Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin is a 2013 sci-fi thriller starring Scarlett Johansson. The Woman, Johansson, is depicted as an alluring beauty cruising Scotland in search of lone men. Simple enough. To be forthcoming, the film’s a bit tedious but with fascinating purpose. Like so many of us, the film grows and develops with both time and rumination. If you enjoy the existential journey of personhood, I recommend it.
Everything that follows below is a spoiler. Go watch it first.
The Vacant Light
Many reviews have described The Woman as a black widow; a creature born to ensnare and consume. This is likely due to The Woman’s voluptuous, flirtatious nature, as well as its choice of prey. By comparison, the black widow is a sexual cannibal. Surely, they are analogous.
But this analogy is a mistake.
The Woman is an angler fish; the pulsing vacant light of one to be exact. We know the image: the harmless glow in the fathoms below betraying wayward fish to sharp, chilling jaws. The Woman is this glow, this lure, and the clue is in its wrongness. The Woman is distinctly wrong: warm but cold, self-possessed but hollow. There is nothing to The Woman but function. It feels not hunger but purpose through design. It is not what consumes but instead a vacant tool for feeding an entity unseen.
From just beyond the door of its van, men swim up to assess The Woman. The Woman’s beauty, a non-biological mechanism, pulses with potential. The light in its eyes. Some of these men can tell that something is just a bit off – it’s not a real fish. Those men live unaware of the jaws just beyond the darkness. Meanwhile others, whether drunk, lonely, or careless, take the bait. Those unlucky men are taken to its home, deep and dark, where they are consumed; though notably, not by The Woman. The men slide into an aquatic celestial darkness, their meat forced onto a single track of moving flesh toward some greater purpose.
That greater purpose is the fish.
The Lure Malfunctions
But then, the light drains and The Woman begins to struggle. A lure too long separated from the greater, cosmic body. The dimming is marked by a hunt gone wrong, as The Woman lures a Hooded Man into its van. The Woman invites him to touch its face, only for him to discover it is cold, which The Woman seems to both know and accept. Perhaps the man feels a shared wrongness, I am not to say, but there is a tenderness which should not be. He is taken to The Woman’s “place”, but The Woman does not pursue him further.
This was realistically my first exhale since starting the film.
At its “place,” The Woman, notices herself. And I’m hesitant to say herself because The Woman is not a being, not really. But for a moment, in the mirror of that residence The Woman looks at her reflection and sees a body. Her body. She inspects a bit, with tentative curiosity. Do lures have bodies? What about presence? Do lures have questions?
These are likely the questions that unsettle her. Not emotional thoughts, but existential. I looked at my hand and wondered what it would be like for it to edge towards personhood. It was only meant to be a biological tool.
Coatless, vanless, and without purpose The Woman meanders the Scottish hillside. She is abandoning her camouflage, her mechanism, and even her very task. The Biker finishes her assignment; the Hooded Man taken by some backup biological function. My foot learns to use chopsticks because my hand is having a moment. But all of this leaves The Woman adrift. Her battery drains; The Woman loses functionality; and through this loss emerges identity.
Mimetic Becoming
The Bus Man is almost correct in seeing her as a woman in distress. She is a lure without her fish, a drifting function. That is distressing. Through her interactions with the Bus Man, she develops a sense of existing in a body, a sort of proto-personhood. He taps his feet to music, and she taps her finger. He kisses her, and she kisses him. There is joy in learning through mimesis. It’s play. It’s sharing. It’s something children do.
It was a natural phase for her to enter. A consciousness emerges in the form of the vessel chosen. She is becoming a woman.
Shift In Ecological Role
Earlier in the film, we see The Woman as unshakable while in the throngs of rowdy men. A group of what can only be described as drunken frat boys stage an attack while she is alone in the van. With the most minimum of acknowledgement The Woman drives through the group, seeking less feisty prey. They simply weren’t worth the effort.
However, at the end of the film, she meets a man in the woods, and she feels fear perhaps for the first time.
While she was in a stage of becoming, both the highs and the lows, the man in the woods aggresses The Woman and kills her. It is a sudden escalation without repair or even parallel. The lacking parallel: the man in the woods can only experience lust and fear, to her self-realization and The Woman’s former procedural purpose. In short, our hunters differ: The Woman was once a function; the man is just an animal.
The most succinct takeaway is that when The Woman became a woman, she became prey.
The film is the antithesis of the “born perfect yesterday” trope. Instead, the film is the far less catchy “born yesterday, was developing a sense of personhood, and was robbed by a man” trope. The outcome is oddly heartbreaking considering her original function as lure, but perhaps with choice, it would not be a function she’d resume.
Conclusion
Initially, this is a story of what it means to be; and later, what it means to be a woman. It is a slow-burn, philosophical film on personhood and gender. First it asks what it means to emerge into consciousness. Then it asks if our consciousness fills the shape of our vessel.