London College of Communication MA Thesis, Submitted in December 2021
Under the Skin (2013) is a film that, with minimal dialogue, follows an unnamed alien (Scarlett Johansson) disguised as a beautiful woman as she hunts her male prey in modern Glasgow. The Alien cruises the city’s streets in her white Ford Transit van with an intense, calculated focus, asking directions from wide-eyed men who can’t believe their good luck and are quite right not to. She then leads them back to her derelict flat and begins to seduce them, but as she undresses, her victims slowly sink beneath the floor as it becomes a meniscus black liquid. Once trapped, their bodies are slowly eviscerated over the course of several days and their skin is harvested for unknown purposes.
In the film’s opening scene, we see The Alien created in a mysterious sequence reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. A bright light emerges from darkness, the score, a rapid tremolos of synthesized strings, begins to play, the bright light passes around a sphere that one could, paired with the alien sounding music, mistake for for the alignment of a planet, or spaceships docking, but is actually the formation of a human eye. This eye then stares unblinkingly forward at the audience, until cutting to the film’s title.
Following this uniquely science-fiction opening scene, the audience is immediately transported to the dark, rainy streets of modern Glasgow. The Alien has landed here and the film begins its recurring juxtaposition of science fiction and social realism. She roams the city streets has a silent, motorcycle-riding, male handler (Jeremy McWilliams) who ensures she does not stray from the sole task she was created to perform: seduce and destroy. But stray she eventually does.
After picking up a few lonely men in her van and leading them to their deaths by liquefaction without any remote sense of remorse, she picks up one man with a severely disfigured face (Adam Pearson). The Alien does not seem to distinguish between his looks and those of her other victims yet she feels a certain kinship towards him. The Alien can sense he is equally as uncomfortable in his skin as she is hers. She is moved to empathy and breaks precedent by freeing the disfigured man from the meniscus liquid trap that her other victims were left to perish in.
The Alien then flees Glasgow and her mysterious handler and drives to the Scottish highlands. There she attempts to perform and understand the actions and emotions of humans. Her creators, however, did not endow her with the sensual pleasures of the flesh. She eats a piece of cake but chokes it up, listens to music but can only mimic the tapping motion others make to its melody, watches a comedy television show but the concept of laughter is lost on her, and eventually tries to engage in sex but is not anatomically designed for intimacy.
In the end, The Alien dies as a result of gendered violence. She is attacked in the woods and her flesh disguise peels off her body, revealing the mute, featureless, matte black alien creature who lies underneath. Her attacker pours gasoline over her exposed body, lights a match, and runs away. In the film’s final moments it seems to say, it does not matter what extra-terrestrial elements are at hand, what epic transformations are made, or what discoveries are unearthed, to be female is to be voided.
There has been a significant amount of scholarly writing on Under the Skin since its release in 2013. In this essay I’ll examine and reference different academic sources, including articles in film journals by Ara Osterweil and Elena Gorfinkel who, respectively, write about the film’s relationship to feminism and cosmology. One theme that is touched on by both these authors in their articles, and in several of the other pieces of academic writing on Under the Skin, is how the film explores the question of what it means to be human. I’m interested in understanding how the film blends genre in a unique way to tackle this question.
Something that distinctly separates Under the Skin from other modern science-fiction films is its incorporation of the social realism film genre. Social realism is defined as, “The realistic depiction in art of contemporary life, as a means of social or political comment” (Oxford Languages). Social realist films usually explore political and/or social issues through naturalistic characters and gritty working class locations. Stylistically, these films typically have realistic and/or semi-improvised dialogue, are filmed on location rather than in a studio, cast unknown actors, and deal with issues such as class, religion, or regional identities. Famous examples in British cinema include Naked (1993), This is England (2006), and I, Daniel Blake (2016).
