Six Points About "Under the Skin"

Under the Skin, directed by Jonathan Glazer, heralds its theme with its opening sequence: massive orbs engage to form an eye in a ballet of geometry (yes, it is not unlike 2001 in this respect or Melancholia for that matter). We know from the get go, then, that this is a film about looking as well as a film to be looked at. In other words, it declares its visual emphasis and entreats us to brood over its images. So with Under the Skin it’s worth unpacking what we’re actually seeing.

• While Glazer has conjured images and movements of potent evocative force, most of his attempts to contextualize them (e.g. fit them into a narrative arc) largely efface their impact. He generally errs on the side of opacity, avoiding concreteness to preserve the efficacy of his set-pieces. It is in this respect, the attempted preservation of mystery and ambiguity, that Glazer is most clearly striving towards Kubrick. At some point, however, one wonders if what we’re really dealing with is not a series of killer music videos strung together by faint ideas. These ideas include a literal enactment of the mirror-phase (or the mirror part of the mirror-phase at least) in which Scarlett Johansson’s character seems to belatedly form a symbolic image of herself, beginning her journey to subjecthood. What this reveals is fairly facile (beginners Lacan and actually doesn’t really work as Lacan. He’s confusing, so I’ll refrain from making any definitive claims about it one way or another), but I sense that a tidy read of the film isn’t the response the filmmakers were going for. After all, such a reading would deny those stretches that make a real impact. The problem remains, though, that Glazer, rather than allowing the content to emerge out of his visual concoctions (which are obviously the product of some serious inspiration), squares it all off with an unworthy framework and by the last act you can feel the strain (more on this below).

• For the most part, the film does successfully de-familiarize its drab Glasgow settings, however I wonder if it works as well when it actually plays in Glasgow where the audience can presumably understand the thick Scottish brogues that threw my yankee ears for a loop. And yes, highly concentrated refined sugar would indeed taste bad to an alien, but I propose that it would also taste bad to anyone who had simply not grown up eating it (maybe that’s the point, that we must learn to take pleasure). The revelation that Johansson’s alien character (and frankly I only know that she’s an alien because I read it in some synopsis before watching the movie) would be disgusted by human food is mainly a function in Glazer’s narrative strategy. That strategy is to create an oppressive atmosphere of inhumanity and tease his way towards some recognizable sentiments so that we eventually beg him to relinquish his strangle hold. Once you catch onto this program, the proceedings become increasingly dull and more apparently glib.

• What can we make of Scarlett Johanson’s transformation, her emergent awareness of the possibility of possessing other dimensions beyond an infrangible draw on the opposite sex, her struggle to navigate the field of object relations? Johansson does an impressive job of personal distanciation here, alienating herself from her own body (a clever use of Johansson’s public image: She objectifies herself for once!). Her character wields this body to deadly ends, baiting men throughout the film, only to let them sink and perish in an oily void moments before the act of consummation they’d been expecting (which leads to the film’s most harrowing passage, sub oil-void). But as soon as she opposes the advances of a male, at a moment when she is cut-offthe recourse of her oil-void (castrated, if you will), she is raped and burned alive. So to boil down this resolution we could say that just as she trains her gaze toward a dawning humanity, this womanoid, who until now has been nothing more than a deadly cock-tease, finally gets her comeuppance. The tragic but just deserts of a foul temptress? Naturally, we’ve been headed towards rape the whole time.

• Glazer pimped out a van with hidden cameras in order for Johansson to pick up and lead on actual men off the street. I can only assume that Glazer opted for this conceit to free him from worrying about how to handle the human side of the equation and at the same time give his film a little extra cache in the bargain. It certainly does add to his hall of mirrors in terms of the “looking” theme. Or maybe he wanted to obscure those misogynistic overtones by positioning our point of view with that of the predator. It also introduces a meta-element with regards to casting. Did Glazer conceive of this project with Johansson in mind all along, as the gimmick actually provides much more insight into her position in the pubic eye than anything else? Or maybe I just forgot about the fact she’s been passively accepting the dictates of a mysterious male figure who rides a motorcycle. Could Glazer be illustrating the difficulty of escaping the patriarchy and the precarious position women hold within it?

• Johansson is an odd starlet in the sense that she doesn’t have any traditional movie star glamour and her persona is actually pretty nondescript. Besides her estimable talents and charms, her presence or star quality or whatever you want to call it (and “it” she has got in spades) rests mostly on her incredible surfeit of estrogen. Not a classic beauty and lacking any of the prickly qualities that made the silver screen odalisques of yesteryear compelling, Scarlett is somewhat of a benign object of desire. This indefiniteness or reserve is of course the source of a great deal of her allure, but the pheromones practically waft off the screen. So not only does this make her perfectly suited to the task of luring actual men into her van (the van being the wheels of choice for sexual predators apparently), but she can also be readily identified by audiences as the embodiment of pure seductiveness (she can also afford to spread her sultriness out over several movies, too; her body in this one, her voice in Her). But what I see in her (the public figure) as reserve or coyness could more simply be viewed as self-possession, a quality that when found in a woman can alienate, threaten, and infuriate an insecure or emasculated male ego (ahem).

Now, this element makes the whole affair altogether more unsettling. Regardless of the fact that the character is an alien, we’re looking at images of a woman being raped, a woman we are familiar with and who is an international focus of lust and symbol of unattainability, in other words a symbolic object of desire or object of symbolic desire and in still other words a celebrity. We are here allowed to share in her and the filmmaker’s deceit (we’re meant to feel privileged that Glazer and Johansson would let us tag along for their little candid-camera adventure. They let us believe that their eyes are our’s), but we are also in a broader sense the victims of a similar deceit. She’s drawn us in countless times to the dark no-space of the multiplex, larger than life, self-possessed, and beyond our possession. So in this film we can identify with both predator and prey and are given the catharsis of an enacted retribution. By that logic, this film let’s us have our cake and eat it too. But then when the camera takes on the POV of Johansson’s character and takes its time closely scrutinizing the reflection of her naked body in the mirror, I honestly wonder if Glazer has ever heard of Laura Mulvey.

• Can we call this an on-a-bad-day extension of the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” mentality? This kind of thinking alienates men and women from each other (even adopting an extra-terrestrial metaphor as its coda). Here the mentality is taken to the next extreme: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and the self is from a different dimension. The unconscious is nearly unknowable, fine, but practical gender relations need not be so dour. The subject, it has been said, can only be defined in relation to others and this seems to be suggested in one of the film’s many startling sequences in which Johansson is subsumed by a sea of superimposed faces. But what more can a film about a non-human who begins to feel the stirrings of humanity finally tell us about being human? I have no idea. Perhaps next time, to risk sounding new-agey, Glazer will look inside.