I had the privilege of watching “Under the Skin ” in the first day it was shown in UK theaters and it was quite the experience. The whole film was soaked in a sense of dread which just kept on rising while the film was moving forward. After a long time that horror films just were not effective for me (with the exceptions of “Eraserhead” and “The Exorcist“), this film just made me hold my breath because of how unsettling and creepy it is. It literally crept under my skin. Still it gets little recognition and I still remember that in the day I watched it, almost half of the audience left the theater by the time the film had reached its middle point. But even if half of the people that watched it, hated it, I still believe it’s fantastic.
To begin with, the film is just shot perfectly and the sound design and the music is just masterful. It’s subtle and the sci-fi part of it is not in-your-face and obvious, but kept in the background and left for the audience to give it attention. The soundtrack is haunting and sets the mood from the beginning. Apart from achieving in a technical level, tough, the film is extremely rich in content.
The film tackles the way certain people perceive beauty and how beauty is represented to us today. As everyone might know by now, the protagonist is played by Scarlett Johansson and that’s an interesting little choice. She’s an actress well-known for her beauty but still constantly tends to be presented with a suspiciously reduced waistline. This film though presents her a bit curvier than people are used to seeing her. “Hollywood people” would call her chubby, which is absolutely ridiculous. Scarlett Johansson’s type of body is not used to be presented in Hollywood films. Hollywood has more standards and rules than a DnD game and almost never tends to break them. The women presented there are usually skinny, bright-eyed and nothing less than models. But people wanted Scarlett, so what Hollywood did was to stick her in a bunch of tight clothes and pass her pictures through thousands of Photoshop edits in order for her to reach an “acceptable” state. The outcome was Scarlett to become a person defined by her curves which are all in the “right” places. A similar case was going on with Jennifer Lawrence, who was constantly mocked for having a couple of more pounds than other actresses. This is poisonous for people. Not only it standardizes beauty, something which has no limits or rules, but it causes guilt to those who are not beautiful in a way that Hollywood and fashion magazines define.
SPOILER WARNING: Read the following after having watched the film.
Early in the movie, Scarlett removes the clothes from a woman looking very much like her. While this happens, a tear runs from the woman’s eye. She has feelings, which possibly killed her in a way. Scarlett (or the alien) doesn’t. She then observes what people do to become attractive, including a shop, where women go to try out and buy make-up and she imitates them, making her appearance “acceptable” based on those women’s standards. Quickly we understand she’s just here to kill lonely people she picks up in the roads of Scotland (most of them were actually strangers randomly stopped in the street, which is awesome) and uses her beauty to lure them to the trap. She’s gorgeous and no man can resist her. She takes them to her layer where she “digests” them in some of the most haunting scenes I could ever imagine.This whole part attacks the shallowness behind looks and how dangerous it is to judge by that only. Men approached Scarlett only because of her looks, but ended up killed and processed.
This goes on until Scarlett picks up a deformed man, who is shy and doesn’t compliment or try to approach her. Scarlett keeps complimenting him, (since looks to her mean nothing) and struggles to convince him to come with her in her layer. Long story short, she feels pity, lets him go and this is the moment she turns. She starts feeling and tries out what it is to be human. She tries to eat food and fails, she tries to make love and fails, she tries to enjoy music but her fingers tapping are in the wrong tempo from the song played on the radio. After all these failures she runs away disappointed and ends up in a forest where she is chased by a worker. While he tries to tear her clothes he sheds Scarlett’s skin and seeing what lies under it, unable to accept what was hidden “under the skin” he burns her alive, presenting how certain people (in my opinion Hollywood and fashion people) are unable to accept something out of the limits they set for the whole world.
Scarlett’s two characters serve their purposes perfectly. The skin is just a presence. It has no though nor a personality, but looks human, it’s the one to be accepted and truly seen by the men that approach her. The “alien” hiding serves as the personality. It was made to kill, but evolved to love and sympathize, even if it failed and was rejected by humanity. (Ultimately, one could say that the movie also attacks intolerance towards the different (eg. racism and homophobia) but I think that interpretation is a bit far-fetched.) All this shows the dangers of viewing a human as a skin and nothing more, both from the side of the person that is viewed as the skin and the person viewing someone like that. The film states that the one to view another person just as flesh, is a “hunter”. Scarlett was a hunter as the movie started and ended up being the prey of someone else that saw her just as flesh.
The movie clearly shows the dangers of objectifying a human being and how intensely it is done by today’s media. Its harshness is necessary in order to give the message to its full volume and the choice of showing Scarlett completely naked serves as a deconstruction of the idea that people had about her body (in my opinion she is more gorgeous here than she ever had been in any Hollywood film).
Beauty has no standards and it should never be presented with peaks and valleys. Everyone has their own idea of beauty and that’s how it should be.
Congratulations to Jonathan Glazer, Mica Levi, Scarlett Johansson and Michel Faber for creating a film that will be discussed for a long time.
Sore Eyed Society 