Under the Skin

From darkness comes vision. The pre-title sequence is an abstraction of galactic travel, with a total eclipse culminating in an eye. The narrative details the similar intersection of aliens and earthlings.

The aliens have taken the shape of male motorcyclists, but make one of their team a woman (Scarlett Johansson) as bait to seduce human males for the harvest of their skins. One reading of the title is that under the skin people can prove as different as (i) humans and aliens, or (ii) the innocents the heroine seduces and the vicious logger who tries to rape her and destroys her (and as a logger, plunders the natural world in which she seeks refuge). People on this globe live as if on different planets.

Where we expect a sex scene we usually get something metaphysical. The naked bodies operate stripped of any physical background. The first time, the woman found by the roadside is being slowly stripped — we expect by the motorcyclist who will rape her.  But it’s the naked Scarlett (unnamed in the film, Laura in the novel), plundering the body for her woman’s outfit. Having donned a woman’s skin and face she now dons the clothing. When she leads men to their doom they follow her into the dark pool she strides across. Led by their erections they literally go in over their heads and are trapped as in aspic, while she treads the surface. Eventually the men implode leaving their emptied skins to be harvested, presumably for the next UFO of aliens. 

The setting is Glasgow in 2014, when Scottish independence is coming to a vote and where the representative society are famously binge-drinking young women and lecherous brutish lads. Those are contrary attempts to find the comfort of a community, an identity. With their incomprehensible dialect, the Glaswegians seem more alien than Scarlett. They help us to identify with her. 

In one of the film’s many twists, though, the laddish brutality is represented only in the intersection lout who taunts the heroine and the group that attack her van. Her victims are rather charming innocents. They are not the aggressive drunks on whom we expect extraterrestrial justice to be wreaked. Indeed in most cases Scarlett has to be the aggressor not just in the initial engagement but in the sexual invitation. 

The alien Scarlett also works as a human allegory. Initially she functions without any moral compass. So she kills the Czech visitor who tried to save the drowning father. She feels no compunction about abandoning the crying baby. And again, the men she kills are nice guys, not lechers. 

When she picks up the misshapen solitary, the heartless alien discovers human feelings. Though she leads him to his appointed doom she changes her mind and releases him. What prompts her change is her sight of herself in a mirror, where she sees how alien to herself she looks. Then she can feel for him. The freed victim wanders home naked, where her colleague finishes him off. But Scarlett has discovered human emotion, especially the feeling of being alienated and vulnerable. The other aliens, sensing she is AWOL, hunt for her.

This new sensibility is so foreign it discombobulates her. Human emotions are as strange and unmanageable to her as the black forest cake she chokes on. She has no human appetites, so can’t eat even dessert. She ends up confused and alone in the rain, on a bus, helpless and cold, until a man offers her help, warmth, comfort, a meal of fried egg and beans that she -- understandably -- doesn’t touch, and an equally alien cultural experience in the gibberish TV clown. 

When the generous, unselfish man leaves her in her room, with a heater, she for the first time discovers and enjoys the beauty of her body. Under the skin she is the alien but her experience with the misshapen man has opened her to the warmth of the helpful stranger. Not just acting but now feeling human, she welcomes his kisses and sexual approach. But their intercourse is thwarted by her lack of vagina. She looks for it with a lamp, uncomprehending. She can't let him in. Her humanity is skin-deep.

Under the skin she remains the alien, as the rapist logger discovers when he claws her skin off with her pants. As she has discovered human warmth and feeling, though, it’s apt that the logger destroys her in a gas-lit fire on the snow. In the last shot, low angle up through the falling snowflakes, her smoke seems to be rising toward a white-framed portal (unless that’s a flaw in the Cineplex screen). 

For all its sci-fi trappings, then, this is a very human and immediate story about the vulnerability of the emotional, the inhumanity of the selfish and destructive, and — in human and alien alike — our quest for completion, to connect with someone both on and underneath the skin.