From entertainment to denunciation: reflections on female aging in The Substance.

The present study investigates the representations of female aging in contemporary media, with emphasis on ageism and the normalization of youth as an aesthetic and social value. Based on the analysis of the film The Substance (2024), directed by Coralie Fargeat, and based on authors such as Winandy (2021), Wolf (1992), Eco (2004) and Castro (2018), the work discusses how the entertainment industry reinforces patterns that make older women invisible. The research articulates a filmic analysis structured in the three-dimensional view of Fairclough (2001), a statistical survey on the Oscars and theoretical references to understand how cinema reproduces and tensions hegemonic discourses on body, age and gender. The results indicate that, despite recent advances, the media imaginary still privileges youth, limiting the participation and visibility of elderly women in audiovisual narratives.