While making Under the Skin, Director Jonathan Glazer utilized social realist filmmaking techniques to place the viewer in a hyper-real world. As a result, the Glasgow the viewer sees on screen is true to form and unretouched. Glazer also juxtaposes The Alien, a beautiful, well-spoken English woman, played by an A-list Hollywood actress, with her helpless victims: lonely, disenfranchised, working-class Scottish men. She appears at random, rolls down her window, and invites them in for conservation with a seemingly genuine interest in their lives. Immediately following these interactions, she leads them to their death in futuristic body-horror scenes. By contrasting the real streets and people of Glasgow with conceptual sci-fi as such, Glazer is able to also contrast human emotion with alien other-ness through a socio-political lens. In this essay I will explore how Under the Skin blends the genres of social realism and science fiction to create political stakes and exhibit the human condition from a non-human perspective.
CHAPTER 1: Contextualizing Social Realism and Science Fiction
In this chapter I will provide historic and academic context for the terms “social realism” and “science fiction.” I will look at early cinematic examples within both genres, explore how film scholars have defined both genres in books, journals and dictionaries, and analyze how Under the Skin fits into these definitions and arguments.
There have been several attempts by different film scholars to pin down a precise definition of social realism in recent decades. In Julia Hallam and Margaret Mashment’s book, Realism and Popular Cinema, they emphasize social realism’s relationship between location and identity, writing that social realist films aim to show how a character’s development can be affected by environmental factors. They suggest that by demonstrating the adverse social circumstances of its characters, social realist films promote the introduction of more enlightened social policies or structural change in society.
Cathy Come Home, released in 1966 and directed by Ken Loach, is one of the first films in the social realism film genre. The film depicts a woman facing a downward social climb due to the UK’s problem-ridden welfare system. Both the homeless charities Shelter and Crisis, founded soon afterwards, “credit the programme with creating a surge of support that helped establish their early work” (BBC News, 2020). Fifty years later, Loach directed his 2016 Palme d’Or–winning social realist film, I, Daniel Blake which takes a hard look at bureaucratic injustice and incompetence through the eyes of 59-year-old widowed carpenter Daniel Blake who must navigate the labyrinth of the UK welfare state after suffering a heart-attack yet still being deemed fit to work. Blake strikes up a friendship with single mother Katie and her two children who are at the mercy of the same welfare system, evicted from their homes and barely able to make ends meet. The film was so influential that it was referenced several times in UK parliament (Ritman, 2016) and food banks in the UK saw up to a 500 percent increase in female sanitary product donations after one harrowing scene in which there are none available to Katie (Collins, 2017). These two Ken Loach films exemplify how the social realist genre can create the call-to-action for more enlightened political and social policies that Hallam and Marshment write about.
Hallam and Marshment write that stylistically, “Social realism tends to be associated with an observational style of camerawork that emphasises situations and events and an episodic narrative structure, creating ‘kitchen sink’ dramas and ‘gritty’ character studies of the underbelly of urban life” (2000, pp. 184). One way social realist directors capture urban life is by filming on location rather than a studio because it gives the film a documentary feel and emphasizes the realistic atmosphere. They also frequently cast non-professional or unknown actors who look like ordinary people and speak in a local accent and dialect appropriate for the region in which the film is set. Andrea Arnold cast Katie Jarvis (Fig. 1.1), a teenager from East London who had never acted professionally before, in her BAFTA-winning 2009 social realist film Fish Tank after Arnold’s casting director spotted Jarvis arguing with her boyfriend at a train station (Palmer, 2009).
Fig.1.1 Katie Jarvis as Mia (Fish Tank, 2009)
David Foster cites Hallam and Mashment’s definition of social realism in his book, Social Realism: Art, Nationhood and Politics. He writes that their ideas are largely accurate but, “limit the pre-existing critical understandings of social realist filmmaking in Britain” (2013, pp. 2). Foster argues that social realist tradition in Britain aims to do more than engage the political and/or social consciousness of its viewer, it seeks to interpret British society in a range of diverse ways through different innovative creatives and directors.
Foster compares social realism to the Italian Neorealist and the French New Wave movements in the post-World War II era, writing that films from within these movements are seen as cultural products of their time as well as stories that reflect their subjects with veracity and conviction. He proposes that social realism deserves the status of a “genuine and progressive national art cinema” (2013, pp.1) and argues that British social realist films should be seen equally for their social and artistic worth, rather than primarily the latter.
