Fountain of Youth: The Substance and Films' Obsession with Fictional Drugs | film

CInema is a damn good drug. For film lovers, a trip to the cinema is just that: a two- (or increasingly six-hour) psychoactive escape from the dreary outside world. The rushing highs, the crushing lows, the kaleidoscopic lights, the bombastic sounds; and that's just the entrance of Pearl & Dean. But while cinema is also full of drugs – from 1894's “Chinese Opium Den” to, er, 2023's “Cocaine Bear”, filmmakers have dreamed up fictional drugs (that don't exist in the real world) to retconn narratives and shift character personalities, transporting audiences to brave new worlds without the need for silly superpowers, confusing routines, or tricky magic.

Ironically, however, cinema's fake pharmaceuticals are used to highlight what is happening in the real world, while filmmakers exploit our fears of Big Pharma and synthetic drugs. Take “The Substance,” Coralie Fargeat’s new body horror, which centers on an eponymous drug based on newer weight-loss magic formulas that seems to have anticipated the ozempic trend. Part Dorian Gray, part David Cronenberg, it begins when fading starlet and TV aerobics presenter Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is fired by sleazy executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid) because she is too old. She gives in to temptation, orders a batch of the substance from a shady company, and injects herself with a (appropriately green) liquid in her strangely empty bathroom. Suddenly, a nubile clone spreads her shoulder blades and crawls out of her spine. Meet Sue (Margaret Qualley): Sparkle's better, prettier half. There is of course a catch; she has to switch between bodies every week; Give her a “stabilization shot” every day to prevent her from getting sick. and continue to feed her other body. And side effects occur: namely headaches, tinnitus, and, oh yeah, turning into a grotesque ogre with an amorphous fusion of flesh that would make Gollum grimace.

“I think that fictional drugs simultaneously appeal to our imagination and our strong human nature, which has always wanted to escape reality and have new experiences,” Fargeat tells the Guardian. So it's no wonder that the film was promoted with the slogan “#TryTheSubstance” to entice people to buy a ticket. “Cinema is a kind of drug in itself that allows us to escape reality,” adds Fargeat. “As a child, I remember preferring to live my life in movies rather than in reality. So in a way, fictional drugs in movies give you a way out…x2!”

Stanislas Reydellet, production designer at The Substance, says: “Coralie initially had a strong desire to associate The Substance with a very addictive hard drug like heroin. Something that once you start, you can't stop.” But these new types of high aren't that new. Harry Shapiro, one of Britain's leading drug consultants and author of Shooting Stars: Drugs, Hollywood and the Movies, traces the fictional drug film to the earliest adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde return. “He swallows an unknown potion and, interestingly, it brings out the demonic side of his nature,” says Shapiro. It shows the duality that drug use catalyzes. “It plays on the guilt of addiction,” he adds.

However, the psychotropic trope really took off in 1972 with Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, based on the cult novel by Anthony Burgess. Alex and his droogs indulged in all sorts of drugs, including the milk drink Milk-Plus. Over a decade later, David Lynch's Dune Melange, or “the Spice” (not the artificial “Spice” that ravages poorer communities, but a fictional equivalent), brought to life an inhalant that promises its user foresight. Earlier this year, Dune: Part Two continued the story. “Spice is power,” the film begins. Unfortunately, it's extremely addictive and can only be harvested on the corrosive desert planet of Arrakis, which is guarded by giant sandworms. Good luck! In the 1990s and 2000s, numerous other fictional drugs entered the collective cinematic consciousness, including black meat (a powder extracted from the entrails of giant Brazilian millipedes in “Naked Lunch”); Adrenochrome (a human stimulant in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas); Neuroin (an inhaled opioid from Minority). Report); Peking Cocktail (a deadly adrenaline blocker in “Crank”); and POS-51 (a drug in the 51st state that is supposedly 51 times more effective than other drugs, but actually Spoiler alerta placebo).

Sometimes these synthesized substances met reality. In the 2010s, mephedrone was sold in some legal high stores as “Clockwork Orange” – with poster-inspired packaging. Adrenochrome has been co-opted by the QAnon conspiracy movement, which claims it is actually an anti-aging agent taken from children by the global elite.

With real-world sales of designer drugs currently at an all-time high, you can expect a new wave of filmmakers to explore what's coming in the near future. As Naked Lunch's William Lee darkly notes, there are “addicts of as yet unsynthesized drugs” waiting to be explored in fiction and taken on new journeys from the comfort of our cinema seats; and we wondered what the hell was in our popcorn.