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Drive-By Review: Under The Skin
Aug. 13th, 2014 11:31 amI bought this on DVD last week, when our money came in, and watched half of it Friday night, half Saturday morning. It is...really striking, and to me, absolutely fascinating, though I understand why other people might have found it opaque or slow. The basic premise revolves around Scarlett Johanssen playing an alien in some version of a human body (possibly riding a corpse or possibly cloned/assembled freshly from harvested human DNA, but director Jonathan Glazer talks explicitly in the extras about always considering "her" an it, something sexless and inhuman using human flesh as a vehicle) who drives a big van around rural Scotland, picking up guys so she can take them to a squat-house which seems to cohabit the same space as an interdimensional delivery system of some sort; over and over, she walks backwards across an apparently endless black surface, shedding clothes as she goes and getting them to do the same, and the minute they're naked they start to sink through the floor, ending up imprisoned underneath in a formless, watery void where they float/marinate until some sort of force sucks their meat out, leaving nothing but skin behind, and beams the result...who knows where, exactly? There's no clear impression of what this whole process is "for," per se—are they making new vehicles out of the men? Deconstructing them to learn about them, and consuming the result? But then again, if you can't deal with open-ended questions, the may not be the film for you.
Much as with Steven Spielberg's A.I., however, the fascination of the narrative fot me lies in trying to figure out how much Johanssen herself understands about the whole thing—how she thinks, if she thinks, what she's capable of thinking of. For a while, I thought maybe she was some sort of organic robot, because the parameters apparently set for her interactions with humans are so wonderfully restricted—she emerges from her “birth”-chamber in constant roaming mode, eyes always searching, and when she spots her targets (young men, alone and unattached, ones who show sexual interest in her) she engages with them, doing nothing more or less than what she thinks will most effectively get them to come to the house with her. Often she asks for directions, using their mansplaining instincts against them, then pretends she can't understand; she'll ask them into the van, hoping they can "guide" her to her supposed destination, then flirt (or allow them to flirt with her, more specifically) until they're so turned on that they agree to a little detour, but these flirtations keep to a very repetitious pattern, almost like an algorithim: she waits for them to compliment her, laughs and smiles, then immediately compliments them in return, even if she has to work to find ways to do so. But she can't really talk about much else; it's like any deviation from standard or attempt to change the subject makes her hit reset, returning her to the original basic program.
This last part becomes most obvious when she picks up a guy whose facial deformity—so massive he has to shop at night, to avoid people "winding [him] up"—provides a context for her behaviour which renders it so unnatural-seeming that he's off-put by it even as he desperately welcomes it. (“I was looking at your hands,” she tells him; “you've lovely hands. Would you like to touch me? To touch my neck? How long has it been since you've touched someone else?”) It's like some sort of vaguely threatening Penthouse Letters scenario: “I never thought this would happen to me, but one night, as I was walking down the highway...” And she simply can't understand his response, beacuse it appears to be literally outside her field of recognizable elements—how can she tell what sort of trauma simply asking: “Do you have a girlfriend?” is going to do to him? So by the time she leads him across the black surface, he keeps saying, sadly: “Dreaming, yes? Dreaming.” While she just answers: “Yes. Yes, we are.”
On the one hand, it's a bit pat, this image of female as unknowable creature, as sexual lure, but though her primary function is this temptation/disposal routine, Johanssen constantly amnages to get across that the alien is far more interested in everything around the men she play siren to—the things, living and un-, which she hasn't already been given any information about. “Other” women, for example—with whom she obviously has no sort of identification at all—are presented as a combination of background visual static (non-targets), obstacle and occasional threat, capable of catching her off-guard because she literally doesn't seem to perceive them until they're on top of her, surrounding her and bearing her away, like that shrieking, laughing crowd of Ladies' Night maenads who drag her by her elbows into a dance-club while she's intent on stalking one particular dude. And then there's the chillingly weird moment when she and her helper/monitor, a “male” alien patterned after a motorcycle racer, kidnap a hapless Danish tourist from a rocky beach, which we retrospectively realize must have involved murdering and disposing of a Scots camper and his wife who unwittingly witness this transaction. As Johanssen clubs the Danish guy unconscious and drags his slack body to her van, she passes by a screaming barely-toddler struggling to rise and walk, and just leaves him there in front of the breaking surf. This turns out to be the murdered couple's son, later cited as still missing on the radio news; Johanssen listens to the report while stuck in a traffic jam, then hears a kid crying from a nearby car and looks over, dispassionately—is she thinking about the kid on the beach? Finally making the connection, recognizing exactly what this...item...must be? Then a man knocks on the window to give her a rose (bought for her by another driver, probably as a variety of sexual approach), and she takes it without comment, only to be surprised when she sees blood on her hand afterwards, from the thorns she barely notices penetrating her stolen skin.