Stylistically, Under the Skin aligns with Hallam and Mashment’s assessment of social realism. Many of its scenes have realistic dialogue, non-professional actors, a non-interventionist approach to film directing, were shot on location, and work to explore the reality of working class life in the UK. Thematically, Under the Skin also exemplifies Foster’s argument for the genre because it’s a film that reflects socio-political issues while its incorporation of the science fiction genre additionally works to provide a dramatic and artistic framework to utilize its themes and engage audiences in a completely different way than mainstream cinema.
Science fiction is an older and more widely known genre than social realism, predating it by about half a century. The first film categorized as science fiction is Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) directed by George Méliès, which tells the story of a spacecraft being launched to the moon in a large cannon (Wagner, 2019). In the nearly one-hundred-and-twenty years since this film’s release, science fiction has had a long and eventful history that has taken it many places and spawned numerous subgenres.
In their 2012 book, A Dictionary of Film Studies, Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell define science fiction as, “A genre characterized by stories involving conflicts between science and technology, human nature, and social organization in futuristic or fantastical worlds, created in cinema through distinctive iconographies, images, and sounds often produced by means of special effects technology" (2012, pp. 359). They write that science fiction’s common overlap with other genres such as fantasy and horror as well as its imagining of future or alternative forms of social organization attract critical commentary of sociological kind as well as ideological, feminist, and psychoanalyitcal readings.
In a Roger Ebert interview, Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer states that he believes science fiction as a genre offers a good conduit for ideas but he likes thinking of it as a starting point, rather than working within the borders of the genre. Glazer continues in the interview to say, “The science fiction I’ve loved has been the science fiction that remains inscrutable” (2014). This inscrutable quality Glazer alludes to is further referenced in Nicolas Rapold’s New York Times review of Under the Skin. Rapold writes, “Stubborn ambiguity and the arresting visuals help place ‘Under the Skin’ not among standard thrillers about predatory extraterrestrials, but rather in the realm of visionary science fiction. Instead of satisfying our curiosity about what might happen, it’s about creating a transfixing enigma” (2014). Rapold continues to write that if Under the Skin were to join a subgenre of science fiction, it would be in the ‘head trip’ tradition pioneered in 1969 with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In her Film Forum magazine article, “Under the Skin: The Perils of Becoming Female,” Ara Osterweil writes, “Science fiction is, of course, always about otherness. Yet the smartest examples of the genre also reveal something essential about the world we live in” (2014). Under the Skin doesn’t travel to a fantastical world to make a statement on otherness, instead it places The Alien, the “other-ed” entity, in the damp, overflowing streets of modern Glasgow. The revelations made about the world we live in are done through her objective eyes. The Alien observes and exposes the nature of humanity, flawed and emotional but also compassionate and empathetic.
CHAPTER 2: Social Realism in Under the Skin: Creating Mystery, Realistic Dialogue, and Layered Meaning
In this chapter I will first examine how the film’s sparse script and minimal exposition correspond to the mystery of an alien entity. Secondly, I will explore how the use of hidden cameras, a social realist filmmaking technique with roots in the French New Wave movement, helped the film crew capture realistic dialogue, accents, and locations. I will then delve into the technicality behind filming with hidden cameras, citing members of the film’s production crew directly. Lastly, I will explore how the method of filming with hidden cameras corresponds directly to the film’s narrative.
Director Jonathan Glazer spent a decade making Under the Skin. In that period, the film went through many edits and changes in the pre-production process. The original script Glazer wrote was a very illustrative and faithful adaptation to the science-fiction novel on which the film is based. Glazer was planning to make a film with more characters, dialogue, exposition and computer-generated visual effects. After budget cuts and years of rewriting, Glazer thought critically about what he wanted to achieve, adopted an overall more minimalist approach, and introduced the genre of social realism to the film.
