Under The Skin – Bitch Flicks

Alienated Women: The Terror in Mica Levi’s Scores for ‘Under the Skin’ and ‘Jackie’

Jackie’s deeply emotional outbursts may stand in stark contrast to the alien’s lack of empathy, but both women share a troubling alienation from the people around them. Mica Levi’s scores make this alienation audible, the grim discomfort of her music allowing the audience to feel, even for 90 minutes, the terror of such a solitude.

This guest post written by Zoë Goodall originally appeared at Cause a Cine. It is cross-posted with permission.

When I saw the trailer for Pablo Larraín’s Jackie (2016), my first thought was, “Why do I feel so afraid?” I was unsurprised then, to discover that the woman behind the music was Mica Levi, who composed the score to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013). After seeing Jackie, it occurred to me the two films that Levi has composed music for have more in common than it initially appears. Under the Skin is a sci-fi angle on the femme fatale, where Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who seduces and kills men in Scotland. Jackie is the Oscar-ready biopic of Jackie Kennedy, centered on a masterfully emotive performance by Natalie Portman. Yet both films feature women who are lost, distanced from others and profoundly alone. Those around them cannot understand them, and so they are alienated. It is the haunted feeling of such alienation that Levi’s scores illuminate.

Johansson’s alien in Under the Skin is of course the more literal embodiment of alienation. She blankly visits human settings such as shopping centers and nightclubs, never sure of how to arrange her face to fit in with those around her. She lacks human empathy, illustrated starkly in a scene where she leaves a baby on a beach with a tide coming in. When she experiences sex with a human man, she is so overwhelmed that she flees. Levi’s score is fittingly otherworldly, pulsing with unidentifiable noises, the viola screeching like a wounded animal. It’s utterly unlike other film scores, giving the audience no easy emotional cues. The nails-on-chalkboard discomfort it conjures makes audible the colossal distance between the alien and humanity. One cannot relax when listening to the score, instead feeling a constant sense of dread at what this unknowable creature might do next.

This constant dread, this grim unease, are present also in Levi’s Oscar-nominated score for Jackie. Jackie, in contrast to the alien, is utterly, familiarly human. Her grief and trauma over her husband’s death is the bedrock of the narrative. The audience knows how she feels, due to Portman’s highly expressive face. Jackie is also privileged, famous, and powerful. But as the narrative demonstrates how quickly Jackie loses her power, Levi’s score highlights the instability of Jackie’s world in the aftermath of her husband’s death. The score is more lush and regal than the score for Under the Skin, in part because there’s an orchestra and in part to reflect the high-class American world that Jackie inhabits. But the discomfort that Levi brought to Under the Skin is present in Jackie, too. Many times when the score begins, it sounds light, almost cheerful, before being undercut by low, ominous strings that lurk obtrusively in the background. The result is a feeling of disturbance, that something familiar and romantic has been polluted by a grim terror.

Just as Under the Skin showed how Scotland was a completely foreign world to the alien, Jackie displays how the First Lady losing her title and home throws her into a world that’s entirely unfamiliar. Visually, this is represented through particular, subtle moments: the look of shock on Jackie’s face when Lyndon B. Johnson is greeted as “Mr President” hours after JFK’s death; the camera lingering on Lady Bird Johnson picking out new White House curtains while Jackie watches, unseen. Jackie is constantly filmed on her own, without even the presence of bodyguards or servants to lessen the impression of her alienation. Her friendship with her assistant, Nancy, is shown to be of great value to her, but the film’s repeated shots of a solitary Jackie make clear that she feels cut off from everyone around her. In the film’s final minutes, a happy sequence of her playing on the beach with her children is concluded with a close-up of her grief-stricken face, and her children out of the frame. Then, she sits alone on the couch while the Life interviewer talks on the phone. Then, at the burial of JFK, she stands starkly apart from everyone else. The final shot is of her dancing at a party in JFK’s arms, placing her feelings of joy and belonging firmly in the past.

Angelica Jade Bastién writes that Jackie uses horror movie techniques to illustrate Jackie’s grief. Levi’s score is an integral part of this, the relentless, ominous strings suggesting that life has changed for Jackie in a most terrifying way. When she finally returns to the White House from Dallas, the score is fundamentally eerie, sadness undercut with grim foreboding. It’s a score suited to a dangerous expedition into unknown territory, rather than a return home. Levi’s score communicates what doesn’t need to be said through dialogue; the White House isn’t home anymore, and Jackie’s power has disappeared with her First Lady title. The terror of being cut off from a familiar world, and the subsequent alienation, are made salient in Levi’s grim, uncomfortable music.

