Jonathan Glazer has found the perfect part for Scarlett Johansson. In Under the Skin (2014) her new Marilyn image is literally stripped away to reveal its truth; she is a seductive alien with no desire. Glazer’s Lynchean inflection continues the deconstruction of the horror genre, but he goes further. Where Lynch makes uncanny the play between the glamour of the movie-star and the full-psychological range of the girl-next-door, Glazer adds a third term. Scarlett Johansson’s performance divides woman into three (not just two): movie star, regular girl and alien. These are never truly separate however; each category reveals the others.
I can’t remember feeling scared in quite the same way I felt at the beginning of this film. Johansson’s character, Laura, strips cheap clothes off a dead girl/alien. In the bright lights of the back of her van/somewhere in space, this action is rendered perfunctory. Her death is not sad in a sacred way, it just calls for a replacement: our protagonist of the film. The exchange of women here is ordinary, terrifying, and science-fictional. The symbolic order is translated to the audience by depicting the fallout of patriarchy in the mundane everyday.
The film reminds me a lot of Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), where the divide between the screen and its audience is broken down as horror is depicted via the familiar texture of home videos and surveillance cameras. Under the Skin achieves a similar tension, not with standard definition digital video, but with mixing documentary and sci-fi. The film moves between non-spaces, polished with special effects, and the real-life Glasgow streets, where the protagonist looks curiously at the strangers shopping in the malls and high streets, wondering why they bother. These are people alienated by capital. The protagonist isn’t alienated, though, she is an alien.
She doesn’t need a job; she is employed by God/herself in space to farm the insides of men. After picking them up in her van, she takes them to an old house and undresses, leading them into a black pool. From here their insides are collected and streamed into space, whilst their shells remain. Is this violence symmetrical to the objectification of women? The protagonist gets revenge for women like herself who are denied interiority, by sucking it out of men.
An alien femme fatale, Scarlett Johansson seduces and destroys men. Under the Skin moves away from the claustrophobia of the woman defined by marriage to the eternal loneliness of woman as sexual object. This move creates a more complex reading of the female sex, illustrating an embodiment both inside and outside the symbolic order of men. Even in Inland Empire, which deconstructs the horror genre, Laura Dern is still a wife, stuck in the Oedipal drama. No longer the skinny high school sweetheart of Wild at Heart (1990) and Lost Highway (1997), the old danger of the boyfriend has become the life-threatening bond of her husband. Scarlett Johansson’s seductive power doesn’t define her.
When the film moves from Glasgow to the Scottish highlands she gives her seducing up. She becomes less of an alien and more a girl, but the star presence of Scarlett Johansson never seems to disappear. She finds a humble Hollywood diner/Scottish café among the hills and orders cake. When it comes to the table she spoons some of the cake into her mouth as she has seen others do. It reaches her lips in close up, referencing a thousand old Hollywood scenes and new ice-cream ads. For a moment Johansson leaves her dishevelled Glasgow look and enters the persona of the sex symbol that we know her to be. But she regurgitates what she has tried to swallow and the celebrity gloss is shattered. Johansson is not a new Marilyn but an everyday woman: an alien who cannot eat.
The country air doesn’t bring her back to health. As Laura takes a walk in the forest a park ranger soon interrupts her solitude. This ranger at first seems benign, until he tries to rape her. When he catches hold of her, the impossibility of interiority for the sexual object can no longer be kept secret. Her skin starts dissolving, revealing the alien inside her: a shiny black anorexic inversion of her Marilyn body – eerily mimicking the change in fashion of the feminine body ideal. He pours gasoline over her and sets it alight. As the fire blends in with the forest the girl dies, the alien returns to her home in space, and Scarlett Johansson goes to star in another movie.
Eva Birch is a writer from Melbourne.