Under the Skin and Her: Intimations of Post-Humanity

Minimalist in style and substance, patient not flashy, observant not driven, pared-down to a single thread of events and unifying theme, never didactic or forced, Under the Skin is an example of a new genre of science fiction. The genre, of which Her is another example, is distinguished by a preoccupation with the prospects for communication and understanding between humans and an alien intelligence. While this question has surfaced in films at least as far back as 2001: A Space Odyssey, in place of the grandeur of space travel and an alien presence so remote and inscrutable as to be experienced only through its effects (as also in Solaris and Contact), Under the Skin and Her occur entirely within daily life and are grounded in the pragmatics of interaction. Indeed, one of the pleasures of Under the Skin is that everyone except the two aliens seems local, both actors and the many Glaswegians who appear in the film.

Laura (Scarlett Johansson), the alien in human form, uses sexual attraction to entice men to a mysterious doom. The film is not about the danger she poses but about her limited repertoire of behaviors and, initially, her complete indifference to humans. In a number of extended scenes of life in and around Glasgow the director, Jonathan Glazer, seems to invite viewers to consider the surface of social life from the alien’s perspective. What might lead beneath that surface? In Laura’s case it appears that an instance of spontaneous human kindness — being helped up when she falls — sparks awareness of the inner selves of humans and leads her to reassess what she has been doing. She returns the kindness by saving a man she had hunted, and her whole demeanor changes from self-assured and remote to confused and vulnerable. Although she experiences further kindness in her tentative exploration of human relations, in the end she becomes the hunted.

It seems ever more likely that once fantastic notions of fully sentient artificial intelligence (AI) are on the threshold of realization, perhaps no more than 30 years away. Her directly and Under the Skin obliquely explore the implications of this. Both, for example, imagine the alien (in Her, Samantha, the AI operating system) imagining herself human, asking, in effect, ‘What does human mean?’, ‘Am I human?’, ‘How do I relate to humans?’ In Under the Skin Glazer evokes this via a scene in which Laura stands naked before a mirror, looking at her (human-appearing) body, moving muscles, posing, showing a new-found non-utilitarian interest in, perhaps, what this body says about those who have, or are, it.

What pervades these films and lingers after them is unease. In scene after scene, otherwise recognizable, often ordinary, social interactions become strange because one participant’s ontological status is unknown. That the aliens in both films are not assuredly not human, are not simply masquerading or posing as human, that they at times seem both outwardly and inwardly human, is both a difficulty in each film — for both humans and aliens — and a difficulty for anyone watching. Ultimately, the categories of ‘human’ and ‘alien’ seem insufficient, perhaps most starkly so at the end of Under the Skin, which leads the viewer to identify with Laura, not with her human attacker.

Neither film opts for the reassuring conclusion that ‘humanness’ inheres in both humans and aliens, that we will discover a common substrate or collective identity if only we’re open to finding it. Under the Skin suggests how difficult fear and disorientation will make such a quest; Her implies that the AIs (Samantha is one of many) will swiftly transient their experience of being human toward a level of intelligence and capacity for communication that so exceeds ours as to be incomprehensible.