The alien in Under the Skin has no possessions apart from her classic predator’s white van, and the outfit she chooses to resemble the common woman. Although dressed in the finest of outfits, Jackie finds herself similarly dispossessed, telling the Life reporter that the White House and her current house never belonged to her. “Nothing’s mine, not for keeps anyway,” she tells him. Separated from the home planet or the White House, both women are anchorless, adrift. Even when surrounded by revellers in metropolitan Glasgow, or watched by thousands at her husband’s funeral, the alien and Jackie remain fundamentally alone. Haunted by their inability to connect with others, to slot in to this world, they stand lost and detached. Jackie’s deeply emotional outbursts may stand in stark contrast to the alien’s lack of empathy, but both women share a troubling alienation from the people around them. Levi’s scores make this alienation audible, the grim discomfort of her music allowing the audience to feel, even for 90 minutes, the terror of such a solitude.

Zoë Goodall is currently an Honours student and Media Coordinator for an Australian not-for-profit organization. She likes feminist film analysis, dogs, and reading Batwoman comics. She lives in Melbourne, Australia.

On Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Under The Skin’

This guest post by Jacqueline Valencia previously appeared at These Girls on Film and is cross-posted with permission.

Contains spoilers.

The mulling over of Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin is an entirely different beast than the actual watching of the film. In fact, I started writing this sentence a few months after writing the one before it. I had to re-watch it and digest it, read the original book by Michael Faber, and then re-watch it again. I have to backtrack a bit though (and please forgive the ramble or pleonasm, it always ends up somewhere…at least I hope it does for the reader). Since the film is very loosely based on the book, I won’t use the names of the characters from it, instead I will refer to Scarlett Johansson’s character as the alien, Laura, and Jeremy McWilliams as The Biker.

I’ve just finished reading Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. When the book first came out, it left a major impression on feminists and the science fiction community. The novel is set in various times and numerous dimensions within the varying perspectives of all the women that inhabit those worlds. Each character has her chance at inquiring and defining what it means to be a person living as a female. The book isn’t connected to Under The Skin, but it did open up some inner discourse about how gender identity is part of the film’s unsettling nature, thus making it a big part of this film.

In Under The Skin, we first witness a series of enigmatic shapes and sounds, some of them analogue or the voice of someone figuring out a language, and a flash of what seems like a space ship hurtling through the blackness. The images dissolve into The Biker riding a long stretch of road. The lights of a city are reflected on his helmet (reminiscent of the psychedelic light show in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001). He then goes into a ravine and grabs the body of dead woman and places her in an unmarked van. In the next scene we see Laura, naked, taking off the dead woman’s clothes to put them on herself. This dead woman could possibly be another alien that Laura is replacing. The Biker’s job is to observe and keep tabs on Laura and since The Biker knew where to find this dead woman, it’s more than likely he was following her all along. The dead women also has the same body shape as Laura and looks like her.

Laura looks at the dead woman’s body, water from the river The Biker recovered her from, is released from her dead eyes, like tears onto the sides of her face. She picks up an ant from the dead woman’s body and watches it crawl over her fingers as she examines it. I think of formication here, the sensation of having insects crawling under your skin. The aliens here inhabit a foreign skin like a human suit to capture their prey. Laura will undergo a psychological transformation while in the suit and since we are unaware of her emotions or motivations, we witness her visibly struggling with the world that this human suit is made to navigate. Although she is a predator, she is like the ant, a tiny being away from its colony, defenseless in a foreign world.

Glazer displays a combination of completely silent moments with scenes plucked out of reality through the use of hidden cameras and non-actors. As Laura goes shopping for new clothes at the mall and The Biker goes about riding through the Scottish countryside, neither of them utters a word. It’s only when Laura goes about searching for and grooming her possible prey, that she speaks. She selects her prey (always male) by asking them if they are connected in any way to anyone or anything. If they are, she lets them go, if they aren’t, she seduces them by asking them back to her place.

Her place is an old building with decaying walls which is dank and dark. The men follow her in and out into a black room with a slick black floor. Laura walks provocatively away, coaxing them without letting the men touch her. Walking forward the men keep their eyes fixed on Laura even though the black floor soon becomes a liquid and they are swallowed up into it. Laura retraces her steps, picking up her clothes and the floor is still solid under her feet. The victim will look above to see her walking away, yet he seems unable to struggle or swim back to the surface. At one point, one of the victims observes another man’s innards sucked out, just before he goes through the same fate, only his outer later of skin left, floating in the jetsam. The meat of the victims then travels onto a conveyor belt of fleshy innards to a light source in the distance.

