What Under The Skin Taught Me About Being a Woman
It has been ten years since 2013 and the premiere screening of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin at the Telluride film festival. In Glazer’s critically celebrated (though commercially ignored) film, an alien named Laura, played by Scarlett Johansson, drives around the streets of Glasgow to prey on men. While it’s the striking scenes of men meeting their demise in an oily abyss that have earned Under the Skin the most acclaim, what’s stuck with me about Glazer’s film a whole decade later is the film’s final moments: Laura, after days of coming to terms with what it means to inhabit the human female form, is sexually assaulted then brutally murdered. With this, Under the Skin makes the tragic assertion that womanhood is defined by the affliction of male violence.
To be a woman is to suffer: it’s a notion that is, unfortunately, not that surprising. It does make for a depressing sentiment though. I’ll admit, while they might not have lingered in my memory as much as the film’s solemn conclusion, Under the Skin is peppered with other, slightly less dismal ideas around what it means to be a woman. Given the conventional power hierarchies associated with the “white van man”, for instance, the film’s repeated sequences of Laura luring unsuspecting men in her own vehicle is a clear subversion. In fact, it often verges on being somewhat comical. As the camera mimics Laura’s gaze, indistinctly grazing over hordes of her potential prey, men are no longer teeming with the violent potential that most women have learnt to fear. In the world of Under the Skin, it’s women that should be feared instead.
Under the Skin’s conscious exploitation - and, really, subversion - of Scarlett Johansson’s sex symbol status is a predecessor to more contemporary performances that play on being subject to these kinds of labels. Talking to Gizmodo, Glazer said that Johansson “de-eroticizes her image” through the film; this is something that resonates in Margot Robbie’s roles in I, Tonya and Mary, Queen of Scots. As Robbie put it herself during an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, these were a sort of pushback to the “uninspiring” scripts where she was just “the wife or the girlfriend - just a catalyst for the male storyline”.
“I was reminded of the alien shedding her skin: I was, like Laura, unbridled from my womanhood for a moment.”
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The scene in which Laura ignores the cries of a baby in favour of bagging herself another victim is poignant too: though distressing to watch, Glazer has created a vision of femininity that’s unbridled from the constraints of motherhood. While it’s a harsh way of emphasising it, Laura is, unlike her human female counterparts, liberated from maternal instinct.
But this subversive vision of womanhood represented by Laura’s alien representation of it is overshadowed by everything in Under the Skin that falls at the complete opposite end of the spectrum: the moments that paint a bleak image of what it means to be female. A major undercurrent of Glazer’s film is the notion of female masquerade. Not only is the entire film based around the conceit that Laura is an alien masquerading as a human female, but we see actual humans engaging in the act of masquerade too. Shots of Laura perusing potential disguise options and makeup displays are followed by shots of human women doing the very same.
The fact that Laura, a being from a whole other planet, knows to partake in the creation of a kind of facade, suggests this: that womanhood has been constructed deliberately “to-be-looked-at”. That we are defined by being perceived and the desire to present. This is hammered home when Laura first looks upon herself in a mirror: It isn’t an opportunity for a Lacanian moment of self-awareness, but rather the perfect time for her to touch up her lipstick.
Unfortunately, a lot of Under the Skin’s more optimistic prophecies read as all but naïve in today’s climate. Any transgressive potential of Laura’s jaunts in the van (which were filmed with hidden cameras and ordinary blokes unaware of the setup) are marred by my innate fear for Johansson. Though the camera crew tailed her in another van, I can’t help but be struck by the potential danger of this scenario: watching her, my mind is flooded with the same “what ifs” that every woman thinks about as they walk alone at night or meet an over-friendly Uber driver. And there’s good reason for me to feel that way: the recent deaths of Sabina Nessa and Maria Rawlings, just two of the 125 women killed by men in the year since Sarah Everand’s murder, affirm that our patriarchal gender relations won’t ever change. There will always be women dying at the hands of men.
Over the days that the film spans, Laura learns a lot about what it means to be a woman. She learns to masquerade. She develops some sense of sympathy, at one point deciding to release a potential victim from her van. She learns to be cared for, succumbing to the genuinely altruistic affections of a man she meets on the bus. But the conclusion of her female existence is this: she is molested, nearly raped, then burnt alive. “Conclusion” might even be the wrong term to use here. This final turn of events – that of pervasive misogynistic violence – is the female experience in Under the Skin.
For many, Under the Skin will just be a “great” film. One that has established Glazer as a visionary director. I have a more personal relationship to it. I’ve written about it repeatedly and in the decade since it was released, as I’ve turned from a teenager to a woman, the ideas the film explores have become more and more part of my psyche. It might be the reason I cut all my hair off a few years ago. As I relished in my newfound ability to walk down the street and receive less unwanted catcalls and lecherous stares, I was reminded of the alien shedding her skin: I was, like Laura, unbridled from my womanhood for a moment. As Under the Skin shows, however, this is a feeling that can never last too long.
Words: Amber Rawlings
