The Sounds of Aliens Adrift: On “Under the Skin,” “Jackie,” and Mica Levi
Halfway through my first viewing of the beguiling, melancholic Jackie (2016), I thought: I’ve seen all this before.
Mind you, this wasn’t the cheap, repackaged déjà vu one frequently feels in today’s remake-obsessed, universe-building cinema. This was a feeling at once more genuine and more sublime. As I watched Natalie Portman’s Jackie Kennedy stumble in heels through the fog-thick grounds of Arlington Cemetery or float in a drunken daze though the empty corridors of the White House residence, I couldn’t stop thinking about why this alienated young woman and her shell-shocked perambulations were so familiar to me.
Then I paid closer attention not to the visuals, but to the Oscar-nominated score: the haunting dissonances, the slithering cello strings, the martial bursts of percussion, the abstract flute calls. It was then I realized the otherworldly female wanderer this filmic version of Jackie Kennedy recalled: Scarlett Johansson’s nameless extraterrestrial predator in Under the Skin (2013). And linking these two seemingly different films were their not-so-different scores, both composed by the experimental pop artist Mica Levi.
An additional viewing of Jackie and Under the Skin later, I’ve had both film scores playing in my ears on repeat. Yes, these are wholly unique scores in their own right. But the more one listens to them (from start to finish, with intermingled tracks), the more one realizes their potential as an aural umbilicus linking two films about two similarly alienated women. In fact, to view Jackie and Under the Skin through the commonality of Mica Levi’s music is to uncover hidden relationships between two of the more pro-feminist films in recent memory; films more powerful because their social messages (pace well-intentioned films like Suffragette [2015]) are not blatantly on display. One relies on many things to unearth these messages, the most intriguing of which is Mica Levi’s score. Both scores, and, by extension, both films, play off one another with a richness made all the richer by its apparent unintentionality.
I confess that, before my first viewing of Under the Skin on its theatrical release, I was (shamefully) ignorant of Mica Levi’s work. Before composing the score for Jonathan Glazer’s film, she was best known on the London Club circuit through her DJ appearances, her mix tapes, and her collaborations with The Shapes — all under the name Micachu.
As a film composer, Mica Levi accomplishes what all great film composers should aspire to: music that’s inseparable from the images on screen. So many of today’s film scores, whether composed before or after production, feel like a tacked-on afterthought, superimposed over the finished product like a coat of clear acrylic; purely utilitarian in their use of brass (AMERICA!) or strings (ROMANCE!) or pounding bass drums (CGI ACTION SEQUENCE!).
But Mica Levi’s scores for Jackie, and Under the Skin before it, are creations in their own right. They can function both alongside the films they accompany and on their own as ambient mysteries. They avoid musical cliché; they often invite a sense of disconnect that keeps one constantly unnerved even in quiet moments. They operate as dramatic extensions of the protagonists themselves. And, when taken together, they feel like bookend depictions of the anxieties of being an alien (read: a woman) in a disoriented world of humans (read: men).
In the 2000 novel by Michel Farber on which the film is based, the main character of Under the Skin is an alien named Isserley. In Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation, she’s nameless. Instead, as a means of identification and personalization, we have Mica Levi’s score: a low-level, recurring electronic pulse that acts as a character signature. While the plot of Under the Skin isn’t nearly as obscure as, say, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961), it is something of a puzzle to those unfamiliar with the film’s log line (which I imagine reads something like “alien seduces and kills men, then discovers her humanity in the process”). As confused as I was on my first view, I distinctly recall Levi’s score keeping me connected to the story, offering me a rickety (but nonetheless reliable) support for navigating the film’s mysteries.
As Johansson’s alien drives her van through Scottish towns in search of men to lure to their deaths (submerged in an inky-black pool of who-knows-what, where their bodies are subsequently harvested), Levi’s score stalks the viewer. It also pretends, like the alien, to be something it’s not. The percussive, electronic thumps beat rhythmically like a heart, and the film’s frequent collusion between electronic and classical string instrumentation suggests the human façade of Johansson’s character — and the alien body hiding underneath. By blending organic and artificial sounds, the score becomes a work that’s both dangerous and alluring, just as one imagines being picked up on the side of the road by an attractive stranger would feel. In a movie obsessed with the body (both as a source of pleasure and a source of food), Levi’s music allows us to hear what’s going on (yes) underneath the skin. It, too, is of the body.