In the book, Laura the Alien is named Isserly, an extraterrestrial who is genetically modified by a corporation on her home planet to look human. Isserley “hunts” heavy set human males so her employer can harvest their meat. Human meat is a delicacy in her world. In the film, no mention is made about her job or who she is doing this for, just that this is what she does and what she is made to do. Her nature is subtly implied in two scenes. First, we see The Biker obdurately inspect her; an ominous beat plays in the background. Laura stands at attention while he examines her, carefully looking at her profile, then up close into her eyes in an intimidating stance. Her eyes are blank and looking off into the distance. In another scene, she brings home a disfigured man. He’s the only one she’s made herself completely naked for and as he descends into the black pool, an alien stares back at her from across the way. Is she looking at her real self or is she looking at a superior? It is unclear, but it is known that she is continually being watched to make sure she doesn’t deviate from her function: to capture men to bring into the black pool.

Laura doesn’t seem to question anything about herself for awhile, even when she witnesses a couple drowning and leaves their child alone to die with the tide coming in. There’s no empathy for her prey. She is given a rose by a stranger through a rose salesman. She notices blood on it and for a moment her expressions are of confusion. Does she believe the blood is hers? How can it be, if she isn’t human? Her breathing is laboured and she seems out of breath in the van. Then she looks around and sees that the salesman has cut himself with the rose thorns. Laura looks almost sad and disappointed.Was she beginning to think she was human after all?

It’s only until Laura begins to question herself and her place in the world when she observes the women around her in the next scene. She’s in her van and as she listens to the report of the missing couple and child she witnessed drowning, a scene of just women, conversing, talking, and walking begins. For a bit, it’s like the montage of her looking for her male victims, with the foreboding background music to match. Later on this same sort of montage occurs, but instead of the scary soundtrack, we hear the hustle and bustle of the street as our eyes scan the women on the screen. There are men in the montage, but overall there are mostly women. There’s a quick flash of Laura’s eye and instead of blackness, we see her pupil and the green-gold iris around it. A calming drone plays on as we watch women laughing and interacting with each other. Their images coalesce into collage of gold lights, much like the intricate gold in Gustav Klimt paintings. Laura’s face dissolves and eventually comes back to the surface among the golden images.

She is back on the hunt right after, but something feels a bit different. A roaring sound is heard as she waits in her van. A man knocks on her window and suddenly her van is surround by men trying to get in. She is indifferent at first until she realizes she might be in danger and drives off. The predator has all of sudden become possible prey.

After she has put the disfigured man in the pool, she catches her reflection in a small mirror on the way out of the building. She looks at herself closely. She turns to hear a fly buzzing to be let out by the door. The light from outside is reflected in her eyes as is the fly’s movements. This creates the effect of a galaxy in her eyes. From then on, her eyes go from blank and dark to shiny and much more prominent in her display of emotions.

These are all signs of her questioning her existence. Obviously, by the end of the film we are shown that her Johansson exterior is merely a suit to the similarly looking alien we see earlier in the film. Something compels her to explore herself as human and a woman on earth. Laura tries a piece of chocolate cake at a restaurant and chokes on it, frustrated that she cannot eat like humans do. She walks out and is taken in by the kindness of a stranger. In his home, she stands in the corner, like a helpless creature until he leaves her on her own. In a room by herself, she takes off her clothes and looks at her body: the movement of her joints, the curve of her back, are all a sort of scientific delight for her. Scarlett Johansson, besides being an incredibly talented actress is also known for her voluptuous and almost perfect beauty. Yet there’s nothing sexual about this scene. Here lies before our eyes a gorgeous woman, but the scene elicits more questions than physical reactions. It’s like when you’re a kid and realize, by some sort of infantile enlightenment, that you can move your hands just by thinking about it. The scene with its red porn lighting becomes absurd and odd in its rendering.

She tries to have sex with the kind stranger and something isn’t right there either. Laura stops him and looks between her legs with a flashlight. Upset, she leaves the house and treks into the woods. There she loses herself to the extreme wilderness of the area only to be found by a logger who eventually tries to rape her. As she tries to escape the ranger ends up tearing her clothes and eventually her human suit comes apart. This frightens the logger. Laura takes part of the suit into her hands and looks into the blinking eyes of her suit. The logger returns, pours gasoline on her, and sets her on fire. Laura runs off and surrenders to her fate as her ashes mix with the snow. In the book, the ending is similar, but she is in full control of her death because she sets off an explosion to eliminate any trace of herself.