In a video interview with the film crew entitled, “The Making of Under the Skin,” Glazer explains his decision to reduce the exposition and make the film more ambiguous. He says, “We wanted to present the idea that this alien entity wanted us for something, but what exactly they wanted us for wasn’t necessary. You can’t show an alien entity, it isn’t possible. But you can allude to one, you can allude to the idea, feeling, or dread of it. It’s a force, it’s dispassionate, it’s a dispassionate entity like the sea. That’s our science fiction, she’s our science fiction” (2013). The sparse dialogue in Under the Skin helps allude to The Alien and her motives, but never gives them away. The audience is left speculating as to where The Alien is from, how she got to Earth, why she is capturing and killing men, and who her motorcycle-riding male handler is. The audience isn’t given the exposition that would be typical in a big-budget sci-fi film as to what her ultimate goal is, we simply see the world through her dispassionate, unfeeling eyes and only hear her speak when she’s attempting to lure her prey into her trap.
The film’s script is incredibly minimal. Most of the story is told through imagery, action, and score rather than dialogue. In the final cut of the film, the first proper line of dialogue doesn’t occur until thirteen minutes in. The line is delivered when The Alien is making her first attempt at luring someone into her van from off the street. She rolls down her window near an unsuspecting male pedestrian who looks to be in his late twenties. “I’m looking for the M8,” she announces. His response is jittery and stalled. Constantly stopping and starting again, he says in an authentic Glaswegian accent, “Aye this just got a bit pure hard to explain, do you know where Asda is?” and behaves exactly how one would when caught off guard and asked to give directions they’re only half sure are right.
Fig. 2.1 The Alien’s first interaction with a human (Under the Skin, 2013)
The reason this interaction seems like it was cut from a documentary rather than a science-fiction film is because the man she spoke to on the street was very likely a random pedestrian rather than a hired actor. Director Jonathan Glazer and his crew installed hidden cameras in the van The Alien drives around Glasgow in so many of pedestrians were not hired actors but real passers-by. Their mannerisms, reactions, questions, and flirtations are all genuine in a way that is evocative of social-realist tradition in UK cinema. In the making-of interview Glazer states he’s been asked many times who was cast and who wasn’t and that’s exactly how he wants the film to be perceived, a unified mix of professional and non-professional actors to achieve the aesthetic quality of realism.
It’s common practice within the social realism genre to cast actors with strong regional accents rather than actors with the generic, posh English accent that is common in mainstream Hollywood films. This is done to exhibit specific regional accents of the UK accurately, regions that may be underrepresented in film and other mainstream media. In Under the Skin, it’s The Alien who dons the generic English accent while everyone else around her speaks in a naturalistic Glasgewian accent and dialect. Osterweil writes, “the fact that many Anglo members of the audience cannot understand the Glaswegian dialects of these unwitting players helps sustain the film’s illusion of other-worldliness” (2014). Because of the accent disparity between The Alien and those around her, many viewers find the streets of modern Glasgow and those who inhabit to be a foreign, unfamiliar sensation, and are thus able to better understand the perspective of the alien as an other-ed element in an unfamiliar place.
In addition to capturing realistic dialogue and accurate regional accents from inside the van, hidden cameras were also used in several different scenes to capture the scenery of Glasgow in unembellished honesty. When speaking about the look of the film in the making-of interview, Glazer says, “The aesthetic to me wasn’t important to me on this film. The aesthetic was that there was no aesthetic… It was very important to me that everything felt unadorned. It felt like it should be as it was'' (2013). To achieve this intended aesthetic, the crew installed hidden cameras in several of the film’s locations including a shopping mall, nightclub, and high street so the locations and people who normally inhabit them could appear in the film exactly as they do in reality.
Early on in the film, The Alien goes to a shopping mall and picks out an outfit for herself (Fig. 2.2). She runs her fingers over the synthetic fur coats and acid wash jeans, unfolds a hot pink v-neck, and tries on a coral red lipstick. This is not the futuristic fashion commonly associated with science fiction but rather fashion marked with a regional class identity. The Alien is making her aesthetic and class-based transformation to disguise herself but also to appear culturally desirable. Instead of hiring extras to fill the shopping mall, Glazer thought it was important to capture real and unsuspecting shoppers around The Alien with hidden cameras, for they are the people whom she’s trying to emulate in her purchasing choices.
