#i watched 'the substance' 2024 two days ago and i honestly spent about half of the film going 'wow this is just like david and mary'

[magiefish]

can we hear about mary and david's friends to enemies arc? 👀

Okay. So. It's kind of hard to properly describe in detail because it is also very mixed up with a lot of worldbuilding and convoluted plots, which is why I took so long to get back to you, so I'm just going to describe the general idea of it in relation to the story's themes and the character's emotions.

So, POV David Cane (nee Miriam Alterman) to Mary Angell (nee Cecilia DeAngeli):

What if we were both children who were raised by single parents who abused us emotionally. What if my mother never respected my privacy and isolated me from everyone else, never taught me the skills I needed to survive on my own, and got angry if ever rejected her or complained, so I developed an impassive facade and never learned how to handle conflict or express my emotions. What if your father was a con-man who moved around constantly, who taught you never to trust anyone and to only ever look out for yourself because everyone is out to get you, who used the fact you were an innocent child to better deceive people, and then discarded you when you became a 'liability'.

What if, after years of you going hungry and fending for yourself and me finally deciding to run away from my mother, we both signed up as nurses in WW1 and met in the trenches of one of the worst conflicts ever imagined. What if we became all each other had, but neither of us was telling the whole truth to one another because we had been raised to believe that we shouldn't. What if you cared for me unconditionally and shaped all your medical research around helping me specifically because you wanted to prove to yourself that altruism could be rewarding, and because you believed that you were only worth anything when you were being useful. What if you performed being innocent and naive and optimistic specifically so that I wouldn't leave because you thought I wouldn't trust you if I knew the truth about how you were raised. What if I didn't know how to handle your kindness because my mother's gifts were always double-edged, and I was always waiting for the other shoe to fall. What if I became convinced that I was weighing you down and holding you back from scientific greatness because you were fixated on something I was born with over the path you could make for yourself. What if I decided that the only way to get you to leave me was to force you to, and make sure that you couldn't come back. What if I wanted you to hate me because I thought it would be for your own good if you got over me.

What if I then ended up right back in another situation where someone cared for me completely while I did nothing to help myself. What if I abandoned them so that they would hate me. What if I did it again. What if it became a pattern. What if I thought that I was so spineless, so utterly useless and incompetent, that my mere existence was inherently parasitic, and the only way to help the people I loved was to leave them, to make them understand just how awful I really was so that they would never chase after me. What if I realised that abandoning you had never really been about helping you in any way, but just reducing you into a tool that I could use to hurt myself. What if I realised that I had sacrificed our entire relationship, the potential for a happier future for both myself and you, on the altar of my own self-destruction.

What if I became so sick of myself, I illegally stole a technology that would allow me to inhabit a different body, a different persona, just so that I could loosen up and express my emotions and be free. What if in the process I realised that I had always actually been a man, but also just used the anonymity to spiral even deeper into drug-abuse, and loneliness, and self-loathing. What if I got so high I lost all sense of reality and shot myself in the head, and only realised when I woke up that I had murdered my original self. What if I realised I had made a mistake that I could never take back, that I had lost my entire identity, that there was nowhere to hide anymore and I would finally have to confront myself. What if, knowing I had nothing left anymore, I decided to go and find you just so that I could apologise, could tell you that what I did was wrong and you didn't deserve it, that I had regretted it every day of my life since then. What if I broke every law and went all the way into hell just to find you.

What if, when I found you, you were no longer the person I had called my friend. What if my abandonment had been the last nail in the coffin for you, and I hadn't even realised it. What if you decided that the only thing that mattered was being on top, was being the used and not the user, was being the person who stomped on everyone else instead of being the one getting ground under the heel. What if you put aside ethics in the name of your pursuit of science, sabotaged your opponents, stole your colleagues' work, and were rewarded for it with fame and success and money and adoration. What if you played at being the philanthropist, the homemaker, the dazzling host, while in private you used all that money you had to drink and drink and drink. What if you decided that instead of making people want you, you would make them need you, so you went around picking out the downtrodden and the isolated and setting them up with jobs and homes, so that they would owe everything to you, so that they would adore you completely. What if you cheated on your husband and neglected your child because you didn't know how to handle vulnerability, the possibility of failure, the weakness of trust.

What if, after you had gotten everything you had ever thought you wanted, you discovered that you weren’t happy or content, because getting there had required becoming the kind of person who could never rest, never live in the moment, never let their guard down for even one second. What if the only way you could justify treating other people the way you did was by telling yourself that everyone else was just as opportunistic and cynical as you, and then that meant you began to suspect everyone else of being out to get you, because that’s what you would do. What if, underneath it all, you still empathised with other people, you still wanted people to sincerely love and trust you, but you had dismissed these feelings as weaknesses and came to despise everyone who invoked them in you, so you hurt those people even when it made you feel worse about yourself. 

What if you decided that what was wrong with humanity (you) was just rooted in biology, in nature, in evolution, so you decided that the only way to ‘fix’ it was to ‘fix’ humanity. What if you had gotten older, and a new generation of scientists inspired by your work had come along, and desperate not to be replaced or forgotten, you decided the only way to get everyone’s attention again was to recreate the miracle, was to come up with a new flashy scientific discovery. What if you kept drinking. What if you weren’t wise. What if you weren’t cautious. What if you didn’t care. What if you destroyed everyone and yourself as well in the name of your own short-sighted selfishness, but you were so used to thinking of yourself as the victim that you refused to accept any blame for what happened. What if you insisted to me that I should be sorry, that I should be guilty for what I had done because it had led to this, and yet you never accepted any of my apologies. What if you had the blood of the entire world on your hands, and you blamed me for getting them dirty in the first place.

What if, when confronted with you face to face, I lied and told you I was nothing but a messenger, that I was just a friend of myself. What if, when confronted with me face to face, you lied and told me that you were still human, that you weren’t a monster, that you hadn’t caused any of this. What if we both knew the other was lying, and yet, even now, we still couldn’t be honest with each other. What if we had both lived our whole lives acting like we were isolated individuals, that our actions would have no long-term consequences because they could never affect anyone other than us, while being completely and utterly shaped by one another. What if we ruined each other. What if we ruined ourselves. What if, even while claiming that you hated me, you still kept talking to me, still kept trying to get me to validate you, still tried to make me laugh. What if I went along with it. What if I needed you. What if you needed me.

What if we weren't friends, or enemies, or lovers, but something worse. What if you

were my other half. What if we were the same person, really. And what if I had to kill you anyway.

***

So. Yeah. They’re both completely insane <3 I think about them every day <3 My Mary Angell playlist is almost 4 hours long <3 Girlie should have actually read Macbeth instead of just pretending to have read it in order to seem ‘cultured’ <3 <3

Because I’m insane, I have also taken all 22 of my major characters and aligned them with major arcana cards, because that number symmetry was just too good to pass up, and within that David is definitely The Wheel of Fortune and Mary is The Magician. I would have made her The Fool for the name alone, but unfortunately that card fit another character better.

The two of them were also born in 1899 (Mary on January 5th, David on December 25th -- yes, he is born on Christmas, now you know why he's suffered more than Jesus) and the story takes place in 1949, so they are both about 50. The two fell apart around 1925.