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The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies

Buzzy films from “Anora” to “The Substance” are undone by a relentless signposting of meaning and intent.

Coralie Fargeat’s “ The Substance,” less an homage to than a recapitulation of body-horror classics, dramatizes older celebrities’ fear of being displaced by casting Demi Moore as a fifty-year-old star who births a genetically generated younger self—literally, through her back. The critic Anna Kornbluh, author of the 2024 book “ Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism,” suggests that our era of “experiential intensity and crisis” has led to an aesthetics of “realness without representation,” which excises “anything that would require time to interpret instead of rapid uptake . It is the warped note in a Nina Simone song, the uncanny stutter of Samuel Beckett’s prose, the trippy trail of Andy Warhol’s prints, the eerie flatness of David Lynch’s films, that we love.

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