Fig. 2.2 The Alien in a shopping mall (Under the Skin, 2013)
Later on in the film, The Alien, on her murderous mission of seduction, sees a man walking towards a nightclub by himself. She parks her van, gets out, and contemplates entering the club after him. She turns around to leave and on her way out a group of women, all roughly in their mid-to-late-thirties, take her by their arms and encourage her to enter the club with them. Their outfits, heavy make-up, and accented voices, all talking over each other, tell the audience they are locals. The Alien looks startled, the random kindness of inebriated women on a night out is a new sensation for her, and follows them inside (Fig. 2.3).
Fig. 2.3 The Alien outside a nightclub (Under the Skin, 2013)
Inside the nightclub people dance, shout over the music to hear each other, and pour drinks from cans into glasses. They are real people rather than hired extras, most likely all local to the area, out for a dance and a drink on the weekend. Although filling the club with extras would have been more practical for filming multiple takes and not having to meticulously hide all the camera equipment, Glazer knew that to achieve his intended aesthetic of unadorned realism, him and his crew had to film the club on a normal weekend night filled with the people who actually go there regularly.
When The Alien begins her drift toward human consciousness about half way through the film, there is a pivotal scene in which she falls down while walking on a high street in Glasgow. When analyzing this scene in a video interview with The New York Times, Glazer says it was all filmed with hidden cameras and after she trips and is lying down on the ground, she’s helped to her feet by real passers-by (Fig. 2.4). Glazer says, “It’s a key scene in the film because it’s about the demonstration of human kindness and how we help each other up when we fall (2014)”. By capturing this interaction with hidden cameras, Glazer is able to capture genuine human kindness, people willing to help someone who they’ve never met without any expectation of a reward, simply because it’s the right thing to do. It’s this gesture of innate human kindness that sets The Alien on her drift towards human impulse and becoming part of the throng.
Fig. 2.4 The Alien is helped to her feet after falling (Under the Skin, 2013)
Jonathan Glazer’s use of hidden cameras while making Under the Skin is a cinéma-vérité filmmaking technique that dates back to the mid-twentieth century. “Cinéma-vérité” translates in French to “truthful cinema” and was born in the early 1960s as filmmakers in many different countries responded to the conventions of documentary tradition. In France it developed amidst the energy and experimentation of the French New Wave movement, which is one of the many 20th century film movements that helped inspire and shape modern social realism. French New Wave challenged the formulaic and studio-bound Hollywood films post WWII and introduced films with, “extended shots, handheld footage, naturalistic performances, on-location shooting, whip-pans, socio-political commentary and ambiguous or unresolved endings” (Evans, 2009). For a sense of immediacy and urgency, many of these films were shot on the streets unrehearsed and unannounced.
When French New Wave director Jacques Demy was making his 1961 film Lola, he and his crew hid the camera operator inside a postman’s cart and pushed him down the street so he could film causal interactions of people wandering around. Nobody knew they were being filmed and the resulting footage is naturalistic and shot from a unique camera perspective (Ferrari, 2021). Glazer employed a similar technique over fifty years after Lola was released when making Under the Skin, but his hidden camera filming involved more extensive technical planning.
Glazer didn’t want to stage and restage action in the van, so all the interactions had to be caught the first time they occurred. He wanted to give the cast the freedom to react to their environment, whether they knew they were being filmed or not. He also didn’t want the scenes filmed from within the van to have a noticeable difference in quality from the rest of the film or or look like CCTV footage.
In the making-of interview, Tom Debenham, the film’s 2nd United Director and VFX Supervisor, said that the cameras they installed in the van were little boxes, kind-of like two inch cubes, on which they mounted very small lesnes. When the crew filmed The Alien’s interactions with pedestrians, there were up to ten hidden cameras recording from different places inside the van. This allowed the camera crew to capture multiple angles at once and enhance the reality of what they filmed. Debenham says that by recording with lots of hidden cameras at once the crew, “could cut from one camera to the other and it would be an understood moment so that the light moving across somebody’s face would be continuous” (2013). Having so many different cameras in the van made the shots appear unbroken and very compellingly real. As a result, the hidden cameras capture humanity in documentary-style honestly from an objective perspective. The Alien doesn’t necessarily judge the content in the frame, she observes it like a foreign object.