The scariest part of this scene isn’t the final unmasking of her true alien form. The scariest part of this scene is the logger coming back so easily with gasoline and setting fire to her. Is this first thing that comes to people’s brains when confronted with the unknown? Or does this logger have a can of gasoline and a match ready to set his rape victims on fire? It came to mind because as I was watching this with my friend, they asked, “Who does that? Wouldn’t they call someone on the truck radio or a cell phone? Call the police?”

Another thing that’s quite odd and unsettling is that in both scenes where Laura finds herself in danger (her van being attacked, her attempted rape and eventual murder), we’ve gone from being frightened of her to being afraid for her. The audience is left empathizing with something that is responsible for the deaths of many people. Glazer accomplishes this feat by giving us a film where the main focus is the predator’s/Laura’s point of view. Without an inner dialogue the audience is forced to inhabit and decipher her movements and expressions. The hidden cameras utilized to film most of the movie and its spontaneous dialogues, adds to that foreign feel, especially with the thick Scottish accents of the town’s inhabitants. Laura is the only one we can readily hear and make sense out of, yet she’s an alien we know almost nothing about.

This brings me back to Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. All of the woman in the book, inhabit different worlds that they cannot make sense of, they are aliens in each others worlds as well, but they find meaning and motivations out of their struggle to identify away from men. Not only that, but the author herself has admitted that all the females within the book are facets of herself, at times, even she interjects as the narrator. There is much complex navigation required for the reader in the book, but there are clues throughout making the book more like an identity game, than a passive read. At one point, the characters all find each other in Whileaway, a world where men have died off from a plague eight hundred years ago. Women procreate using technologies and create a utopian world. As Joanna, Jeannine, Janet, and all the various Js interact on Whileaway, Vittoria, Janet’s wife tells the story about a girl raised by bears. The girl grows to find her difference to much and goes to live with the humans, but finds that unsatisfying as well. Through riddles and tribulations the girl continually struggles to find her place.

“Wait a minute,” said I. “This story doesn’t have an end. It just goes on and on….”

“I tell things,” said by dignified little friend (through Vittoria) “the way they happen,” and slipping her head under the induction helmet without further comment (and her hands into the waldoes) she went back to stirring her blanc-mange with her forefinger. She said something casually over her shoulder to Vittoria, who translated:

“Anyone who lives in two worlds, ” (said Vittoria) “is bound to have a complicated life.”

(I learned later that she had spent three days making up the story. It was, of course, about me). – Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. Boston: Beacon, 1986. pg 99. Print.

The power Laura’s character finds to move away from her passive relationship with her employer is through her identification as a woman among men on earth. That power is in the male gaze and much has been written about it since the film came out in 2013:

Laura doesn’t have a man touch her or see her nude (except for the disfigured man). She merely lures them into the pool with her body, and the expectation from her sexuality. Reduced to her body as a passive weapon, she is also empowered by it. She doesn’t hunt women and she doesn’t interact with them, but she is one of them. It’s a very confusing process for her because she has been programmed to interact with only the male gender. Even when she exhibits wonder and emotions through observing other women does she look to interact with females, instead she goes off on her own and escapes the city, only to be at the mercy of her helpless female exterior. Surely she does run and she does hit back when she is being attacked. But she is shocked, demoralized, and it’s the first time that she finds herself fearing for her own life.

I am intrigued with the fact that The Biker is a male as well and the fact that towards the end, we see him with other bikers like himself. They search for her along the winding, treacherous roads of Scotland. In the end, The Biker is seen looking off into the snowy wilderness, probably aware that he’s completely lost Laura already to the elements. Are there more aliens like Laura out there since there are more Bikers, or were there just sent there to find her?

This film leaves more questions than it answers which has led to much speculations by critics if the movie is merely trying to be too art house by leaving everything up to interpretation or if it’s at its core and intelligently filmed and well-timed work? In its defence, I posit the analysis above and the divisive reviews that the film has garnered. It’s a slow moving narrative with blank spots filled in with thought and wonder. Today’s filmmaking world is out to feed the all encompassing instant gratification machine. However, not every book film or film will touch every audience member. Cinema, no matter if its blockbusting or if its high-brow, thrives on inhabiting difference and expressing it progressively, not stagnantly. There’s hope in films that question how to tell a tale, how to film a film, what makes up a film, and what is an artist’s intention. If anything films like Under The Skin, question the now and how through its premise. It definitely got me thinking more about how disenfranchised and alien-like woman can be in different portrayals of themselves as women.

