Under The Skin
“Under The Skin (2013)”
Text By: Basil Swartzfager
Original Publication Date: April 15th, 2014
I have a problem with film watching: it is far easier for me to lose interest than it is to gain it. When I watch a film I am constantly making qualitative judgments as it proceeds, and if at a certain point I decide “I don’t think I like where this film is going” my interest wanes and it can be tough, or even impossible, to gain it back. Sometimes this decision can happen almost immediately, as Jonathan Glazer's 2014 film, Under the Skin, demonstrates.
The film opens with a small light, and an ominous, repetitious, string-heavy score that underlines the alien, unsettling nature of what we are about to witness. Suddenly the music stabs and the light flares open to create a spherical shape. Slowly a cylindrical cone comes into view, and moves towards a hole in the center of the sphere. Not on accident the opening recalls the beginning frames of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its celestial bodies in repose as the camera traces their slow movements towards a moment of transcendent creation. Most of my fondness for that film, whether intended by Kubrick or not, lies in its dedication to ridiculousness. Everything about it feels stretched to the limit, linking it far more closely in my eyes to his previous film, Dr. Strangelove, than the philosophical treatise most people consider it. Under the Skin, in its opening moments, has no such sense of humor. Where 2001 used the bombastic Also Sprach Zarathustra to build and build and build until a crescendo of sunlight peaked over the earth, Under the Skin creates a deadened mood with its droning score by Mica Levi to kill any potential intention of either comedy or explosive revelation. This created a serious dissonance within me, as I felt the black cylinder piercing the giant sphere’s hole had a comical level of train-into-tunnel sexual innuendo. I at once saw Glazer as taking 2001 very seriously, and attempting to create a contemporary variation on that scene to place his film into the lexicon of cerebral science fiction cinema. I didn’t groan audibly, but I came quite close.
In the world of Under the Skin aliens are in hiding on earth and in order to sustain their existence they must feed off the lifeforce of humans. Towards this end a lineage of alien women disguise themselves as human and travel around Scotland enticing young men to their doom. Despite the fact that I was able to sum up the film’s initial premise in only two sentences this information is often difficult to distill from the film as it unfolds. There is almost no exposition, giving the sense of intentional withholding of information. We, the viewers, are outsiders, rather than being complicit in the goals of the main character, played by Scarlett Johansson.
When this narrative combined with my interpretation of the first scene I immediately gravitated towards a superficial reading of the film’s content. I saw Under the Skin, in essence, as a more clever, creepier take on the 1995 film Species. Woman as an unknowable alien, a black widow using her mysterious and alluring sexuality to prey on unsuspecting men. The film’s form seemed to highlight this reading. In Johansson’s introductory scene a woman is laid out on the floor of a stark white room, the kind of sci-fi room that has no walls and the white extends forever. Johansson strips the woman of her clothes, and then begins to dress herself in them. The final image of the scene is Johansson with her back to the audience, her nude backside on full display. Up until then there’s a mostly clinical quality to the scene, as Johannson removes the woman’s clothing quickly and methodically, dispersing any feeling of eroticism. But in the final moments of the final shot Johansson twists one of her legs ever so slightly inward, pushing her foot up to rest on the ball of her big toe. It’s a coyly sexual pose, accentuating her femininity and should be familiar to anyone who has seen an issue of Playboy (or any similar internet variations of nude women). It’s not how people stand when they don’t think anyone is watching. The next scene shows Johansson walking through a crowded mall, the camera placed low and angled high behind her to give us a full view of her sashaying hips and bouncing posterior as her high heels click across the floor. Again the shot somewhat knowingly apes the modern trend of gonzo pornography, but I couldn’t tell to what end. The ominous nature of the previous scenes inflected this shot with an obvious foreboding, but that foreboding sexuality felt more predatory than accusatory, more Double Indemnity than Rear Window.
The scenes that followed only confirmed my suspicions. Scarlett Johansson begins driving a large truck around Scotland, feigning being lost in order to stop and ask various men for directions. She asks these men probing questions about their lives, but spun with the right amount of flirtatious innocence that has each man answering readily. Do you live around here? Do you have family? Do you have a girlfriend? They think she is just being friendly, but the audience knows the subtext: Do you have anyone who will miss you if you disappear? When she isn’t baiting these men into her vehicle Johansson drives around silently, an inscrutable mask into which the audience has no vantage point. This combines with Glazer’s oblique approach to plotting (many scenes only gain narrative meaning and comprehension after later scenes) to make her, despite being the main character, distinctly not the protagonist. We are with her, but not on her side. This means that when power struggles occur, and she lures these hapless Scotsmen back to her dilapidated apartment, we are placed on the side of men, sympathetic to the lonely fools following their divining rod erections straight to inky black oblivion. Nothing so far had broken my interpretation of the film. The loud, intentionally unsettling score -- with its repetitious metallic stings -- hammers home what feels like the same point. The sexual power of women is so strong that men are helpless in front of it. We are simpletons for being so helpless, but, as the word implies, we simply can’t help ourselves.
Johansson's final pick-up is a man suffering from neurofibramatosis, a condition, according to an interview in The Guardian with actor Adam Pearson, “which causes non-cancerous tumors to grow on nerve tissue.” I at first assumed it was makeup and prosthetics, but it is Pearson’s real face. This scene makes a couple of points: firstly that she, as an alien being, lacks our culturally ingrained shock at his appearance. She speaks to him in the same tone, and with the same performed flirtation that she has spoken to every man. But she also recognizes his difference. She compliments his hands, how beautiful they are, intuiting that comments on his face would be perceived as disingenuous. Glazer here cuts in to a close-up of Pearson pinching his hand. This, to me, read as cynical and condescending. Pearson believes he must be dreaming for such a beautiful woman to be talking to him so genuinely. The audience, so far ahead of Pearson’s character in omniscience, can chortle that little does he know this dream is actually a nightmare. If Glazer intended poignancy to seep into this scene I could not find it. What good is it for Johansson to treat Pearson with dignity as she leads him to his doom?
