Death Becomes Herses: “Sunset Boulevard”, “The Substance”, and the tragedy/triumph of being 50 going on 25

The pictures may have gotten smaller, but these women are still big.

"There's nothing tragic about being 50," Joe Gillis tells Norma Desmond in the original 1950 Sunset Boulevard, "unless you're trying to be 25."

By this point Joe's already shattered the illusion that Max, her ex-svengali turned ex-husband turned butler and caretaker, has carefully constructed — that she's not a forgotten woman, that there's still a chance to reclaim her past glory, that life, in effect, is still worth living. 

No wonder she shoots Joe in cold blood.

You have to admit, though, for a woman in the throws of a mental breakdown, Norma had great aim. Also, Joe's a f---ing liar. For women, being 50 in Hollywood has always been a tragedy, not necessarily for the woman, but for her career. Actresses are rarely allowed to age gracefully, nor do they feel as if they can, due to the demands of an image-conscious industry that expects them to look 25 until they're dead and buried. 

Actresses are literally villainized for getting older, entering into the grotesque harridan phase of parts once their days of playing the love interest have dried up, such as 54-year-old Bette Davis famously, and rather defiantly, did with a string of films beginning with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? To become a woman of a certain age is to become a monster, a killer, someone to be feared or pitied by society. 

Davis starred in the other greatest film about a woman of a certain age from 1950: All About Eve. But Davis' Margo Channing learns to age with some modicum of dignity — sure, after drinking buckets of champagne and terrorizing everyone around her. No one ever said dignity was cheap. Norma Desmond, however, was never afforded that dignity, not until those cameras finally rolled at the end and she was given that much-needed close-up. 

Because of the pressure women face to not age from their industry, and from a society that would rather ignore them and their needs, they are then ridiculed or picked apart for trying to stay young or, God forbid, act in a way deemed unsuitable for one's age. Unless, of course, they're successful at it. Then they're praised.

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In The Substance, Demi Moore's Elisabeth Sparkle was once a lauded actress who's been relegated to a spandex-clad morning workout show host. On the occasion of her 50th birthday, she's unceremoniously fired as the network exec (Dennis Quaid) seeks a younger, newer model. Refusing to go gently into that good night, Lissy Sparkle takes "the Substance," a mysterious, well, substance, that spawns a younger, newer model right from her spine, in the incredibly flexible form of Margaret Qualley's Sue. 

Sue easily supplants Elisabeth in her job and soon in her life. Elisabeth resents Sue for her youth and beauty, but at the same time she refuses to give up her younger self, even as the process of maintaining Sue's existence is slowly destroying her. In one of the film's most affecting scenes, Elisabeth, in an attempt to take back control of her life, accepts a date from an old high school peer who had a crush on her and still does. When she initially runs into him, he gushes about how beautiful and successful she is, but Elisabeth doesn't really think too much of it. Or him. But as the Substance beings to ravage her body, and Sue continues to eclipse her, Elisabeth agrees to go out with the all-too-eager admirer. 

She gets all dolled up for the date and because she's Demi Moore, she looks amazing. But as she gets ready to leave, Elisabeth catches a glimpse of Sue, whose pert and perky image looms large outside of her window in the form of a giant billboard, a reminder that she's not Sue and is therefore not as desirable, not as worthy. She goes back to the mirror and adds more makeup, she covers up her décolletage and attempts to go out the door again, but Sue pulls her back. Eventually, Elisabeth gives up and becomes a shut-in, rather than face what life would be like through her own eyes, crow's feet and all. 

The world treats Sue as a goddess. Even before she took the Substance, Elisabeth could sense herself disappearing. She holes up in her apartment, eating whole roast chickens and watching television on an endless loop, just biding her time until she can become Sue again. For her, the price of this second lease on youthful life is worth the sacrifice of the life she had built to this point. 

But the price is always too steep for women. Elisabeth, and Sue, pay the ultimate price for their obsession with youth and beauty. It's not just their obsession, however. The world around them is obsessed with youth and beauty, and Elisabeth/Sue are merely collateral damage, cogs caught up in the Hollywood machine.  

While Moore is, rightfully, getting the best reviews of her career, for the past 20 years she's been lauded mostly for her stubborn refusal to age. Witness her abs of steely performance in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, emerging from the ocean in a two-piece, in seductive slow motion, at a stunning 40 years old. Even during the press cycle for The Substance, more Moore attention is paid to how incredible the actress looks at 61, irony be damned.

There's also the intentional irony of casting Moore, an actress whose body has been offered up for public consumption from Indecent Proposal to Striptease to G.I. Jane, with Moore's own complicity in that offering — witness her iconic nude Vanity Fair pregnancy cover, and her $12.5 million payday for Striptease, at the time the highest salary for an actress, and daring to bare all on camera. A 60-year-old, notably "ageless" actress winning plaudits for portraying a 50-year-old aging actress losing her career. That's Hollywood, baby.

That a woman who looks like Moore could still be brought low by the fear of aging is rather disheartening, but it also speaks to the fact that the more of a spotlight one has on oneself, the more pressure there is to remain ageless, to remain beautiful. Sure, we live in a time now where women are often applauded for "embracing" their age — Pamela Anderson, a former and eternal bombshell who's also in a career renaissance, earns high praise for going sans makeup, as did Qualley's mother Andie MacDowell for embracing her gray hair — it's merely a celebration of conventionally beautiful women slightly bucking convention. 

To be a flawed woman is still heralded as an act of bravery. Yet, at least these actresses aren't forced to put a classified ad in a newspaper soliciting work, as Davis did before securing her comeback with Baby Jane. And even though she played the monstrous title character, that film also led to one of Davis' finest performances, her 10th and final Oscar nomination for Best Actress, and a career resurgence. These women who take on these tragic roles almost always end up with the last laugh.

Related: The Substance stars, director explain the film’s beautifully gruesome ending

Gloria Swanson was a silent movie queen in the teens through the '20s and into the early talkies of the '30s, but she found her greatest role — the one with which she would forever be associated — playing the forgotten, delusional Norma Desmond. Nicole Scherzinger rode the early aughts wave of scantily-clad, heavily-produced dance pop as head of the Pussycat Dolls, a group known more for its sexy outfits and incredibly limber dance moves than for musical prowess. 

But her Norma Desmond is epic. She manages to pull off a deft mix of camp and comedy with drama and pathos, all the while remaining electrifying to watch, her days of getting her buttons loosened up offering no indication of the tremendous performance she pours out night after night and on Sunday matinees. 

Having already snatched the Olivier for Best Actress in a Musical for the West End production of Sunset Boulevard, Scherzinger is the clear frontrunner for the Tony (though Audra McDonald playing another — perhaps the ultimate — forgotten woman, Mama Rose in Gypsy, might have something to say about that). Who would've thought that 20- or 25-year-old Nicole Scherzinger would do that? Or 25-year-old Demi Moore would give one of the greatest performances of the year?

The true irony of these tragic women's roles is that they often result in the greatest triumphs in the careers of the women who play them. Davis, and Swanson, and Moore, and Anderson, and Scherzinger all prove that one can and does get better with age, which in itself subverts the narratives in which they star as women who struggle to come to terms with their mortality. And in return, they live forever, ageless, if only on celluloid.