The alien Laura is, confounds audiences, it makes them question why we have not had female characters like her before. She is a lonely woman in a lonely man film world. While her existence might astonish some, for some women, we find ourselves in her. Who am I, if not a woman who fulfils certain duties within her highly regulated domain? While laws, without question, are continually placed on how I use and make my body up, very rarely do we find ourselves combatting laws that place these same restricting laws on men’s bodies. Woman find themselves often as the meat on the conveyer belt, a delicacy to society’s standards, but here we are, alien in a world that negates that we are very much human. See? The thought or overthought is amazing when trying to decipher this film and in that I can see more than what lies beyond what is presented on the screen.

Much like the scene in Taxi Driver where a dyspeptic Travis Bickell walks through the wet streets of NYC, alienated from the city he must work on, there’s a gorgeous scene that sticks with me in Under The Skin. It’s this one:

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrMP3yfF-Yw”]

Laura looks around herself and finds herself alone in a strange land. Her sight is obscured by the white fog that surrounds her. It’s an eerily calming scene. The film itself hints at dangers at every corner or a darkness that follows Laura, yet in this scene, she is still isolated, but on the verge of something entirely new to her. The possibilities beyond that moment are endless. She is human and can be anything and anyone.

Jacqueline Valencia is a Toronto-based poet and critic. She the author of The Octopus Complex (Lyrical Myrical Press, 2013) and featured in the 2015 anthology Gods Memes And Monsters (Stone Skin Press). Jacqueline is the senior staff film critic at Next Projection and the founding editor of These Girls On Film.

Becoming Not She, But Her: Motivation, Cinematography, and the Alien-in-Girl’s Clothing in Glazer’s ‘Under the Skin’

If you hear that people hate this movie, this re-inscription of feminine expendability and excoriation is probably, I’m guessing, why. Or there’s not enough explicitly in the surface of the movie: everything’s implied, ergo too many loose ends. They probably hate what happens to the baby: I think that’s when women walk out of the movie. The fact that men regularly walk out of screenings (because of the erect penises on the victimized men–that is a whole other essay for a whole different internet venue and I want to read that essay a.s.a.p.)

Under the Skin poster — *Under the Skin* poster

This is a guest post by Cynthia Arrieu-King.

SPOILER ALERT

Scarlett Johansson herself says the movie Under the Skin is about an “it” becoming a “her”. Not a she: subjective, but a her: objective. This is the key dynamic character shift in the film, so that you’d think this film would embody a cultural critique of how women are treated, or at least, the idea of human predation. Because the “it” is a predatory drone and becomes a “her”, it first discovers slowly and sadly the immense vulnerability and mundanity of being a human person and then of being a human woman. The attractiveness of the Johansson human body (the thing for which she was singled out) ends up completely working against the alien. Its alien culture didn’t fully understand the position it was putting “it” in by putting “it” in a female body, and the amount of thinking we can see on the alien’s face as it is preying on people amounts to what we get from watching a spider on a web. Sometimes it’s the glass of water that does in an alien (Signs); sometimes it’s Johansson’s face and body.

In the first minutes, I didn’t think of a femme fatale; I thought Johansson was acting out some revenge fantasy–the abducted woman with the very deadpan comic twist: men don’t have to be abducted by force or tripped up by a woman’s doubt of her own instinct for being in danger; you can just promise them a one-night-stand with a lost English woman who looks like Johansson, and they’ll conveniently take their clothes off. That seems like the wink from the director, past the affectless alien, to us. Except the movie has a hard time offering up meaning from the gross amount of predation foisted on men—though it sure keeps showing their demises to us, over and over again.

What do you do with the insinuation that feminine wiles are basically manipulation? Or that men are so overwhelmed they can’t pick up on the fact that her questions are faintly pushy and one-track? Honestly, if I saw a gorgeous man on a beach, and he kept asking, “What are you doing here/are you alone/what country are you from?” I’d be taking ten steps back, turning, and walking away quickly. Which to his credit, is kind of what the surfer on the beach does when Johansson’s alien accosts him. The camera hangs on his face, taking in and registering the alien’s intrusiveness: she/it asks point blank what country he’s from. Viewers may worry, thinking: Are you gonna buy this, man? Are you really not noticing this is weird? He seems to feel baited, and the whole exchange is pushed aside for his altruism in wanting to help the drowning woman and dog. This is clearly a movie by a man: because if it were a movie by a woman. But we’re seeing a vulnerability in men we don’t often see on film. Considering the way the social criticism stays on a silent, not-very-deep level in this movie, backed up mostly by silence and blackness to fill in the gaps not covered in the story-writing meetings, I’ll take this one chance to see the tables get turned and go horribly wrong.