His full purpose, narratively, is revealed in the following scene. In a long, close take she stares at herself in the mirror, and a transformation has begun. No longer is this Scarlett Johansson skin a disguise to trick unsuspecting humans, but she begins to see it as a legitimate extension of herself. What people see and what she is are now indistinguishable. Newfound empathy in hand she frees Pearson (to no end, as he is later murdered by one of Johansson's ominous handlers) and runs away from her ominous motorcyclist handlers. Johansson’s alien in the scenes that follow quickly reveals herself as, more or less, an infant locked in the body of a grown woman. She has no idea how to fend for herself, and immediately relies upon the help of a kind-hearted man to navigate her through the world. Sexual desire and paternal concern are conflated and, one might say, this distorts our interpretation of everything that came before it. Again, though, I never felt confronted. This depiction of the helplessness of sexualized newborn females seemed no less ridiculous than Milla Jovovich’s cipher in The Fifth Element. All Johansson needs is a strong, generous man to look after her. He lets her have his room for the night while he sleeps on the couch, he takes her to visit a castle, he carries her across a pond so she won’t get her feet wet. I didn’t feel an irony in these scenes. They felt like attempts at genuine sweetness, a counterpoint to the sexually charged men of the previous act. I scoffed, and never felt like I was supposed to.
The final turn in the film is fairly predictable, given the sense of dread hinted at throughout. Having come to see herself as others see her, Johansson tries to integrate with humanity. She tries to take the sweet-hearted man to bed, only to be terrified and run away when her vagina doesn’t work properly. She goes to a restaurant and buys a slice of cake, only to immediately gag the pieces back onto her plate. Only the finale moved me in a genuine way. She treks alone through a forest park, and encounters a ranger who tells her the park is perfectly safe to wander around in. She does wander, adrift in this existential dead zone between the world she has abandoned and the world she can’t seem to fit into. The context of that early scene, when Johansson stripped a woman who looked almost identical to her, becomes clear. This is what always happens. Alien women cannot prey on men forever. Eventually they feel bad about it. Finally she finds a resting area, a small enclosure with a bench, and lies down to sleep. She awakens when that same park ranger has doubled back, and begun sexually assaulting her in her sleep. She fights him off and runs away, panting and desperate. Here the film has finally involved me. Now that she sees her Johansson skin as synonymous with herself she develops a protective instinct. The film gains an immediacy that it lacked before. That it took so long to arrive, though, made me question its legitimacy. Is this the end? All of that to arrive at this? Apparently so. The would-be rapist catches up to her again and, in a scene far too long and unpleasantly drawn out for the point it seemed to be making, holds her down in the woods and strips most of her clothing off. In the struggle he breaks her facade, punching a hand through her faux skin to the real Johansson underneath. Upset and confused by what he sees, he runs off, leaving Johansson to peel her face off and stare at it in silent contemplation. For some reason the alien underneath has breasts. While I am not usually one to complain about the plausibility of a film, the obviously mammalian gendering of beings that are otherwise otherworldly in their smooth, hairless black skin struck me as only further proof that Glazer wasn’t legitimately challenging traditional depictions of gender. And from there the film ends in tragedy. Only I didn’t feel anything. In the moment, her loss meant the film was over, and I could finally leave. I had decided I didn’t like the film from the opening scene, and almost every scene after reinforced this belief. I felt certain when I walked out of the theatre that I would text Loose Canons’ own Reuben Clay, and we could share in our mutual annoyance with the film.
Only he had an entirely opposite reaction. He saw the film as using misogynistic stereotypes perpetuated by films like Species and The Fifth Element in order to comment on their misogyny. I was confounded. And I have no answer for how our opinions could diverge so completely. Thinking about the film a lot while writing this paper, I can see pieces maybe I missed. The way she stripped more and more clothing off with each successive man she lured into her apartment, with her finally appearing fully nude in front of Pearson, as a metaphor for the stripping away of her shell, for her growing empathy. That the sweet-hearted chivalrous man might behave differently, but is ultimately the same as the sexually charged men she picks up in the sense that they desire her without having any knowledge of who she is or where she comes from. In our society, all a woman needs is to be beautiful. And with men’s sexual desire comes a desire for control. Thus the chivalrous man and the rapist are equated. Again, both express this differently, but their sense of her inner person as extraneous to what they want from her links them. I can see these potential readings now, and recognize them as valid. But something in my brain failed to make these links in the moment, and I am guessing most of it has to do with that first scene, and the way it combined with certain aspects of what followed. I was put off by the sound design’s lack of subtlety. By the intentionally grainy, low-res look of Johansson driving around in a truck at night. By the way the plot seemed to hide information unnecessarily, giving it a feeling of being a confounding puzzle for the sake of its own strangeness. I looked at the surface, and decided I didn’t like what I saw, so I stopped trying to probe deeper. Why? It’s easier? I wish I had an answer. I would like to be more generous. I would like to give films more and more chances to win me over, rather than making up my mind so quickly. Maybe most of them don’t deserve it. But maybe this one did.
-Basil Swartzfager, 2014