In the same interview, Chris Oddy, the film’s production designer, talks about the technical process of setting up hidden cameras in the shopping mall and the nightclub. The crew had to return to both places several times and exhaustively plan where cameras could be hidden. Whether they’d be in a cleaning cone or inside a bag, they had to remain completely undetectable to the public. To film the nightclub scene specifically, Glazer, his crew, and Johansson hid in the back room of a club called The Shed until it was filled with guests. Then they slipped out into the crowd to film the necessary scenes with the crew hiding cameras under their jackets and backpacks (Wiseman, 2014).
In addition to capturing people and places in unadorned honesty, hidden cameras also allowed Glazer to turn the production process itself into a layered film narrative. To prepare for the role, Scarlett Johannson wore a black wig, learned to speak in an English accent, got a UK driver’s license, and wore clothes from a cheap department store. She was then dropped into the streets of Glasgow where she drove and walked around, interacting with people who had no idea they were standing near or speaking to one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. The camera crew was completely hidden, therefore becoming part of the conceit as well. Just as The Alien hides her extra-terrestrial identity, Johannson hides her true celebrity identity in plain sight.
In his New York Times review of the film from 2014, writer Nicolas Rapold cites Glazer as saying, “The idea of using these surveillance cameras and shooting the world as it is has the power of something very illicit and incongruous… The story of Scarlett playing an alien character on the streets of Glasgow, shot with hidden cameras, is kind of an equivalent to this idea of an alien on Earth. The method and the narrative almost become the same thing” (2014). In the making-of interview with the crew, Glazer says that once that once it was understood that the method and narrative were the same, that concept drove through the whole project and made everything clear.
CHAPTER 3: Science Fiction in Under the Skin: Contrasting Human Emotion with Alien Otherness to Create Political Stakes
In the previous chapter I examined how when making Under the Skin, Glazer utilized the social realism genre to establish exposition in a film with very little dialogue, explore human nature, and create layered meaning within the film narrative. In this chapter I will examine how he additionally utilized the genre of science fiction to explore the human condition from the alien, or non-human perspective. To do this I will conduct a case study on the film’s opening scene which portrays The Alien’s creation and examine the political significance of placing a science fiction entity within a real, working class environment.
Under the Skin establishes itself as a science fiction film within the first few seconds of its runtime. The first image of the film is total darkness accompanied by Mica Levi’s haunting score of fragmented, synthesized strings. At the 22 second mark, a small dot of white light appears in the center of the screen. In Catherine Constable’s article, “Under the Skin: Cosmology and Individualization” in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, she writes that the score’s “lack of recognisable melody and use of rapid tremolos of synthesised strings (create) a prickling play of discordant sounds that emphasise the alien, unknown quality of the emerging form” (2017). The score tells the audience there are extra-terrestrial elements at play and that there is something to fear in this otherwise unsuspecting ball of light.
Glazer originally planned for there to be no original score for the film, he wanted any music that played to be part of the non-diegetic background noise to align with his intended aesthetic of unadorned realism. After some reconsideration, he decided the heady science fiction in the film should be just as pronounced as the contrasting social realism. In a Film4 video interview, he says he added Levi’s score into the opening scene because he wanted the audience to know straight away that “the fucking aliens are coming” (2014).
At the 56 second mark, the ball of white light increases in size to fill the screen and becomes the central point of an emerging circular flare of light. The image is “suggestive of an emerging planet, an allusion, perhaps, to the spectacle of perfect, geometric planetary alignment presented in the first scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey” (Constable, 2017). This circular flare of light enlarges to become a spherical, three-dimensional torus shape. The pace of the score also increases which suggests a forming of a particular new kind of life (Fig. 3.1).
Fig. 3.1 Opening scene (Under the Skin, 2013)
The torus slowly moves to the right and at the 1 minute 56 second mark, it eclipses the white light, becoming backlit by it. Seconds later, the backlit torus is eclipsed by a black, three dimensional sphere. This sequence is then repeated from a different angle in which it resembles spaceships docking to a mothership or possible planetary movement, which works to further emphasize the alien, non-human life form that is coming into being.
