwing stance with an appropriately alternate replacement, a fancy, easily breakable china plate. So feminine and fragile!

Narcissister’s “Voyage Into Infinity” at Pioneer Works (Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk)

At least this had a purpose that the audience could comprehend. Most of the Narcissisters’ determined labor seemed driven by motivations only known by them. Why did they light a spinny wheel on fire that connects to a flaming metal chute, only to roll metal balls into a metal bucket with a clang? Beats me. Why was one Narcissister loading up another’s bike with plastic buckets so she could ride over to the third who stacked these buckets only to, then, topple them with a thud? Who knows! Or why was a Narcissister riding a seesaw while another poured water from an enormous pitcher with a loud trickling pissy stream? Your guess is as good as mine! Unlike Pee-wee Herman’s breakfast machine, there was no concluding pay-off here, no task solved albeit by comically meandering means. Which surprisingly didn’t make it any less satisfying. And, while I emphasize all the clanging, thudding, trickling sounds here (along with the pop-pop-sizzles of the rampant pyrotechnics), they were also in sonic conversation with an ambient (later discovered to be live) score by musician Holland Andrews.

Andrews’s score would not have been out of place at an avant-garde circus. Likewise, Voyage Into Infinity felt part circus, part magic show, part Warner Bros cartoon, part children’s storybook, part punk burlesque show, and part horror movie. It wasn’t just the uncanny uneasiness of the Narcissister mask. There was a delightfully audience-torturing strain that ran just beneath the surface of the show like the predictable yet no less nerve-jangling jumpscare of the Narcissisters dancing in sync with a bundle of multicolored balloons (I couldn’t help but think of It), only to roll all over them with grating pops. This was further pushed by the grand (almost) finale in which a curtain collapsed, revealing Holland Andrews fronting a full band for a riotously deafening version of the show’s title inspiration, Bad Brains’ song “Voyage Into Infinity.” I hesitate to give too much away of what the now-nude-plus-merkin Narcissister(s) did during this scene (Narcissister is planning on turning this performance into a video), but I’ll just say that along with the aforementioned references, the performance also reminded me of a now-sadly-closed Seaport bar, the Iron Horse where bartenders used to swing atop the bar and light it on fire to the tune of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” I had to restrain myself from cheering.

Narcissister’s “Voyage Into Infinity” at Pioneer Works (Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk)

One could watch Voyage Into Infinity for the sheer entertainment value alone, not a small feat for an art performance, which usually trades on audience punishment more than enjoyment. Yet, Narcissister tossed just enough weighted symbolism in the audience’s direction to provide a lot to chew on after leaving Red Hook. Several of the objects used in the Rube Goldberg machine came with a history related to gender, race, and/or sexuality, whether the flaming “Catherine wheel” torture device or the discus thrower statue. The latter is the inclusion that blew my mind after a bit of curious post-show research revealed that it was, as Narcissister told The Art Newspaper, “a replica of a statue that Hitler owned.” With some further Googling, yep, Hitler really did love this fucking statue, as seen in this proud and bleary-eyed photograph. In fact, the sculpture, known as Discobolus Palombara, stars in a notable scene in Leni Riefenstahl’s physique pictorial propaganda film Olympia. In Olympia, the Discobolus Palombara emerges out of a fog, transforming into an Aryan man spinning the discus in slo-mo. It’s also worth noting that this film was made in the wake of the 1936 Olympics, a landmark event partially, as explained in Norman Ohler’s excellent Nazi drug history Blitzed, for sending the Nazis into a panicked methamphetamine frenzy as they attempted to find a magic pill to compete with Jesse Owens’s athletic prowess, which, of course, they attributed to Benzedrine rather than his ability. By having women, including two women of color, punt down this statue and stand in as its replacement while also mocking the movements in Olympia, Narcissister rejects that Aryan masculine ideal while also poking fun at femininity by twirling fancy porcelain plates rather than the butch discus.

With a little poking around post-show, I got many of these references. Yet, there was one that continued to escape me. In an interview with Office Magazine, Narcissister mentions aging as a theme, albeit a subtle one. As she says, “And as I get older, aging becomes a more prominent angle in my work. While this particular piece doesn’t overtly focus on aging, it’s present.” I couldn’t see it. Then, I watched The Substance. Like the (ignored) warning delivered to Elisabeth, Voyage Into Infinity also exposes, “What has been used on one side is lost on the other. There’s no going back.” When the three Narcissisters triggered the humungo Rube Goldberg machine, it was all forward motion. There’s no returning those shipping pallets upright, no patching up those popped balloons, no repackaging those firecrackers, no propping that discus thrower back up. Isn’t aging quite like this? Whether features sagging down, a tumbling chain reaction, a portrait marred, or a witchy finger appearing overnight, there’s no going back.