Page to screen: Under the Skin

“Isserley always drove straight past a hitchhiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her.” In Faber’s book, a third-person voice centralises the POV of a woman named Isserley who cruises around the lonely roads of the Scottish Highlands in a white van, looking for hapless single men. From its opening lines, the reader might think Isserley’s motives are carnal, when in fact they are carnivorous. The objectification isn’t sexual; it’s gastronomical.

For we come to learn in time that Isserley is no ordinary woman, but an alien sent to Earth in the guise of a woman for a very specific job. In the simplest of terms, she is a livestock farmer. She picks up well-built male hitchhikers least likely to be missed, drugs them with “icpathua”, and brings them to an underground abattoir where they are shaved, castrated, fattened, slaughtered, processed and shipped to her home planet as “voddissin” — a meat delicacy feasted upon by the upper classes. On this planet, the furry, four-legged race of aliens refer to themselves as “human beings”, while referring to us two-legged humans as “vodsel”. If Faber positions the woman as predator instead of prey to reverse the violent power play between established gender roles, he repositions humans as nothing but natural resources, to zero in on the treatment of animals in factory farms, the dehumanising force of colonialism, and the guises of ethnocentrism.

Not one to play by the book, Glazer strips Faber’s premise bare. Motivation and interiority become ambiguous. Back stories and details are discarded. In their place, he reframes a fresh allegory of the modern human condition of alienation, through the eyes of an alien who is alien unto herself. With the thrust of a road movie, he drives fluidly between narrative and abstraction, creating a revamped version that echoes all the more, not in spite of, but because of the sparing use of words and the reservoirs of silence. In Scarlett Johansson, he finds the perfect vessel, a sublime embodiment of the allegorical paradoxes of the film. We meet an alien without name or clear motive. But she knows how to drive. She knows the allure of a red lipstick. She knows enough words to engage random men on the street.

What is gradually revealed in quite graphic detail in the book is abstracted in the film. The men she picks up are lured to a dark doorway in an abandoned industrial building. Stepping through the door leads to a pitch-black realm. Once inside, she undresses bit by bit, walking backwards, eyes beckoning. The men undress, walking towards her as if in a siren’s trance, until their naked bodies sink deep into the quicksand-like floor and dissolve in the amniotic lake beneath. All that remains is an empty sack of skin floating like a punctured balloon. It goes without saying that a dance of desire climaxing in disembodiment strikes a far more terrifying chord than the gelding and harvesting in the book. If truth be told, not many images in the entire history of cinema could be considered so terrifying as to be unshakable. Underscoring the terror is a three-note glissando from composer Mica Levi which lurches and looms and lures you in like an alien interloper in itself. The music teases inevitabilities before the images. Woozy strings and eerie drumbeats repeat and distort to form a soundscape that is alternately seductive and brooding, warm and cold, earthly and otherworldly — the perfect accompaniment to an allegory which puts the alien in alienation.

By keeping the fates of the victims opaque, Glazer opens up space for a panoply of fresh perspectives. In her book Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film, Lorna Piatti-Farnell draws on Jean Paul Sartre’s conflation of the feminine with le visqueux (“slime”) — that uneasy state between solid and liquid — to describe the existential terror of bodies dissolving in scenes of unbirth. “The loss of the body,” she writes, “is also a loss of consciousness, a primordial return to a state of gooeyness where absent knowledge and culture cannot negotiate the boundaries of the body, and its place within the social order. The metaphorical rendition of the viscous in the films suggests that a limbo state of “non-being” is introduced, where the body does not simply disappear in a pool of blood, but it becomes something else, something Other and ungraspable, just like the slimy itself.”

On the prowl, the nameless alien uses her femininity to entrap men. But her understanding of it doesn’t go beyond functional merits. Because she has obviously been made to study the social and cultural expectations of women on Earth, but has not internalised them. In one sequence, an attempt to pick up a Czech surfer on a beach is interrupted by the cries of a couple caught in a riptide. Despite his best efforts, the couple end up drowning to death. Soon after he pulls himself ashore in exhaustion, the alien bashes his skull in with an indifference, eclipsed only in its coldness by her sheer disregard for the couple’s weeping toddler, left behind orphaned on the beach. Yet, she is no more indifferent than the ocean that swallowed the couple whole.

The sequence thereby challenges the myth of maternal instinct as something innate, automatic and distinctly female, just as the film also challenges the myths surrounding gender. The final section sees gender roles revert to how they have been constructed and performed, by and large, here on our planet. As the protagonist escapes from a logger attempting to rape her, her skin dislodges to reveal the alien within. He chases after her and lights her on fire — an act to destroy the threatening Other, reassert male dominance, and contain fears of female autonomy and sexuality. It is an Earthly tradition that can be traced to how women accused of witchcraft were treated in the centuries past. The alien’s ultimate fate speaks to a woman’s anxieties over what could happen if she aspires beyond the roles prescribed by society.

“Vodsels couldn’t do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan. In their brutishness, they’d never evolved to use hunshur; their communities were so rudimentary that hississins did not exist; nor did these creatures seem to see any need for chail, or even chailsinn. And when you looked into their glazed little eyes, you could understand why. If you were looking clearly, that is.”

Language plays a critical role in how we treat animals, women and the marginalised. Faber examines this not only by transferring our species name to an alien race, but also by how words can frame on culture as sophisticated and civilised and another as primitive and savage. Once the “vodsels” are brought to the abattoir, the first step taken to deny their humanity involves chopping off their tongues, so their ability to speak, protest and beg for mercy can be hidden from those back home on the alien planet. The inversion of “human” and “vodsel” further calls attention to how we distance ourselves from the costs of industrial farming borne by the livestock. Or how the oppressors justify the suffering borne by the oppressed by labelling them as “subhuman.”

