What is The Stuff? That question drives much of the plot in Larry Cohen’s The Stuff (1985), in which people across the U.S. become mindlessly addicted to the new, yogurt-like, living(?) product known as The Stuff. But I’m here to tell you that the answer to that question is the question itself. The Stuff (the product) is nothing and, therefore, anything.

To understand this we have to examine some of the film’s narrative and thematic elements. Doing so obviously requires taking the film much more seriously than it presents itself, but I would argue that for one, fuck it, I’m going to do it anyway. And two, I think The Stuff does have something more to say than the surface-level critique of American consumerism. Or rather, it’s making the criticism in a more profound way than is immediately obvious.

We first encounter The Stuff very early on in the film, where it’s apparently bubbling up from beneath the snow, from the Earth itself in fact. Like the snow, The Stuff is pure white. It has a vaguely liquid form, is unaffected by temperature, and seems to have some kind of animating force that gives it a mysterious agency.

Oh, and it’s delicious. Anyone who eats it simply can’t get enough of The Stuff!

The first character to do so says “maybe we could sell it,” immediately recognizing what The Stuff really is: potential. The Stuff is pure value representation. It’s what developers see when they look at an undeveloped piece of land. It’s what the timber industry sees when they look at uncut forests. It’s what every capitalist dreams of. Profit, baby. A blank, white space that everyone wants to consume. And be consumed by.

In fact, The Stuff’s lack of a defining quality is its defining quality. It doesn’t even require processing, pumped directly from the ground and straight into the containers in which its sold, unaltered. The Stuff is plain, undiluted capital N Nature.

The clearest description of The Stuff that we actually get is from one particularly astute businessman in the company who proclaims it as “the product of the future”. In doing so, limitless temporal possibilities are mapped on to the blank slate of nature. Here is a product worthy of the American capitalist spirit.

Of course, in many ways The Stuff represents capitalism itself. It grows (and spreads) through consumption. This contradiction is ironically illuminated by the main right-wing militia that joins the fight against The Stuff, convinced it’s part of an anti-capitalist Soviet plot, in what may be the first use of the “everything you hate about communism is actually capitalism” meme.

In The Stuff, we see numerous morally ambiguous characters struggle to reconcile with the ultimate product that is The Stuff. And what is the result of their struggles? Like nature, capitalism finds a way.