Slowly, she becomes aware of, then obsessed with, her own reflection. She never eats or sleeps, and seems to possibly be running out of fuel—she goes down bang on the street in one scene, just stopping herself from breaking her nose, and just lies there 'til a passerby helps her up. (This is one of many sequences shot using concealed cameras, starring non-actors who didn't know they were interacting with a Hollywood star until afterwards, in which Johanssen's unnatural beauty/perfection used very knowingly as a signifier of her inhumanity.) After the facially deformed man emerges from the squat-house naked but otherwise unharmed and is allowed to simple wander away, meanwhile—rejected for some reason, though she never learns why—it's as though this throws her program off, causing her to malfunction; she drives up to a misty lake in snow country, abandons her van and walks off, coatless, into the muddy back-roads. At one point she goes to a coffee-shop, orders a slice of cake which she considers for a hilariously long time, then tries to eat it and pukes it back up almost immediately, as fellow customers watch.
After coming home with some guy she met on a bus, she's surprised but not especially rejecting when he inevitably attempts to have sex with her—there's an epiphanic moment which has nothing to do with pleasure or lack thereof, a second where it seems as though she's suddenly realized that this is, in fact, what the guys she trapped though she was offering them, and wants to see it through on a research basis. But then he ejaculates, either onto or into her, and she breaks away, sitting up—grabs a bedside lamp, sticks it as close to her crotch as possible and examines herself, baffled by what's just happened. Leaving early the next morning, she ends up in a snowy forest, moving towards the film's end, which arrives in a spasm of classic Cronenbergian body horror shot like a Kubrick home movie...the final revelation of her own true nature, as a forest ranger/prospective rapist tears her skin badly enough that the creature underneath is finally set free, at least long enough to hold its false face in both hands and examine it solemnly, even as it blinks back up at it.
Throughout, Glazer's cameras mimic the alien's unblinking gaze, constantly receiving information without judging it, or even seeming to categorize it. When juxtaposed with the "normal" Scots people around her, Johanssen literally doesn't seem real, and again, this contrast is most striking whenever she stands next to “another” woman—for all that they're filmed like weather, or pack animals, some sort of freak disaster waiting to happen, they nevertheless possess a hundred times more agency and substance than she does. And while her innate inability to see herself as being “like” them reminds me very much of how I used to think of myself vis a vis my own body, let alone the societal version of acceptable femininity I was expected to conform to, the plain fact is, she just isn't like them, canonically...she's a sea-creature on dry land, a rampant anomaly not built for the pressures of human existence, living entirely on borrowed time. She isn't like anybody.
Anyhow. It's a brilliant film in its own odd way, and one I think I could watch several times in a row, always seeing something slightly different, something new. A smart purchase, if done entirely on impulse.
Much as with Steven Spielberg's A.I., however, the fascination of the narrative fot me lies in trying to figure out how much Johanssen herself understands about the whole thing—how she thinks, if she thinks, what she's capable of thinking of. For a while, I thought maybe she was some sort of organic robot, because the parameters apparently set for her interactions with humans are so wonderfully restricted—she emerges from her “birth”-chamber in constant roaming mode, eyes always searching, and when she spots her targets (young men, alone and unattached, ones who show sexual interest in her) she engages with them, doing nothing more or less than what she thinks will most effectively get them to come to the house with her. Often she asks for directions, using their mansplaining instincts against them, then pretends she can't understand; she'll ask them into the van, hoping they can "guide" her to her supposed destination, then flirt (or allow them to flirt with her, more specifically) until they're so turned on that they agree to a little detour, but these flirtations keep to a very repetitious pattern, almost like an algorithim: she waits for them to compliment her, laughs and smiles, then immediately compliments them in return, even if she has to work to find ways to do so. But she can't really talk about much else; it's like any deviation from standard or attempt to change the subject makes her hit reset, returning her to the original basic program.
This last part becomes most obvious when she picks up a guy whose facial deformity—so massive he has to shop at night, to avoid people "winding [him] up"—provides a context for her behaviour which renders it so unnatural-seeming that he's off-put by it even as he desperately welcomes it. (“I was looking at your hands,” she tells him; “you've lovely hands. Would you like to touch me? To touch my neck? How long has it been since you've touched someone else?”) It's like some sort of vaguely threatening Penthouse Letters scenario: “I never thought this would happen to me, but one night, as I was walking down the highway...” And she simply can't understand his response, beacuse it appears to be literally outside her field of recognizable elements—how can she tell what sort of trauma simply asking: “Do you have a girlfriend?” is going to do to him? So by the time she leads him across the black surface, he keeps saying, sadly: “Dreaming, yes? Dreaming.” While she just answers: “Yes. Yes, we are.”
