THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE MYTH OF YOUTH AND BEAUTY IN CINEMA: A STRUCTURALIST AND SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF THE FILM SUBSTANCE

Abstract

The aesthetic pressures individuals experience through gender norms and popular culture contribute to beauty and youth becoming a social ideal, particularly for women. In this context, women attempt to preserve their youth and beauty through cosmetic products, aesthetic and surgical procedures, diet culture, and fitness to achieve social acceptance and be perceived as desirable. The persistence of this effort is reinforced by the construction of a distorted body perception standardized by popular cultural mediums such as advertisements, mass media, social media, and cinema. In this study, the film Substance is examined within the framework of myth and binary opposition construction, which underpins Lévi-Strauss's structuralist approach as it critically interrogates the ideals of youth and beauty imposed on women, and Roland Barthes’s semiotic framework based on denotation and connotation. The analysis reveals that binary oppositions such as youth vs. old age, natural beauty vs. artificial beauty, and control of the female body vs. women’s autonomy are constructed through the two female characters and articulated via denotative and connotative signs in the film.