Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 film, The Substance, uses the concept of “body capital” (the value attached to people’s appearance that may be exchanged for other forms of capital), to present a view of restructured social and economic order via Bourdieu’s field theory. Existence in the fields of The Substance demands the becoming of the body, placing the film also in the context of Deleuzian theory. For Bourdieu, the body bears the imprint of divisions according to the person’s social location, habitus and taste. The body bears symbolic value, which is bestowed to particular bodily forms. For Deleuze, the twilight zone Hollywood reproduces old notions of female beauty instead of creating possibilities for new ones. He contextualizes the entertainment landscape as a space where the bodily forms of the working classes constitute physical capital that has less exchange value than forms developed by the dominant management class. This becoming field creates a capitalist social and economic order from which its binary characterizations physically and metaphorically profit, turning The Substance into a cinematic space where differing fields “battle” for the ultimate prize of control. We can see, through Bourdieu’s field theory and Deleuze’s notions of becoming, how Fargeat reinscribes the relationship between space, social organization, and the capitalist concept of beauty in film.