On the one hand, it's a bit pat, this image of female as unknowable creature, as sexual lure, but though her primary function is this temptation/disposal routine, Johanssen constantly amnages to get across that the alien is far more interested in everything around the men she play siren to—the things, living and un-, which she hasn't already been given any information about. “Other” women, for example—with whom she obviously has no sort of identification at all—are presented as a combination of background visual static (non-targets), obstacle and occasional threat, capable of catching her off-guard because she literally doesn't seem to perceive them until they're on top of her, surrounding her and bearing her away, like that shrieking, laughing crowd of Ladies' Night maenads who drag her by her elbows into a dance-club while she's intent on stalking one particular dude. And then there's the chillingly weird moment when she and her helper/monitor, a “male” alien patterned after a motorcycle racer, kidnap a hapless Danish tourist from a rocky beach, which we retrospectively realize must have involved murdering and disposing of a Scots camper and his wife who unwittingly witness this transaction. As Johanssen clubs the Danish guy unconscious and drags his slack body to her van, she passes by a screaming barely-toddler struggling to rise and walk, and just leaves him there in front of the breaking surf. This turns out to be the murdered couple's son, later cited as still missing on the radio news; Johanssen listens to the report while stuck in a traffic jam, then hears a kid crying from a nearby car and looks over, dispassionately—is she thinking about the kid on the beach? Finally making the connection, recognizing exactly what this...item...must be? Then a man knocks on the window to give her a rose (bought for her by another driver, probably as a variety of sexual approach), and she takes it without comment, only to be surprised when she sees blood on her hand afterwards, from the thorns she barely notices penetrating her stolen skin.
Slowly, she becomes aware of, then obsessed with, her own reflection. She never eats or sleeps, and seems to possibly be running out of fuel—she goes down bang on the street in one scene, just stopping herself from breaking her nose, and just lies there 'til a passerby helps her up. (This is one of many sequences shot using concealed cameras, starring non-actors who didn't know they were interacting with a Hollywood star until afterwards, in which Johanssen's unnatural beauty/perfection used very knowingly as a signifier of her inhumanity.) After the facially deformed man emerges from the squat-house naked but otherwise unharmed and is allowed to simple wander away, meanwhile—rejected for some reason, though she never learns why—it's as though this throws her program off, causing her to malfunction; she drives up to a misty lake in snow country, abandons her van and walks off, coatless, into the muddy back-roads. At one point she goes to a coffee-shop, orders a slice of cake which she considers for a hilariously long time, then tries to eat it and pukes it back up almost immediately, as fellow customers watch.
After coming home with some guy she met on a bus, she's surprised but not especially rejecting when he inevitably attempts to have sex with her—there's an epiphanic moment which has nothing to do with pleasure or lack thereof, a second where it seems as though she's suddenly realized that this is, in fact, what the guys she trapped though she was offering them, and wants to see it through on a research basis. But then he ejaculates, either onto or into her, and she breaks away, sitting up—grabs a bedside lamp, sticks it as close to her crotch as possible and examines herself, baffled by what's just happened. Leaving early the next morning, she ends up in a snowy forest, moving towards the film's end, which arrives in a spasm of classic Cronenbergian body horror shot like a Kubrick home movie...the final revelation of her own true nature, as a forest ranger/prospective rapist tears her skin badly enough that the creature underneath is finally set free, at least long enough to hold its false face in both hands and examine it solemnly, even as it blinks back up at it.
Throughout, Glazer's cameras mimic the alien's unblinking gaze, constantly receiving information without judging it, or even seeming to categorize it. When juxtaposed with the "normal" Scots people around her, Johanssen literally doesn't seem real, and again, this contrast is most striking whenever she stands next to “another” woman—for all that they're filmed like weather, or pack animals, some sort of freak disaster waiting to happen, they nevertheless possess a hundred times more agency and substance than she does. And while her innate inability to see herself as being “like” them reminds me very much of how I used to think of myself vis a vis my own body, let alone the societal version of acceptable femininity I was expected to conform to, the plain fact is, she just isn't like them, canonically...she's a sea-creature on dry land, a rampant anomaly not built for the pressures of human existence, living entirely on borrowed time. She isn't like anybody.
Anyhow. It's a brilliant film in its own odd way, and one I think I could watch several times in a row, always seeing something slightly different, something new. A smart purchase, if done entirely on impulse.