It’s hard to say what exactly is the trigger for the alien that makes her understand humans as something other than a meat parade. Is it mundane night life, malls, and people walking on the street? The alien’s modus operandi is a blend of “hunter” as well as tedious, dutiful, and atonal. I did not think she developed feelings or pity for humans. Her project is tedious to her. Is she really having a revelation about people? Or is this actually about sentience? Is she discovering the little bugs (humans) she’s picking off are values-driven?

Under the Skin seems more focused on the dreadfulness of being in another body, constantly amongst people who will want to kill her if they discover what she is. This isn’t, however, to say the movie is about Otherness in the way speculative fiction critiques and instructs on Otherness. It’s more about the weariness of being. Of being any being. Her work is so repetitive that I almost got enraged that it was still happening narratively, much less to these poor dudes. There’s no clue of how or when it could end. This can be read as rigor of repetition or, perhaps, as art for art’s sake.

Then comes the turning point, but it’s so crazily silent that it takes the length of this very long shot to understand what’s happened. The overpowering substance of the shot is that she looks out a window or into a glass tank and we see her face move from darkness into half-light. The beauty of this is its eyes go from an examination of the human as Other to self-regard pretty seamlessly. When the eyes dip into the light, the shot really communicates reticence and an inability to accept this gaze, this human face, these eyes. Does it look gruesome to itself? Maybe it loves this face? Is it creeped out? We don’t know whether or not sympathy is in the emotional currency on the alien’s planet, but we see something blows the alien’s mind. As a result, she releases the guy with neurofibromatosis (Adam Pearson) that we rolled our eyes to see going into her trap.

Why compassion for him and not the baby? She has remorse. Because she relates to alienation? Because of job burnout?

It’s worth saying a few words here about the cinematography and the setting of Scotland. In an overwhelming number of shots, the lighting is so dim you almost don’t know what you’re looking at, and there’s neon and noise and gold and graphics. This is a nod toward Jordan Chenoweth (cinematographer for Blade Runner) from DP Daniel Landin. The alien repeatedly echoes Rachel from Blade Runner in the use of eyelights—an almost totally dark face except for eyelights and the lighting of the lower third of her face. Why are we echoing Rachel here? Because Rachel’s humanity was tested through her eyes. She’d thought she was human but actually wasn’t. Here, Johansson’s alien ascertains something through an examination of her own eyes, thinks she’s not human, but, as the symmetry of this subtext goes, is about to find out she feels just like one.

Once out of the comfortable workplace of her van, Johansson’s alien is trying to stop with the predation. Except her kind didn’t study women enough to understand that just by walking alone on a road, she’s vulnerable. Here comes symbolic and literal fog on the road. She cannot see where she’s going now that she’s acquiring a conscience. She walks through the fog until she’s just passed it. This whiteness counters the blackness attached to everything the aliens do as day-to-day business. She rides a bus, now alone, and looks utterly freaked out like a woman who is trying to get out of a traumatic domestic situation. Except, it’s the situation she was sent here to embody that she’s trying to leave. She would prefer something more domestic, it seems, as she keeps going into houses—first a man’s and then a shelter in some woods.

There’s so much to say about the most retold, re-cast tale about predation in Western culture (Little Red Riding Hood) regrouping itself into some horrifyingly corrupted archetypes here in the last fourth of the movie. The book on which this horror movie is based is a piece of Michel Faber’s Dutch/Scottish horror. Little Red Riding Hood originated from a group of sexual assault warnings that filtered through the French countryside in the 17^th century. Don’t let yourself be tracked. Don’t accept people on appearances (shey could be a wolf with your grandmother in its stomach). A wolf in grandmother’s clothes. And here after an interlude of almost-happiness in which Johansson’s alien-woman checks out her body in a mirror and ventures to have consensual sex, realizes what’s between her legs, she runs out into a forest where she shouldn’t be, where she has little idea how dangerous it is, and she’s warned to follow a trail by a woodsman, who ends up being the wolf.

The woodsman hits on her just the way she hit on men for the first half of the movie. What happens next is even harder to process, because in the end, isn’t she the wolf trapped in a woman’s body?

She pays for the underestimation, but the woodsman also pays for his underestimation with a terrible surprise for his rape-impulse. But wait a minute. After all the totally lamb-like men she’s picked up and stowed in her death lake, she’s out in a forest and the ONE MAN in the WHOLE FOREST that she runs into not only hits on her while trying to give her directions, but goes to find her so he can molest her, which then turns into him chasing her in the woods to straight up rape her.