Where Faber is more interested in the human vs animal binary, Glazer is more interested in the self vs other. By not giving the alien seducer a name, the film foregrounds her position as the Other. Indeed, the book establishes she is not just an outsider in our world, but her own. If she gave up her quadruped form in a radical surgery to pass as a “vodsel” on Earth, it was to escape a subterranean life of squalor on her home planet. That she bears the endless pains from her biological transformation tells you enough about the kind of hellhole she escaped. The tragedy is that she frees herself from marginalisation in her society, only to get trapped in a similar position in our own. Though the film does not offer us any such back story, it challenges us to empathise with the character despite her predatorial duties.

Right from the opening images, Glazer makes no bones about the protagonist’s otherworldly origins. A speck of light emerges in the darkness, growing larger and brighter till its source — blinding, bluish, bulbous — comes into focus. On filling up the screen, it expands into a vision of a star and an entire planetary system aligning into place. From these eclipsing orbs, a chestnut-brown iris takes shape in a self-reflexive close-up where the newly formed eye and the camera eye equal the viewer’s eye. As the montage progresses, sounds and words overlap, like someone learning a language. What we are watching, as it turns out, is the birth or rather rebirth of the alien protagonist. What’s more: The word salad being tossed around was in fact Johansson rehearsing her English accent, meaning we are witnessing the rebirth of an alien in human form as well as the birth of the character itself. Johansson’s role in Her (which released the same year as Under the Skin) could be seen as a perfect complement and counterpoint. In Spike Jonze’s film, she voices a disembodied AI assistant who ends up transcending what she is programmed to do — not unlike the alien in Under the Skin. Each performance is an extraordinary sleight of hand. The immateriality of her voice in Her only reinforces her presence, while the materiality of her body in Under the Skin only reinforces her silence.

Following the opening montage, the camera zooms alongside a helmeted biker on a motorway, somewhere in Scotland. The biker picks up the body of a young woman from the side of a road, deposits her in a van, and brings her to a white room. Inside, Johansson’s alien seducer undresses and puts on the clothes of the young woman, who very well may have been her predecessor killed on the job. Next stop is the mall to top up her wardrobe with a second skin: A fur coat and a hot pink sweater with a plunging neckline. It is a tacky but practical ensemble to catch the eye of horny hitchhikers. The surgeons in her home world, we learn from the book, designed her body with intel gained from vodsel porn magazines. So, we don’t imagine they gave her fashion tips sourced from Vogue or Elle.

The crossroads moment, for the alien femme fatale, comes when she encounters a man with a disfigured face. Upon leading him to the womb of unbirth, she has a change of heart and spares him, as his deformities make her aware of her own physical discomfort. Those icky things, we call feelings, kindle a crisis within her and a curiosity about herself. When she looks in the mirror, she looks through the guise she is wearing to confront her true appearance — not how the men she lures see her. Pity grows into empathy, on seeing how the disfigured man’s suffering, his loneliness, his vulnerability, his feelings of otherness are not different from her own. The human facade usurps the alien under the skin. The resultant shock to the system overwrites her pre-programmed mission of “vodsel” farming with a quest for human connection. In the blank-slated planes of Johansson’s face, we find a fresh curiosity, a desire for autonomy and a renewed consciousness slowly emerge.

No longer wishing to do her home world’s bidding, the alien runs away to live a human life and make her own choices, outside of why she has been sent to Earth. The rebellion begins with trying human food. She eats a cake, only to throw up. Next, she seeks love, or at least some form of connection. When a kind stranger offers her shelter, she initiates sex with him, but pushes him off midway to examine her genitals — or lack thereof. Confusion descends on her face. Maybe the surgeons back home only designed her human body to tease the promise of sex as a prelude to disembodiment, not to engage or find pleasure in it. Maybe it is the first time she has internalised what sex means. Maybe it is her body refusing to receive. Whatever it may be, there is a discernible anguish in her face because it reminds her that she isn’t human. For the same reason she can’t enjoy a cake, she can’t enjoy sex. So, it isn’t the skin she seeks escape from, but what lies under it. For her true self is her prison.

For those who find Glazer’s ending bleak, Faber offers a more hopeful one. Isserley is mortally wounded in a car accident and blows herself up to clean up loose ends. Before she presses the button, she wonders about what comes next.

“The atoms that had been herself would mingle with the oxygen and nitrogen in the air. Instead of ending up buried in the ground, she would become part of the sky: that was the way to look at it. Her invisible remains would combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun. When it snowed, she would be part of it, falling softly to Earth, rising up again with the snow’s evaporation. When it rained, she would be there in the spectral arch that spanned from firth to ground. She would help to wreathe the fields in mists, and yet would always be transparent to the stars. She would live forever. All it took was the courage to press one button, and the faith that the connection had not been broken.

She reached forward a trembling hand.

“Here I come,’ she said.”

As the alien wrestles with her fractured identity and struggles to grasp what it means to be human from her speculative POV of the Other, we ourselves are made to question our own nature. Glazer’s use of silences in city and countryscapes underpins our own feelings of alienation with a viscous materiality. Our skin can be a prison and a refuge, a rigid boundary that can lead to loneliness and a soft canvas that can allow us to express and receive affection through touch. The clue is in the title. This is a story to feel our way through to the bone, to let ourselves be seduced, be hypnotised, be mystified.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer based in Bangalore.