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Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

At the end of the 1992 film “Death Becomes Her,” the undead frenemies played by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn receive punishment for their vanity. Ghoulish mannequins with puttylike skin, they tumble down church steps and shatter into an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycpEjbV4KRM" target=_blank>unholy rubble of limbs</a> — their comeuppance for downing a potion promising eternal youth and beauty.

The new Broadway musical based on the movie knows better than to vilify its grand dames, played with fabulous panache by Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard, instead dialing up their fierce rivalry and leaning into the film’s camp legacy. The show can’t entirely overcome its punitive premise, but it’s not alone among recent works on stage and screen in grappling with the confusing beauty standards of our present moment — and asking whether women are meant to conquer them or merely escape them alive.

Death Becomes Her (10/10) Movie CLIP - Friends Forever (1992) HD

Just walk down the block, where you might catch Nicole Scherzinger exiting the stage door for the buzzy “Sunset Blvd.” looking like a Calvin Klein shoot <a href="https://x.com/kevinddaly/status/1840388487545012645" target=_blank>descended into homicide</a>. In director Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-down take on the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (based on Billy Wilder’s 1950 film), it’s not Scherzinger’s former silver-screen ingenue Norma Desmond who’s lost her marbles, but anyone who would call such an obvious glamazon “washed up.”

Musical theater is crowded with female characters concerned about appearance and aging as part of their arcs, from young heroines worried they’re not pretty enough (“Wicked,” “Mean Girls”) to older ones reflecting wistfully on the passage of youth (“Follies,” “Gypsy”). But “Death Becomes Her” and “Sunset Blvd.” engage directly with a conversation that has been happening in our culture and on-screen for some time — arguing that the obsession with extreme standards for women is a social problem rather than an individual flaw.

In her instantly famous “Barbie” treatise on how “it is literally impossible to be a woman,” America Ferrera’s Mattel employee <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBqlDWHkdHk" target=_blank>included in her list</a> of indignities being “thin, but not too thin” and never getting old. In the real world, Kardashian-inspired curves are apparently out, in favor of a figure that plastic surgeons have dubbed the “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2024/10/01/ballet-body-trend-thinness-athletic/" target=_blank>ballet body</a>.” Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/09/24/weight-loss-drugs-wegovy-ozempic-short-supply/" target=_blank>still surging</a> in popularity. <a href="https://www.plasticsurgery.org/news/press-releases/plastic-surgery-sees-steady-growth-amidst-economic-uncertainty-american-society-of-plastic-surgeons-2023-procedural-statistics-report-finds" target=_blank>So is Botox</a>. And yet, through it all echo calls for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/of-interest/2024/02/14/ozempic-body-positivity-influencers-weight-loss-drugs/" target=_blank>body acceptance</a>.

It is a cruel paradox that amid seismic political battles over women’s bodily autonomy, there are more tools than ever to exercise control over self-presentation (for those <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/08/19/weight-loss-drugs-ozempic-wegovy-unequal-access/" target=_blank>who can afford it</a>). That control takes the form of the titular tonic in “The Substance,” the splattery recent horror film from Coralie Fargeat, in which a faded star played by Demi Moore gets an irresistible taste of her former glory. The gruesome price exacted on her body lends the movie its terrors.

Where are the men in all of this? While recognizing their role in setting the terms of heterosexual desirability, these recent stories make the case that blaming men alone would be too easy. “The Substance” takes the most pointed approach, casting the quest for everlasting youth as a vicious bargain with the self. “Sunset Blvd.” exonerates its hunk-killer, weighing whether she’s actually the victim. Somewhat hamstrung by the conventions of musical comedy, “Death Becomes Her” does a kooky soft-shoe that suggests queerness as an alternate way around these social traps.

In every case, the dilemma of facing off against time and gravity doesn’t make a woman shallow or delusional, just a survivor caught in an impossible system.

MUBI

There would seem to be an obvious villain in “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2024/09/19/substance-demi-moore-horror-review/" target=_blank>The Substance</a>,” in which Moore stars as an aging actress who is promised a younger, more “perfect” version of herself if she injects a Brat-green goo. A studio honcho, aptly named Harvey and played by Dennis Quaid, informs Moore’s character, ludicrously named Elisabeth Sparkle, that she’s reached the sell-by date of even her attenuated career as an on-air aerobics instructor.

A fish-eye lens shoved practically halfway up his nose, Harvey balloons across the frame like a cartoon bad guy, a monstrous mouthpiece for the misogynist whims that dominate the entertainment industry. “Renewal is inevitable,” he tells Elisabeth. “And at 50 — well, it stops.” In other words, Harvey needs fresh meat.

So long, Elisabeth; hello Sue, her “better” and certainly younger self (played by Margaret Qualley), who is birthed on the bathroom floor by Elisabeth, split open along the spine and discarded like a husk. Just as most of the men in the movie dismiss Elisabeth with disgust, their lust for Sue catapults their tongues to the floor. (Naturally, the before-after pairing launched a thousand memes.)

But Elisabeth and Sue “are one,” so the war waged on-screen is between a woman and her own flesh. “What fascinated me is what we do to ourselves,” Moore <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/09/16/g-s1-23240/demi-moore-reflects-on-aging-acceptance-and-finding-happiness-within" target="_blank">told NPR</a> of the film. The fate of Elisabeth’s career is at the mercy of men like Harvey, but how she relates to her aging body — and calculates her own value — is ultimately in her hands.