Why is this piece of crap woodsman the last human she encounters on earth? Oh that’s right, we’re re-inscribing the message we apparently don’t get enough of: lone women who aren’t protected will be raped and killed. If you’re a wolf in woman’s clothing, good luck preserving your wily alien-wolf self because this near criminally insane woodsman will immolate you for being the uncanny. What did she do to become a predator magnet instead of the predator? She started feeling stuff. She gave up her predatory sex-kitten game. She tried to back up and see how she could possibly fit in and try to consider the essence of what she was doing. And so she ends up in a fate reserved for the more spectacular pieces of murdered women porn regularly paraded between 8-11 pm every night of the year on network television in both magazine and crime shows. Back to an object save the second moment of self-regard she has when she looks on her own Johansson face as a mask in her lap. It’s the one moment that makes this ending uncanny, and I would say, ultimately about being a human.

If you hear that people hate this movie, this re-inscription of feminine expendability and excoriation is probably why. There are too many too many loose ends and surface-like implications. People probably hate what happens to the baby: I think that’s when women walked out of the movie. The fact that men regularly walked out of screenings (because of the erect penises on the victimized men) is a whole other essay for a whole different internet venue and I want to read that essay a.s.a.p.

When Johansson’s corpse is burning up into the sky, the black smoke mingles with snow that flakes down to obliterate the literal camera lens. The fog comes back. And that male body-snatching alien looks off a cliff with his back to us, seeing or not seeing this black smoke, trying to find a sign in the confounding mist. He is not unlike a Romantic hero mystified who constantly feels alienated from Nature–a more tableaux version of what Johansson’s alien, in her last look upon her human face, must have felt.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Under the Skin of the Femme Fatale by Ren Jender

Cynthia Arrieu-King teaches literature and creative writing at Stockton College in New Jersey and has two published volumes of poetry. She has taught about 17 sections of freshman composition in which plagiarism was covered thoroughly, so beware internet magazines with sticky fingers. cynthiaarrieuking.blogspot.com.

‘Under The Skin’ of the Femme Fatale

Most of these films demonstrate a lack of curiosity about how these women came to be the characters we see: no one in real life becomes as deceptive, manipulative, and callous toward others as these characters are without a backstory, which usually never makes it into these films. So we’re probably overdue for a femme fatale who literally drops, fully formed from the sky: Scarlett Johansson’s main, unnamed character in Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Under The Skin,’ an alien in the guise of a beautiful woman. Johansson, wearing a short black wig, drives around Scotland in a nondescript, white van asking men walking alone along the road for directions and then, if she ascertains, through a few questions, that they won’t be missed, she offers them a ride.

The woman who lures men to their doom is a trope that goes back to the earliest days of film. Theda Bara, one of the first silent screen actresses to have an image of wanton carnality instead of the virginal purity of other stars of the era like Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, was referred to as a “vamp“–short for vampire– for her sexy roles in which she proved the downfall of the men attracted to her. “Vampy” and femme fatale characters have provided career peaks for many actresses since, from classic Hollywood film noir–Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice through the late 20th century with Kathleen Turner in Body Heat in the 80s and Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction in the 90s. In this century, the vampire of Let The Right One In (and its inferior American remake), who appears to the world an ordinary 12-year-old girl, manages to enlist both a man and a boy as her servants (while preying on others for fresh blood).

Most of these films demonstrate a lack of curiosity about how these women came to be the characters we see: no one in real life becomes as deceptive, manipulative, and callous toward others as these characters are without a backstory, which usually never makes it into these films. So we’re probably overdue for a femme fatale who literally drops, fully formed from the sky: Scarlett Johansson’s main, unnamed character in Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, an alien in the guise of a beautiful woman. Johansson, wearing a short black wig, drives around Scotland in a nondescript white van asking men walking alone along the road for directions and then, if she ascertains, through a few questions, that they won’t be missed, she offers them a ride.

JohanssonCompactSkin — Johansson’s alien on the prowl

We’re cued to how the main character sees human beings in one of the earliest scenes in which a naked Johansson strips the clothes from a freshly killed young woman (it’s unclear whether Johansson or her silent male assistant–also an alien in human guise–did the deed), so she can wear them as her own. As a tear falls down the dead woman’s face, Johansson’s character picks up an ant crawling on the woman’s now naked body and focuses on it as if it were a puppy. The ant helps explain Johansson’s attitude to humans: she’s not cruel. She just sees them as expendable and as removed from her own existence as most of us see insects.

The media and the filmmakers have made a point of revealing that some (but not all) of the encounters Johansson has in the van were unscripted, the men in them random passersby (who didn’t recognize the star of The Avengers), the camera hidden. This information seems pointless given how ordinary those conversations are–as far as we can tell. The accents of most of these men are so heavy they should have been subtitled for American audiences and perhaps UK ones as well.

