What is Under the Skin in ‘Under the Skin’ (2013)?
[spoilers abound]
Director Jonathan Glazer has referred to the source material for his sci-fi arthouse masterpiece Under the Skin as “great but trashy” (“pulpy” might be the more generous term). When he made this remark, Glazer was of course thinking of Michel Faber’s book of the same name, which served as loose inspiration for the film. While it’s an open question if Glazer’s film is any less trashy than the book, it certainly offers a darker take on empathy and desire than Faber’s text.
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Both works center on an alien huntress (Scarlett Johansson in the film), following her as she cruises Scottish highways looking for solitary hitchhikers to seduce. While the film is slightly more ambiguous on the men’s fate, in the book, they are harvested in factory-farm conditions to be sent back to the alien home planet to be served as a delicacy to the wealthy of a corrupt, failing society.
Having seen the film first, I had expected Faber’s prose to have something in common with the cold angularity of Anna Kavan’s Ice, Becket’s sparse absurdism, or the nihilistic minimalism of Didion-aping Brat Packers like Bret Easton Ellis. Instead, it has more of a Stephen King vibe. Written in the close third person, it takes us into the inner world of the alien protagonist, at times even giving us glimpses of her victims’ thoughts. The book offers elaborate world-building regarding the society from which the aliens have migrated and the farming community they have built on Earth.
The phrase “under the skin” appears twice in the book (pp. 152, 164), and those passages make clear the work’s central theme: regardless of the inequities of social reality, we are more alike than different in our thoughts and feelings. Along the way, this angle provides Faber with the opportunity for some vintage, early ‘00s riffing on the ethical implications of language, definitions of the human (cf. Agamben, Butler, Fanon, Harraway, et al.), and factory farming. Dated, perhaps, but not untimely.
Faber’s text tracks the growth of the alien protagonist, named Isserly in the book, toward having greater empathy. To avoid being forced into backbreaking work as a miner on her home planet, Isserly has undergone painful plastic surgery to take on the appearance of a human (i.e., a homo sapien, worth clarifying because the book plays with the conceptual weight of the term “human” by having the alien race use it for themselves). It’s implied that she hasn’t always been treated honorably by men of the higher social classes of her society. She’s bitter, but her anger is understandable.
Discussions with a progressive-minded alien visitor to the farm and her own tragic assault soften Isserly’s resentment at having been exploited and mistreated by virtue of her social class and gender. Faber balances acknowledgement of the reality of Isserly’s oppression with an awareness of how even justified anger in response to social inequality can turn toxic, choking out one’s ability to appreciate others’ suffering.
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Glazer’s film takes a different tack. In the film, a mute motorcycle-riding handler stands in for the entirety of the alien civilization. No further context is provided. We have no access to the protagonist’s inner world. The characters aren’t even given names. Gone are the reflections on things like factory farming, with the film instead emphasizing gender and desire.
The film’s froideur and refusal to contextualize lead to a distilled, clinical viewing experience. Glazer’s vision juxtaposes improvised scenes shot on the street (the filmmakers built their own covert cameras to avoid detection) with slick, ambiguous depictions of the victims’ deaths. The audio blurs sound to convert human speech into muffled verbal ticks. Johansson’s acting communicates the stilted memeticism of an alien imitating flirtatiousness. To me, all of this is to the film’s credit, though I’m not shocked that it has baffled and frustrated more than a few viewers (the film received a polarized response from the start).
Much as it likely doesn’t need saying that both works are about an alien becoming increasingly human by adopting the human trait of empathy, it’s also clear that the alien gaze in both provides us with an anthropological detachment for understanding ourselves. The idea of a female alien using her sexuality to seduce men could have heavy misogynistic undertones, though I don’t think that’s what either work is going for. Both at least aspire to underscore the violence and objectification that are a routine part of the feminine experience. Seeing things from an alien’s point of view helps us to see the violence that we take for granted in ordinary social relations.
As noted above, in the novel, the growth of the alien protagonist’s empathy leads her (it?) to go rogue, breaking with the exploitative alien enterprise that instrumentalizes her sexuality to use her as bait. The same is true of the film, though in a slightly different way. In the film, after the protagonist has gone rogue, she goes to live with a kind man she meets on the bus, starting what appears to be a tender relationship. Sweet, though it’s when that relationship becomes sexual that the alien’s skin first starts to come loose (literally).
From there, the film cuts to a scene of the alien, now in a remote wooded area, where a logger adopts the protagonist’s own predatory strategy of initially appearing kind before viciously attacking her. His attempted rape is cut short when his violence rends the protagonist’s human disguise, leading to the film’s big reveal, where we see a classic grey alien figure emerge from under the protagonist’s skin. The alien’s human mask has been removed, exposing what was behind the facade all along. Horrified, the would-be rapist leaves only to return with a can of gas, setting the alien on fire. The film closes on the alien burning to death, as the rapist runs back to his truck, and, in a narrative but not thematic non sequitur, the alien’s motorcycle handler is shown peacefully gazing out over a mountain.
Thus, while the film’s scanty dialogue doesn’t give us the expression “under the skin” as directly as in the book, it instead provides a less figurative depiction of what is “under the skin” of the alien. This is a place where the two works go their separate ways. In Faber’s version, Isserly kills herself after getting in a car accident. She’s broken with the factory-farming enterprise that has exploited her, her coworkers, and her human prey. By striking out on her own, she’s made herself vulnerable. At the book’s end, an ambulance is on the way to treat the victims of the accident. But Isserly knows that the human doctors won’t know how to help her, and even if they do, they are unlikely to respond well to learning that a predatory alien community is harvesting them as a food source. She has accepted the consequences of being an agentic subject and will live and die on her own terms in the pursuit of an ethical life.
The film is quite different on this point: while the alien protagonist has chosen to embrace empathy and separate herself from her home community, her death is one of brutal homicide rather than dignified suicide. In Faber’s book, we are all the same “under the skin” in a way that challenges social difference without denying its effects or injustice. In Glazer’s film, what we find “under the skin” might be universal, but the kernel of violence at its heart is so horrifying that we cast it as something alien in a world that provides little grace for virtue anyway.