UNDER THE SKIN
#31DaysOfHorror — October 10th
This October, for the second year in a row, I’ll be reviewing one horror movie each day! Respected classics, trashy and forgotten B-movies, both new frights and old… I love ‘em all. Well, some of them I’ll probably hate. We’ll see.
The Plot
A pretty woman drives around Scotland picking men up to take them back to her house, where she…
Watch this movie. Don’t read about what happens yet, just sit down and watch it. (The DVD is currently $5 at Walmart. The BluRay’s $8 on Amazon.)
Just know that it’s a bit slow-moving, so if you’re looking for jump-scares, look elsewhere. But also know that Under the Skin is one of the most beautiful, unsettling, eerie, horrific movies I’ve ever seen, so if you’re okay with slow, then… go watch this.
Okay? Done? Watched it? Now. Moving on. We won’t really concern ourselves with “plot” here.
My Review
Because the “plot” of Under the Skin is rather difficult to follow, anyway. I’ve seen the movie five times now, and I’m still not 100% sure I understand what’s going on, on a basic story level. It’s clear that the woman driving around Scotland picking up men to harvest their skin isn’t particularly human, given the skin-shedding scene at the end just before her death, but… is she an alien? We do see one brief glimpse of hazy lights shining through fog above a skyscraper, which are suggestive of a UFO, or maybe UFOs, but that’s all we really get to suggest that she comes from a planet beyond our own. She could be a demon of some kind, or a manmade monster, some science experiment run amok. We don’t really know.
But also, it doesn’t really matter. Each time I’ve seen the film, I’ve paid attention to and noticed different aspects of it. I find Under the Skin fascinating because it resists things like “plot” and “story,” even though it’s natural to spend your first viewing trying to understand those. But, as is the case with many rewatches, once you’ve got the basic idea out of the way — she’s an alien (or something) who starts out hunting men but slowly starts to learn what it means to be human — it’s easier to watch for the aesthetics of it all, to appreciate how certain shots are constructed or how certain scenes fit together, to keep an eye out for when exactly the alien begins to notice that the city is populated with woman as well as men, or to attempt to investigate the metaphorical resonances of it all. So, for the purposes of this review, I’ll start with visuals and then discuss how those factor into the metaphorical significance of the film, which I find deeply horrific, even if the movie isn’t “scary” exactly.
The Visuals
A Google Images search for “Under the Skin screencaps” brings up almost nothing but screenshots of various points in the film where Scarlett Johansson takes her clothes off. Don’t get me wrong — she’s a stunningly beautiful woman, and the scenes where her various victims follow her, naked, across a glassy black surface are breathtakingly seductive. An A-list actress baring it all for the camera is bound to make a stir, but to splash those shots across blogs for the express purpose of titillation does the film, and Scarlett, a disservice. (Not that people have cared about that in the past, considering her personal nude photos were leaked online several years ago).
Because… this film’s use of nudity isn’t just to arouse the audience, as is so often the case. Many, many men meet their doom in Under the Skin because they see her as a helpless woman, there to be looked at, rather than an actual human being. (Or, rather, they’re so blinded by her beauty that they miss the fact that she’s something inhuman). To be fair, she does encourage this. Her body is made into spectacle, the absolute personification of Laura Mulvey’s conception of women on screen as possessing a certain to-be-looked-at-ness. But, unlike most films, which use the subservient female form as an object for men to ogle, Under the Skin inverts this — because Scarlett looks back, and it is precisely her objectification that becomes her strength.
So… to reduce these scenes of nudity to “Scarlett nude! See the clips here!” is to completely miss the point. Ah, well. It’s the Internet. What do I expect.
The scene toward the end where she inspects her own naked body in the mirror is one of the most beautiful moments in the film, in my opinion. Reflective surfaces play a big part in the film’s iconography, from the glassy black mire where her conquests find themselves trapped, to the mirror in her rundown house where she examines her face as she makes the decision to free the man with the deformity, to the constant motif of eye-closeups.
By this time in the film, she has escaped from the man on the motorcycle — her handler? her servant? — and she’s staying with a kind man who has offered to shelter her. At this point, we are so closely tied to her point of view that her own body has become something beautiful and alien, a source of fascination for her as she tries to figure out what it means to be human.
Much of Under the Skin is made up of static long takes that give our eyes plenty of time to pore over the entire frame. Sometimes we’re given a full minute to just watch Scarlett’s face as she peers through her windshield at potential victims. Sometimes we see a vast, gorgeous landscape, and we spend 45 seconds watching a tiny dot of a person walk from one end of the frame to the other. Sometimes we’re forced to watch an eerie, waterlogged man waver and wiggle silently, his skin sagging, until finally he pops, and we see his leftover skin sliding down a chute into what we think might be a furnace, but which is really a series of abstract, glowing red lines that suggest a furnace.