But Glazer has a great touch with professional actors: he made the justly acclaimed Sexy Beast with Ben Kingsley as an unforgettable, ultraviolent, pint-size gangster: the anti-Gandhi. In Glazer’s less acclaimed (but still creepy and atmospheric) Birth he gave us a stricken, affecting Nicole Kidman (also in a short wig) as a woman accosted by an 10-year-old boy who convinces her he is the reincarnation of her dead husband. Johansson hasn’t always impressed me in her movie roles, (I didn’t believe a minute of Her: Johansson’s performance as Samantha was not the whole reason why, but certainly didn’t help) and in interviews she seems to confirm our worst suspicions of how ill-informed and insensitive to people outside their sphere movie stars can be. But she pulls the audience in here, as if we too are her victims, a relief, since for much of the film Johansson is the sole, silent person onscreen. In other scenes, when she talks to the men in a passable English accent (which sounds more natural than the Jersey accent she used in Don Jon) her eyes glitter with emotion. At first we mistake this passion for empathy (and the men mistake it for lust), but her excitement turns out to be the thrill of the hunt.

Each unlucky man follows her into a room (while the disturbing score by Mica Levi plays in the background) in which she strips her clothing as she walks, encouraging the man to do the same (this film isn’t one that discriminates in its nudity: the actors who go to her place are shown in full-frontal shots, two of them with erections) Without realizing he is doing so, his eyes focused on Johansson each man sinks completely into the black hole/digestive tank under his feet, while she pads across the smooth surface like a cat.

In the outside world, we see her knock out a swimmer who saves a man from drowning (the man then tragically goes back into the water to try to save his wife) and ignore the screaming toddler the couple has left behind on the beach. She starts to feel for the humans around her only when, outside of the insular world of her van, walking on city streets, she trips and falls face first on the sidewalk–and men like the ones she has been preying on help her up and ask if she’s okay. She’s as disconcerted by their doing so as if a small band of dragonflies did the same for one of us.

Later she picks up a loner (Adam Pearson) who appears to have the same disease as The Elephant Man (the actor has Neurofibromatosis), his facial features radically distorted. Because she’s an alien, Johansson’s character neither looks away from his face nor stares at it. She stops the van, asks him if he’s ever touched a woman and places his hand on her neck. She does take him back to her place, but the sight of a trapped fly trying to escape a room sparks something in her conscience. She flees the city (and her male assistant) to the Scottish Highlands where she experiences both the best and worst of human nature in men (she rarely interacts with women).

In this latter part of Skin the filmmakers seem to want to show Johansson’s character finding out what being human means. The problem is: Johansson’s character knows, from the start of the film how to be, by all appearances, a human woman— and the filmmakers never seem curious how she learned to do so. This film isn’t big on explanation–for anything, but this omission nagged at me in a way the other missing pieces didn’t.

The guise Johansson’s character chooses for herself is one which seems like it would require some research. Like the vampire in Let The Right One In she knows inhabiting a female form will make humans less wary of her, but she also somehow knows to take on all the arbitrary and sometimes contradictory attributes that make a woman attractive in the Western contemporary movie-star/model sense: full breasts (but a small waist), full lips (but a small jaw) and large eyes (but slender eyebrows). Equally puzzling, Johansson’s character knows, from the start, how to act like a conventionally attractive woman. She puts on a bra as if she had spent her adult life doing so; she walks in heels (she even knows to run down stairs in them–sideways, so she won’t trip) without wavering or falling (except for the one time); she applies makeup so it accentuates rather than makes grotesque her eyes and lips. Teenage, femme girls spend years wobbling and stumbling in heels and using too heavy a hand with blush and eyeliner before getting the hang of any of these things, but the filmmakers seem to think these skills come naturally with a female body, the way prizes used to come in cereal boxes. Johansson’s character never says a wrong word or has an awkward moment when she flirts with the men: she doesn’t talk to them with a young teenage girl’s uncertainty, but with the easy confidence of someone who has garnered male attention for most of her years.

If we had seen Johansson’s character struggle and falter with being a convincing, normal-seeming woman earlier in the film, we could better understand–and more easily suspend our belief for–her struggle later with the trials of being in a woman’s body. She has no idea how to maneuver amid men’s various intentions toward her, like the consensual encounter she cuts short when she finds, to her shock (in one of the film’s few comic moments) just what comprises heterosexual intercourse.

Toward the end, Johansson’s character removes the mask she has been wearing throughout the film, and as she looks down on it, it blinks back at her. It’s a visually stunning moment that might have been more emotionally resonant if the filmmakers had bothered to better explore what the world–and movies–expect women to be.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoSWbyvdhHw”]

___________________________________________________

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.