(don’t?) Stop Looking At Me!: The Institutional Gaze and Commodified Bodies in The Substance and The Man Who Sold His Skin

Imagine this: you are walking down the street at 9 a.m., barely awake, caffeinated beverage in hand, merely trying to make it through another day when you make eye contact with a stranger. They’re cute. They raise their eyebrows slightly. Are they surprised? Okay be nice. You smile. They don’t smile back. Did you smile too wide? Are they disgusted by you? Wait! Someone else is looking at you weird. You think? Is there something on your face? Oh god. There are more people coming. They all hate you. Wait no that’s unreasonable. And kind of narcissistic. Okay. You take a deep breath. You straighten your posture. You walk a little faster. More confident. With more conviction. You puff your chest. You look directly ahead, you stride. You leap. Everyone on this street is enamored by you! You’re a star! You’re adored!! And then BAM! You bump into a pole and spill the coffee/tea/energy drink all over yourself. This is embarrassing…

We all do this to a certain extent; as humans, we anticipate others’ perceptions of us and adapt accordingly. Identity formation is inextricably relational—and performative. The way we smile, the way we touch, and the way we move through the world are shaped by the expectations of those around us; you would behave differently in front of a stranger than you would in front of your mother or a close friend. Often, this is our imagined projection of their expectations rather than their objective perspective. We don’t really know what people want from us, but the effects are lived and felt regardless. Most of us drift inside this ambiguity, between the disquieting uncertainty of what others expect and the enduring pressure to become whatever that might be.

This isn’t inherently a bad thing, per se. Performance often translates, gestures toward, and acts out our inner emotional lives in a way that is most legible to others. To be seen in the way that we want, even subjectively, often means to be respected, to be desired, to be understood, and to be loved. But problems aris,e and violence might occur when power imbalances allow one entity to inflict a gaze onto another who is unable to refuse its identification. From Mulvey’s cinematic male gaze that frames women as objects of visual pleasure (Mulvey 11), to Fanon’s white gaze that racializes perception (Fanon 109), to Foucault’s medical gaze that dissects bodies under the guise of objective knowledge, theorists have affirmed how power operates and is sustained through looking (Foucault 9). This institutional gaze can be all-consuming, sucking individuals into an unending circuit where exposure and identification entirely replace selfhood, eating them from the inside out to a point where they don’t know who they are outside of imposed judgment. Seriously, who are you underneath all of these expectations?

I apologize if this is bleak—the awareness that at all times we are being anticipated and measured by larger, suffocating systems of power that we have zero control over can be quite overwhelming. I believe we have free will in all of it, though. Cinema, with its inherent relationship to vision, spectatorship, and the act of looking, becomes an ideal medium to engage with and perhaps counter the institutional gaze. Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 body horror The Substance and Kaouther Ben Hania’s 2020 drama The Man Who Sold His Skin both literalize this ever-present gaze through the commodification of their protagonists’ bodies, presenting them as spectacles to be consumed. Aging star Elisabeth Sparkle duplicates herself through a serum that creates a younger, “better” double named Sue to earn back her job, while Syrian refugee Sam allows his back to be tattooed with a Schengen visa in order to gain freedom of movement and reunite with his fiancée. However, while Elisabeth crumples under the Hollywood machine’s ravenous demand for youth, sex appeal, and a particular image of beauty, Sam makes it out of the Western-dominated elite art world’s gaze with his sense of self still intact—first through subversion, then through a reciprocal, loving counter-gaze. What’s at stake in both films isn’t just whose bodies are looked at, by whom, and how, but whether people can survive that looking.

In The Substance, Elisabeth is first introduced to us while leading her fitness program “Pump It Up!” After blowing the camera a kiss and telling the audience to take care of themselves (an ironic piece of advice given what will unfold in the film), she walks down the hallway lined with polished posters of her as someone cheerfully wishes her happy birthday. From the beginning of the film, we already see how Elisabeth’s identity depends on being visible; she is rewarded with validation and respect for the visual value that she provides to the market. Nonetheless, this gaze that substantiates Elisabeth is the same one that holds the power to erase her. We see this in effect when Elisabeth is then immediately fired from the show, following the network’s search for a younger, hotter lead. Deprived of the external gaze, the former star injects herself with “the Substance,” birthing Sue—the physical manifestation of what the Hollywood system approves of—exuding youth, desirability, and a seamless, shiny surface. The rule is clearly outlined: the two versions of the person must take turns living for exactly one week at a time. When one person is “active” in the world, the other must remain in a deactivated state, receiving nourishment through a tube. Most importantly: Sue and Elisabeth are one.