Fargeat’s camera lavishes as much close attention on Sue’s high, taut contours as on the squelching deformity that makes them possible. Both are their own kinds of horror, for how they sap any sense of personhood from the body. (It’s worth noting that another cautionary film this year, “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2024/09/27/different-man-sebastian-stan-movie-review/" target=_blank>A Different Man</a>,” features a male character who also regrets his transformation, though he goes from genetic disfigurement to the figure of a handsome actor.)

The substance forces Elisabeth to confront whether she’s reserved any part of herself that’s not for consumption. As she morphs into an oozing mass of distorted features, an inner sense of self is the missing safe harbor.

Marc Brenner

Norma Desmond’s foggy interior — her psyche — is the setting of the new “Sunset Blvd.,” which substitutes an atmosphere of shadow, light and extreme amplification for the so-called crazy mansion described in the libretto by Don Black and Christopher Hampton. The result is not a breakthrough psychological study of a character heretofore misunderstood. She is still in the same musical. But rather than pathologize Norma, intentionally or not, the revival allows us to see the absurdity of her position.

As conceived in the film and in previous Broadway outings starring Glenn Close, Norma is a template for showbiz has-beens driven mad by the loss of the spotlight. As I wrote in my <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater/2024/10/20/nicole-scherzinger-sunset-blvd-review/" target=_blank>review</a>, Scherzinger demonstrates such total command of her agile voice and graceful movement that it’s impossible to believe anyone could begrudge her their admiration. Not for nothing, she looks like the more-than-a-million-bucks “Sunset Blvd.” is grossing weekly. If <i>that</i> is what washed up looks like, then everyone else — not Norma — has lost a grip on their senses.

Norma’s fragility and desperation are sacrificed as a result, but it’s in service of something much more interesting. The harm she inflicts on herself and others has typically been cast as a symptom of her delusion — the poor thing doesn’t know when to pack it in — rather than the consequence of what Harvey in “The Substance” calls the inevitable “renewal” that will eventually swallow everyone. Here, Norma is the canary, and society’s expectations — of her and every other woman under scrutiny — are the hazardous coal mine. We’re the problem, not her, and we’ve driven her over the edge. It’s no wonder she winds up devastated and doused in blood.

An exaggerated wink at the <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/08/death-becomes-her-25th-anniversary-meryl-streep-goldie-hawn-gay-classic?srsltid=AfmBOopz4d3l312HOG3abfNoyVxoxj2fW62Dlp55YOeccFYpGqWOjWkJ" target=_blank>queer audience</a> that has kept the legacy of “Death Becomes Her” alive well arrives early in the musical. When we meet Hilty’s Madeline Ashton (Streep’s role), she’s performing a number from her Broadway revue (titled “Me, Me, Me”) that trumpets the reason she’s so slavish about her upkeep. After a quick change from a red-sequined Liza Minnelli into Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz,” Madeline crows, “We all know this whole damn show is for the gays.” Not the male gaze, silly, the <i>gays</i>.

That queer streak runs through the staging by director and choreographer Christopher Gattelli — including drag body doubles when the feuding ladies come to comedic blows — and softens the plot’s condemnation of their big heads and Grinch-size hearts. (Whether “the gays’” appetite for dueling divas calls for reevaluation is another story.)

Hung up as Madeline is on her looks, there’s also an endearing whisper of reasonableness about her. “It’s a bitch,” she says with casual resignation about growing old before the potion’s keeper shoots back, “It’s a crime!” (The book is by Marco Pennette and music and lyrics by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey.) Simard’s Helen, meanwhile, is pure vindictiveness: She could give two turds about her appearance if looking good didn’t kill Madeline.

Style is where The Washington Post explains what’s happening on the front lines of culture — including the arts, media, social trends, politics and yes, fashion — with wit, personality and deep reporting. For more Style stories, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/" target=_blank>click here</a>. To subscribe to the Style Memo newsletter, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsletters/style-memo/" target=_blank>click here</a>. 

An eternity of piecing together a hot body that’s falling apart is still the fate that awaits the zombie rivals onstage. Significantly, though, in gay neighborhoods like Hell’s Kitchen, we call that a slice of life. In a conclusion that’s more faithful to what Hawn says was an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW4s_dtE_Sk" target=_blank>alternate ending</a> for the film, the pair wanders off musing about how to spend eternity. As in the movie, the unremarkable schlub passed between the two foes (here a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon played by Christopher Sieber) winds up happier in his golden years. Still, a queer reading easily applies to the platonic biddies ambling together into the sunset.

As for an updated moral, “Death Becomes Her” resists hating the players or the game and tries its hand at chiding the coaches. The keeper of the live-forever potion (played by Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child) and that bumbling surgeon (laughably named Ernest Menville) accuse each other of enabling women to defy nature. They both have a point.

One caveat of the deal that Madeline and Helen make with the devil is especially chilling: They are granted only 10 years to enjoy themselves at their peak before they’re forced to disappear from public view. A decade is hardly enough time. Fortunately the elixir doesn’t exist — and its promise is built on a lie that only we have the power to stop telling.

For all the external pressures that dictate how we are meant to be in the world, the ultimate negotiation — as with any Faustian bargain — is the one we have with ourselves. With a crazed sense of humor and geysers of gore, these works demand recognition of simple and obvious facts: that looks aren’t everything and that everyone is going to die. Some will even be lucky enough to grow old. Why keep torturing ourselves to deny the truth?

A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Demi Moore's character in "The Substance." It is Elisabeth, not Elizabeth. This article has been corrected. 

Naveen Kumar is The Washington Post's theater critic. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Variety and them.us, and he is associate director of the National Critics Institute, the leading arts-writing workshop for professional journalists.

Naveen Kumar

In “The Substance,” “Death Becomes Her,” “Sunset Blvd.,” beauty is a fresh hell

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