Jackie Kennedy, as interpreted by Natalie Portman and her director, Pablo Larraín, is an alien in her own right. Throughout much of Jackie, the First Lady is stripped of any pretentions to nobility. The sheen of the Camelot myth, with all its pomp and pageantry, comes later; for most of the film, we’re confronted by a woman who’s raw, broken, spattered with blood and brains. This Jackie is a victim of both immediate trauma and the more lingering, more oppressive trauma of history. From the moment her husband’s destroyed head falls into her Chanel-pink lap (and perhaps well before that moment) Jackie is alienated from the rest of the world. I think immediately of one of the film’s most powerful, understated shots: Jackie in the shower, her back to the camera, water sluicing her husband’s blood off her body. She appears frighteningly small and thin, and what stands out to the discerning viewer are the nobs of her vertebrae descending down her back. She looks just like a space alien; less human and more humanoid. Then there’s the polished artifice on display during Jackie’s interviews with The Reporter (played by Billy Crudup as a domineering, condescending male) and her televised tour of the White House (the opening shot of which shows her walking awkwardly down a long hall toward the camera, as if experiencing gravity for the first time).
There’s less engineered artifice in Levi’s score to Jackie. In interviews, Levi recalls the process of composing for the film (undertaken long before she saw any filmed footage), specifically her desire to reflect Jackie Kennedy’s musical tastes in the score. In this way, Jackie’s score, like Under the Skin’s, is an extension of the protagonist herself, inextricably linked to her journey during the film. In one brief scene, we see Jackie sitting prim and proper in a small audience, bookended by the two ill-fated Kennedy brothers, entranced by a cello performance — the same cello that reverberates throughout the film (especially during the funeral procession through the D.C. streets). A cultural icon who herself championed culture, Jackie’s story is backlit by classical instruments played without added magnification and electronic distortion. While we don’t have an electric heartbeat, we have the sound of something more ethereal, something Johansson’s alien, for all her longing, can never truly possess: a soul.
Both Jackie and Under the Skin, at their core, are films about women on a mission. For the former, that mission is to cement the legacy of a husband’s presidency through the engineering of an elaborate public funeral; for the latter, the mission is to seduce, destroy, and harvest unsuspecting men. Both missions, interestingly enough, require the female protagonist to navigate an oppressive, male-dominated culture in male-dominated environments: the structured patriarchy of American politics, the testosterone-fueled rabble of football matches, political agents like Robert F. Kennedy, the helmeted gang on motorbikes who act as Johansson’s alien handlers. Both women, whether specifically or suggestively, are strangers in strange worlds. Surrounded by men, they’re entirely alone, their only protection the costumes they wear like armor (a fur jacket in Under the Skin, a funeral shroud in Jackie). They are aliens adrift.
The triumph for both women is how they break free of these roles, and of how Levi’s score suggest and celebrate these breakthroughs. One of the rare instances in Under the Skin where melody overtakes ambience is when Johansson’s alien attempts to make love for the first time with a kind-hearted man who takes her in after she abandons her mission (an act that’s thwarted, it’s suggested, by the alien’s lack of genitalia). Despite the continued electric drones, the music (through its strings) suggests an opening up, a discovery. Listen closely to the track “Alien Loop,” which pulls cues from the reverberating track that opens the film and accompanies the alien’s birth (“Creation”), and you’ll discover faint hints of the love scene’s theme. Perhaps the alien’s nascent humanity was there all along.
In Jackie, we get the sense of existential drift right from the start. The first note we hear, suggestive of uplifting biopics, instantly sours into something deeper and darker. Right away, Levi informs us we’re not in for the traditional score we expect from filmed biographies, with all their majesty on display. Instead, the score becomes instantly dirge-like, death-haunted. And stays that way through most of the film. When Jackie finally gleans a sense of peace (after a triumphant shot in which The Reporter watches, emasculated, while Jackie rewrites the story he’ll dictate to his editors), “The End,” with its gorgeous flutes and strings, leaves us with a sense of Jackie as both triumphant and wistful. A survivor, for sure. But an imperfect one.
What’s curious about the end of Jackie is the last musical note, if you will, is given not to Levi but to Richard Burton and the ensemble of the original Broadway cast recording of Lerner and Loewe’s 1960 musical, Camelot (“Finale Ultimo”). The singers raise their voices in triumph, while on screen the final shot is of Jackie dancing with her still-living husband, body obscured by his, her head peeking above his shoulder, her eyes looking at us conspiratorially, as if to say, “Camelot exists only because I willed it into being.”
Alas, the fate of Johansson’s gone-rogue alien is more tragic, though triumphant in its own bleak way. Under the Skin descends into silence in the final moments, as Levi’s score gives us a thrumming cello followed by that rhythmic thumping again, as if we were listening to the alien (immolated by a would-be rapist) slowly dying. The flaming corpse stumbles out from the woods into a snowy clearing and collapses like a puppet whose strings have been unceremoniously snipped. The heartbeat stops, and Levi’s music abandons us. We’re left only with the natural sound of the wind, the crackle of the alien’s pyre, the soft tap of snowflakes. Then that, too, is gone.