And that’s what I think is so brilliant about much of the imagery in Under the Skin. Leaving the audience to consider various shots — many of which have little or no movement — for such abnormally long periods of time at first seems to imbue many of the shots with deep meaning. Our eyes track over a forest of gently-swaying trees, trying at first to figure out what we’re supposed to be looking at. Then, as we’re still watching nothing but trees, we may consider what Glazer is trying to convey with such a shot, and we may realize that as the alien has become more human, she has progressed from a crowded city, to a small, remote village, and now finally, to this resting place out in nature. But the longer the shot goes on, the trees may seem less and less like trees, and more like abstract swaying lines and patterns of color, and we may begin to appreciate the pure aesthetic beauty of the image, for its own sake, much like the alien has begun to appreciate the beauty of her own body as more than just an instrument for seducing men.
And then, Glazer superimposes a prostrate Scarlett overtop of the swaying trees, and once more, our brains begin firing, attempting to figure out what the image means.
The Search for Meaning
So, I’m including this in my #31DaysOfHorror project. What’s so scary about it, right?
Those reflective surfaces mentioned above have a deeper meaning, in that the film itself functions as a reflection of humankind, through the eyes of an alien utterly unfamiliar with most of the daily rituals and experiences we take for granted. By reflecting society through the surfaces and eyeballs of such an observant, alien entity, we are forced to re-examine ourselves and our surroundings with a new perspective.
For example, I find the early scene where the alien visits a shopping mall to be viscerally uncomfortable. For much of it, a handheld camera guides us through loud, ugly, teeming crowds of people, and everyday occurrences like shopping for clothes and trying out makeup seem alien and strange. Similarly, the scene where the alien finds herself at an underground rave is incredibly loud and disorienting. Unlike the rest of the film, which is very quiet and almost serene, here the soundtrack gets louder, the lights flash bright and fast, and the editing becomes absolutely frantic, resembling an EDM music video rather than the slow, methodical film we’ve been watching up through this point. I’ve been to my fair share of loud dance parties, including ones where I was more than a little uncomfortable, but the party in Under the Skin is a whole different level of frightening.
There are also moments in the film that are more obviously horrific. Calling it my “favorite” scene probably makes me sound disturbed, but whatever — my favorite scene in the film is the one where the alien is standing on a beach, watching silently as a family dog swims out too far and gets trapped in a current, and then the wife follows, and so does the husband, leaving a baby alone on the shore. A man swims out to save the husband, but the husband jumps back in the water to try saving his wife again, leaving the swimmer exhausted on the shore… so the alien bashes his head in with a rock.
Unless I’m forgetting something, it’s the only direct act of violence we see her commit. Yes, she lures men home and harvests their skin, It’s shockingly violent, too; there are no cuts away from the act here, and we watch as she walks over to him, searches for a rock, weighs it out in her hand, and then finally brings it down on his head. Then, perhaps even more shocking, she leaves the baby alone on the beach, crying. It’s sickening. It’s also humanizing — after she’s heard the baby’s cry, she can’t stop thinking about it, and it’s after this moment that she begins to notice women in the city as much or more than the men.
Aside from the obviously horrific sequences, what makes Under the Skin so deeply, psychologically effective for me is its exploration of what it means to be human, and more pointedly, what it means to be a woman.
Clearly, being human in Under the Skin has something to do with the pursuit of pleasure, whether it’s shopping or dancing or sex or chocolate cake… but the alien’s body — much as it looks like an actual human woman’s — just doesn’t work the same way. As she starts to desire to partake in actual human experiences, she discovers that her body is standing in her way. She can’t swallow the cake, for one. And despite seeming intimately familiar with the mechanics of seduction and the intricacies of various human mating rituals, the actual, physical act of sex is shocking and invasive for her, and she panics, leaving the relative safety and security of the man’s home, headed for the wilderness.
She first encounters a foggy bridge, and for a very long time, we watch a faded image of her face. It’s as if she must be partially erased in order to begin thinking and acting for herself.
She does not find safety in the solitude of the woods. Instead, she encounters a logger who attempts to rape her. He chases her through the forest and ultimately tears her false skin away, leaving the alien exposed to the elements; horrified by what she actually is, he douses her in gasoline and sets her aflame. The end.
Every time I’ve seen Under the Skin, I’ve been deeply moved by this ending. And I can’t quite figure it out. It can certainly be read as a punishment — she begins the movie as a sexually liberated woman, picking and choosing the men she wants to be with, and then (figuratively) eating them alive, and so as she moves further into humanity (and further out of society), she must be destroyed. It’s tragic, really. Sure, harvesting skin is wrong, yes. But she wants to be good. She’s compassionate to the man with the deformity, and she lets him go. He makes her realize that what she is doing is wrong, and she wants to learn how to be better. It’s tragic that she’s not allowed to be fully human. She isn’t given a chance to atone for her mistakes; the society she tries to join doesn’t want her, and the man on the motorcycle is drawing ever closer.
From there, it’s not too hard to make the jump to real life. Too often, society doesn’t let real women be fully human. Rape isn’t something that just happens to alien creatures in the woods. The ending forces us to reckon with the fact that society considers women less-than, that we see them as alien, empty on the inside, nothing more than pretty faces that they must display to the world for the approval of men. It’s disturbing that the film doesn’t end with a triumphant moment for the character, but it’s even more disturbing that life ends this way, too, for real women. That is, I think, the real horror of Under the Skin — she’s not an alien at all.