Over the score, The Alien’s voice can be heard repeating consonants from the English alphabet, as if acquiring the basic building blocks of language. In the making-of interview, Glazer reveals that this audio was recorded during Johanson’s sessions with her dialect coach as she learned an English accent for the role, another example of how the film production and narrative correspond directly. At the 2 minute 26 second mark, the black sphere is fit within the white torus and becomes the focal point of the frame (Fig. 3.2).
Fig. 3.2 Opening scene (Under the Skin, 2013)
The black sphere then expands as its surrounding torus shape contracts to reveal the iris of a human eye. The pupil is small and frantic, contracting and expanding slightly to suggest it’s host is shocked or bewildered (Fig. 3.3).
Fig. 3.3 Opening scene (Under the Skin, 2013)
The graphic of geometrically perfect shapes aligning to create a human eye suggests that the host of this eyeball was meticulously designed and created by higher forces, likely to serve a particular purpose. At the 3 minute 12 second mark, the soundtrack is accompanied with spoken words from The Alien: “form, forms, cell,” and as she begins to say what sounds like the word “self,” the moment of completed formation does not come and there is a cut to a white background featuring the film's title: “Under the Skin” in black lettering.
This three minute long scene works to immediately establish the film’s cryptic tone. It tells the audience right away that this is not a typical mainstream science fiction film. Similarly to how Glazer reduced the script and exposition to create a sense of mystery surrounding the alien, he also reduced the amount of visual effects in the science fiction scenes. In the making-of interview Glazer says, “We could tell the same thing by distilling it” (2013). Originally, the opening scene was supposed to show the construction of the alien’s entire human body and rely heavily on CG visual effects. Glazer states it was originally a huge undertaking, describing it as, “probably a ten minute scene, a million pounds” (2013). Instead, he distilled the idea, taking influence from Stanley Kubrick’s use of practical visual effects in his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and changed it from the very literal construction of a human body to the close-up of the construction of an eye.
The opening scene is also important in establishing the alien entity that will directly contrast her human counterparts for the remainder of the film. Osterweil writes, “Anyone who missed Under the Skin’s Kubrickesque prologue would never know they were watching Johansson’s meanderings around Glasgow through a sci-fi lens” (2014). After the audience knows they’re observing humanity through the eyes of an alien or some otherworldly force, the objective gaze of the camera and social realist setting take on a heightened, layered meaning and work to exhibit the human condition from an objective, alien perspective.
In A Dictionary of Film Studies, Kuhn and Westwell write that science fiction is often characterized by stories told in futuristic and fantastical worlds. In Under the Skin, Glazer chooses to engage The Alien, the science fiction element, with the skin of today’s world, rather than the glistening surfaces of future. Because the film is ”committed to the degraded surfaces of everyday life” (Osterweil, 2014), the tension between the science fiction and gritty realism serve as a constant reminder of the political stakes. Just as the science fiction grene is commonly associated with escapism and fantasy, in Under the Skin, The Alien represents an escapist fantasy to her victims.
The film’s political concern with the everyday is highlighted when The Alien’s victims reveal details about their own lives in conversation and they’re shown to be of humble origins. One of the first men she asks directions from says he immigrated to Scotland from Slovenia to live with family. Another man tells her that he lives alone and works as an electrician. He tells her he loves living alone because there’s “nobody to nag you.” The audience gets the sense that this man is potentially putting on a brave face by saying this, as if in denial of his loneliness or trying to appear unbothered by it. What he doesn’t know is that by telling her this, the man has sealed his own demise. The Alien ensures all her victims live alone because she doesn’t want someone to come looking after them and potentially jeopardize her mission.
The men she picks up off the street not only lust after her but also see her as an escape. “She appears in random, miraculous fashion and showing inexplicable interest in their ordinary lives (and) represents a candy-coloured implausible escape from the repetition of dreary, working-class minutiae and modern conservative austerity” (Salum, 2019). Glazer reveals the hopes, aspirations, and emotions of these men, some of them real people while others actors, by juxtaposing their speech, look, and life details with an otherworldly science fiction element that takes the form of a beautiful alien.