Sue, who rarely speaks but often smiles, is embraced by Hollywood executives as soon as she appears, replacing Elisabeth’s job on the show while men treat her with exaggerated warmth and deference. She basks in this spotlight and her version of ‘Pump It Up!’ unfolds as a heightened spectacle of tight framing, glossy lighting, and close-ups of the character’s chest, legs, and crotch. While Sue thrives, Elisabeth begins to disintegrate both physically and psychologically and the balance between them collapses. Sue overstays her allotted time, disrupting the cycle, and Elisabeth’s body deteriorates in response. This erosion culminates in the film’s final “switch,” where a grotesque creature bursts from Sue’s back: a fleshy, distorted blob-like humanoid with mismatched body parts. Crawling onto the “New Year’s Eve Show” stage that Sue was set to host, Elisabeth cries out, “It’s me! Just me! I’m the same!” Under blinding lights and camera flashes, the crowd screams, and her body literally falls apart. Elisabeth’s face, now attached to mushy, intestine-like tentacles, crawls on top of her Hollywood star, before smiling widely one last time and dissipating—a visualization of the gaze’s potential for total consumption.

In contrast to Elisabeth’s identity formation through institutional approval and eventual collapse, Sam’s sense of self in The Man Who Sold His Skin is established and sustained through love and self-preservation. Sam’s journey is driven by the desire to reunite with Abeer, his fiancée, to whom he proposed at the beginning of the film. When he learns that his lover will be married to a richer man, he agrees to have his back tattooed with the Schengen Visa as a transaction that turns his skin into a literal exhibition piece to be displayed in Western galleries, photographed by Western photographers, and owned by Western sponsors. As both man and exhibit, Sam’s humanity is mediated through a frame of aesthetic and economic values set by those who directly benefit from his exploitation. Yet his dignity is never fully erased. Even as he complies with the elitist art world’s demands on paper, he remains sharply aware of its exploitation and abuse, resisting dehumanization through small, persistent acts of defiance—his dry and self-aware humor, his refusal to perform beyond a certain point, his quiet dignity in the face of humiliation. This awareness prevents him from being absorbed into the institution’s gaze; they may own him as an artwork but could not own him as a person.

Sam’s insistence on maintaining his humanity is exemplified in two moments that reimagine what it means to be looked at. During the auction, Sam, with his back turned toward the audience and lit by a white spotlight, is sold before a large crowd of high-class patrons in dress suits and elegant gowns. His face out of sight, Sam’s skin is a perfect spectacle devoid of lived subjectivity. After an attendee successfully obtains the artwork (Sam’s back), he turns. To everyone’s surprise, our protagonist walks down from the stage and stands in front of the audience as we hear hushed murmurs against his reverberating footsteps—then he screams. The horrified audience collectively rushes out the door, mortified, and Sam collapses on the ground while bursting into laughter. The sterile elite art world, once confident in its power to look, now flees from the violence of its own gaze. In a cathartic instant, Sam reclaims his body by turning the performance back on its spectators. 

This stunt lands Sam in prison, where his lawyer’s translator is revealed to be no other than Abeer. Here, defiance takes on a different form; the carceral and disciplinary space, with its bars, metal tables, legal documents, and prevailing surveillance, is interrupted by the dance of the couple’s reciprocal gazes. When Sam and Abeer lock eyes across the translation barrier, their love, untranslatable and immediate, restores what the art world attempted to strip away. Their fingers touch over the paperwork while Abeer confesses her enduring desire and affection for Sam in Arabic—slipping by the lawyer who cannot understand—reclaiming a moment of tender intimacy from the very system that commodified him. In this intimate exchange, the gaze is transformed into something else entirely. If The Substance ends with the annihilation of self under blinding stage lights, The Man Who Sold His Skin closes with a gentler illumination: that radical self-sustenance and being seen by love, rather than by power, are what allow one to survive. 

As the films roll their end credits and the screens fade to black, one body dissolves and another persists. If living underneath undetectable systems of surveillance and the institutional gaze is inevitable, what matters most then is how we face them. We’re all walking through busy streets under someone else’s gaze, bumping into poles, straightening our backs, lifting our chins—desperately performing whatever version of ourselves we think might be worth looking at. But sometimes, if we’re lucky, the gaze doesn’t confine us but lingers curiously. It doesn’t worship nor diminish. It meets us halfway. It holds us in the in-betweens. It sees us in our subjectivities and contradictions, not as mere form, but as something textured, ephemeral, and real. It says: yes, I see you too. 

Perhaps we can even stumble upon our own gaze as well,

one that emerges in courage

one that exists softly and kindly without demand

one that is free.

Anyway, in the meantime, take care of yourself. xx. 

Bibliography

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Pluto Press, 1986.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith, Tavistock Publications, 1976.

Ha Trang Tran is a third-year student studying Film and Media Studies at the Dual BA between Columbia and Trinity College Dublin from Hanoi, Vietnam. When she grows up, she wants to stay clear-eyed and curious, and hopefully employed.

@senkiiso