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Under the Skin (2013)

In: Film and Music

Submitted By jdudley
Words 926
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In the avant-garde, science fiction film, Under The Skin (2014), Jonathan Glazer utilizes vivid visual language and an alien femme fatale to explore themes of sexuality, strongly commenting on anthropological gender relations of the 21st century. Glazer creates the anti-feminine—a woman, fully in control and wholly unemotional— played by Scarlett Johansson, who can also be best described as an alien siren. Guised to be irresistible to the opposite sex, she is trained at reeling in humans. Her swinging sex pad is in reality a lair where she lures her victims into a black abyss. He does not censor Johansson’s nude body in order to convey that she outwardly appears human to these men, despite what is underneath. Glazer finds a way to desexualize Johansson, undoubtedly a sex symbol in our society. He accomplishes this through lighting, unflattering camera angles, and helping her perfect an unconfident and awkward physicality to demonstrate how new and unfamiliar she is in her human form. Glazer doesn’t hold too long on the sexual mechanics of the alien’s ploy. After the men are brought to the black void and swallowed beneath the surface, she exits, returns to her van, and drives onward. His focus is on objectively showing the woman’s growing understanding of human emotion and what it means to be human. Our femme-fetale’s turning point occurs when she picks up a disfigured man walking in the shadows alongside the road. To show this impact, he uses a black creature, which is later revealed as her alien self outside of her human shell. Intercut with the disfigured man being seduced and entering the black liquid, the woman stares deeply at her reflection in a dirty, broken mirror. The ghoulish black creature lurks behind her to remind her of the monster within, a monster she no longer wishes to be. The disfigured man sets something off in her. She empathizes with someone who seems as isolated and ill-at-ease with his body as she is. After rescuing the disfigured man from the black abyss, she flees to the outskirts of the countryside, eventually reaching a thick sheet of white fog. The woman is mystified, drawn to its angelic purity, a stark contrast to the blackness of the abyss and the alien. The fog represents a kind of heaven’s gate, a cognitive rebirth, as she has experienced her first human emotion. Glazer also utilizes the theme of sex through subtle illustrations showing the desire of companionship and human emotion. The man she rescues is a pariah, forced to buy his groceries in the middle of the night because of his disfigurement, and not to “scare everyone.” The woman, before abducting him, seduces him by asking him to touch her body. She discovers his loneliness when it becomes apparent that he has “never touched a woman.” Sex and seduction is part of her programmed ploy. She doesn’t understand human intimacy because in the mind and world she’s been cultivated in, she is merely a sex object to provide physical pleasure and fails to recognize its emotional implications. Glazer’s is successfully able to provoke thoughts on socially rendered issues like sexism/sexuality, violence, and prejudice through abstractions and subtle execution in Johansson’s character. After she crosses the fog-like barrier, she becomes childlike, meek and helpless in her environment. Everything Glazer constructs in Johansson’s character is reversed in the second half. She is shaped into the submissive woman archetype. This shift causes the audience to feel sympathy, as she has been weakened and vulnerable. Men talk, and Johansson stays quiet. Men lead, and she follows. Johansson gets an objectifying full-frontal shot, and the men keep their clothes on. She ultimately falls in love with a man, only to discover that due to her construction, she can’t consummate or find pleasure in it. The scene culminates into a heart wrenching moment when she frantically inspects her own genitals, panicking, trying to work out what’s wrong with them. This is just one example of how the film deftly layers surreal metaphors in order to address body dysmorphia, transgender issues, sexual violence and more through such subtle execution. Soon after, a man stalks her in the forest…our hunter, now hunted. He sexually assaults her and in the process, tears her skin and reveals her true form, an androgynous black skinned alien. Her attacker is so fixated on her surface beauty that he’s repulsed when he’s forced to recognize the life form underneath. Violently rejecting that which he doesn’t understand, he pours a can of gasoline over her and burns her alive. Her ashes float back into the atmosphere and the credits role. Men are not socialized to see women as equals, or even as humans, and Glazer wants us to see this. Her character is something of a blank slate, and her mission in life—to sexually attract young men—is the same one our society often ascribes to women. She even uses the same methods. She buys a fur coat and skin-tight jeans at the mall and goes to raunchy dance clubs. She’s been trained to give men exactly what they want to hear. He takes normalized concepts like gender binaries and patriarchal structures and, by refracting them through alien eyes, forces us to face up to them. Under the Skin doesn’t just try to make us see the world through the eyes of a man-eating, baby-killing, coldhearted alien. Instead, Glazer tries to make us understand what it feels like to be socially oppressed…or, a girl.

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