The few details these men reveal about their lives provide context as to why they are more than happy to get into a van with The Alien, a total stranger, and follow her back to her derelict, run-down flat. The Alien has the power of lust and seduction but she also represents liberation from their reality which seems to be one of loneliness, repetitive jobs that potentially leave them living paycheck to paycheck, and the dead-end cycle of conservative austerity.
This unique power that The Alien holds over them is demonstrated in the conceptual science fiction scene 19 minutes and 26 seconds into the film in which she traps her first victim in a mysterious black liquid void. Right before this scene, The Alien picks this man up off the street and offers him a ride. In her van she laughs at his jokes and tells him he’s very charming. She then asks if he has a girlfriend to which he responds, “No I don’t have a girlfriend at all.” She then lays bare her fool-proof method of flirtation. “Do you think I’m pretty?” she asks. “Aye, I think you’re gorgeous,” he responds. She then drives him back to her flat.
The Alien enters her flat and her victim follows behind her. As they walk through the doorway they are encapsulated in darkness and the screen goes black momentarily, representing the transfer from one world, or dimension, to another. When they emerge on the other side of this darkness, they are both fully illuminated, yet surrounded by a pitch black void (Fig. 3.4)
Fig. 3.4 The Alien’s victim after he enters her flat (Under the Skin, 2013)
The void glistens with a reflective sheen and the man follows The Alien, as if in a daze of desire, as she walks across the floor. The Alien walks ahead of him and removes her articles of clothing one-by-one as her victim does the same. The floor then becomes a minicuous liquid material and the victim descends step-by-step into the black abyss, but he doesn't seem to notice, his eyes are still transfixed on what’s ahead of him, he is mesmerized by The Alien (Fig, 3.5). The Alien doesn’t descend into the liquid void with him, instead she continues to walk across on the solid black surface. Once her victim completely submerges, she turns around, collects her clothes, and walks back outside, devoid of any emotional reaction to his death.
Fig. 3.5 The Alien’s victim meets his liquid demise (Under the Skin, 2013)
In this scene, The Alien is shown to have a power greater than simply lust over her victim. He is helplessly following after her, as if under a spell. He is following a fantasy, an escape, right into a black pit of his own demise and he doesn’t even notice until he completely submerges.
In this scene, Glazer juxtaposes the beautiful, cold, and unfeeling alien with her regular, working-class victim to seemingly saying that for these men, there is no easy escape from the economic circumstances they’ve found themselves in due to their country’s social and political policies. It’s almost as if they’re being punished for believing that there even could be.
In the film’s exploration of the human condition, the incorporation of science fiction scenes like The Alien’s creation and her first victim’s descent into the black void are of great importance. Seeing people display very human emotions like lust, desire, and loneliness through the lens of science fiction gives the film tangible stakes. Because The Alien’s victims seem so real, the audience can see themselves reflected in them and better understand why her victims would be inclined to believe in an escapist fantasy.
Conclusion
In Social Realism: Art, Nationhood and Politics, David Foster argues that social realism is not merely a cinema of mimesis or reportage but rather a film culture that houses British national film artistry and challenges the audience’s perception of the socio-political sphere. Under the Skin exemplifies Foster’s analysis of the genre because it integrates real looking people and documentary-style footage into a larger science fiction narrative to make an artistic, enigmatic, and transfixing statement on what it means to be human.
Evidence of Under the Skin’s successful artistry can be observed in the film’s lauded critical acclaim. The Guardian, Indiewire, and Rolling Stone all awarded it a top five spot in their respective lists of the best films of the 2010’s. At the time of its release Richard Roeper, a critic at the Chicago Sun Times, gave the film a four out of four star review, writing, “This is what we talk about when we talk about film as art” (2014).
Jonathan Glazer took ten years to make Under the Skin and his careful, laborious consideration is present in every frame of the film. Throughout the film’s 1 hour and 48 minute runtime, the social realism and science fiction genres are always in flux, working to subliminally explore existential questions of human-ness through visuals rather than dialogue. Instead of having a character monologue about what it means to be human, the film’s cinéma-vérité interactions between a supernatural entity and everyday people dare the audience to ask and answer these questions for themselves.
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