Episode Transcript
Hello everyone! Welcome back to the final girl on 6th ave podcast, I'm your host and 6th avenue’s very own final girl, Carolyn Smith-Hillmer. Today, I am going to be talking about the 2013 film Under the Skin, starring Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy McWilliams, and Lynsey Taylor Mackay. This film is directed by Jonathan Glazer and written by Jonathan Glazer and Walter Campbell. It is based on the novel written by Michel Faber. The summary of this movie from IMDb is “A mysterious young woman seduces lonely men in the evening hours in Scotland. However, events lead her to begin a process of self-discovery.” You can find this movie to watch on ShowTime, it will run about 1 hour and 48 minutes and of course, like all legendary movies, it is an A24 production.
The movie starts with a black screen and a singular aqua blue dot in the center of the screen growing larger. The blue aura slowly evolves into what I interpret to be a planetary system with some form of black hole or collision. During this scene, there is a feminine voice that is sounding out English words. Cut to a beautiful river running down a cliffside and a motorcycle driving at night down the most secluded road I have ever seen before. Our unknown motorcycle rider eventually ends up on a highway and jets off onto the sidewalk to walk down a dark path off the side of the road. When he re-emerges, he has a woman slung over his shoulder. He puts her body in a van he had parked on the side of the road. In a laboratory-looking room, a woman undresses her body and puts on her clothes. This is all done with the entire screen white and the two women made dark enough to stand out. On the body, the woman finds a live ant and picks it up to inspect it with wonder.
Cut to a large, empty home and the motorcycle man driving off while the Female drives off in the van. She goes to a shopping mall and purchases some makeup. The Female drives around the city and ultimately waves down a man walking alone to ask him for directions. She asks what he is doing and he says he is going to meet up with someone. She didn’t really need the directions. She continues to ask men for directions on the road, asking them what they are up to and if they have family in the area. When the men say that they know people close, she gets discouraged. She finally finds a man to ask for directions and he says he works for himself and lives alone and is going home, so she offers to give him a ride. She continues to find men that do not have a romantic partner, don’t have friends around, don’t have family close, etc. easy targets to get in the car with her. She brings a man home with her and while he walks behind her, she takes off one article of clothing at a time and he does the same. The whole room is black and all we can see are the two characters. As she continues to walk, the man following her steps into a black liquid and disappears. The Female picks up her clothes and gets back into the car.
Seemingly, she is out all night. The next morning she goes to the beach and waits for a man in a wetsuit as he comes out of the water. She stands next to his towel and he comes to get it. She asks him if there is anywhere good to surf and makes conversation with him. He says he is from the CR and living in a tent on the beach. Their conversation is interrupted by a woman screaming as she is getting caught in the wake of the water and is at risk of drowning. The man in the wetsuit goes to save the drowning woman and her male companion. The male companion is brought back to shore by the man in the wetsuit and immediately goes back out to try to find the girl. The man in the wetsuit is exhausted and collapses on the shore. The Female takes a rock and hits him in the head. He is unresponsive. She drags his body along the rocky beach while the drowning woman and man’s baby cries on the beach. The Female takes the man in the wetsuit and puts him into her van. The motorcycle man packs up the wetsuit man’s tent on the beach and finds the couple's crying baby. He does not assist the baby and leaves it there to die. The Female drives until she finds a man walking alone through a parking lot. She gets out of the car to approach the man and is interrupted when a group of drunk, rowdy women gather her into their arms and force her to go into a club with them. The Female tries to find her way out and is approached by a very drunk man who desperately wants to buy her a drink. She says she saw him on the road and he thinks nothing of it. Cut to the man from the club dancing in the all-black room again while getting undressed with The Female. As he walks toward her, he slowly steps into the same black liquid and disappears. The floor becomes solid again where he falls through and he looks up to see the female walking across the floor. While suspended in this liquid, he encounters another man who looks somewhat deformed. They cannot communicate with words, no sound comes out of their mouths, but the deformed man is able to touch the hand of the man from the club. Then, the other man shrivels ups and becomes a 2D version of himself. With the screen still black, we see a small opening with a red substance running down to it and out of it. When the red substance is gone, the opening closes.
During traffic, a man in another vehicle buys the female roses sold by a man who is selling flowers in stand-still traffic. He cut his hand on the roses and she inspects the blood on her hand. On the radio, a woman is discussing the body of the man that drowned up washing up on the shore. A man in the car with the Female is telling her about how beautiful her eyes are. They arrive at her house and again, it is all black. There is enough light for her to put on some lipstick. This time, the floor is made of bricks. Instead of getting straight to the point of walking and stripping at the same time, she stands still and the man walks around her, investigating her, while she stares straight ahead. As he walks away, we see him as the man in the motorcycle outfit. He disappears into the dark and finally, the door to the house opens and we see the Female step outside.
She goes for a walk around Scotland and trips and falls on a cobblestone road. Multiple people stop to help her back up. She is visibly disoriented, as walks away without thanking any of the people that helped her. Later that night, her van is attacked by a bunch of weird punks/young men/teenagers. She just drives away. While she is parked in a new place, she encounters a man with a distorted voice. She says she is lost and asks for directions. The man agrees to get in the car with her after she offers him a ride to the supermarket. The man is very disfigured. He is quiet and she asks why he goes shopping at night. He says that the people are ignorant and wind him up. He has no friends, no girlfriend, and is 26 years old. He said he has never had a girlfriend before. She compliments his hands. She stops the car and tells the man she caught him looking at her and that she liked it. He is not interested in her. She asks him if he is uncomfortable, and he says no and that he just wants to go to Tesco. she takes his hand and puts it against her cheek. She says his hand is cold and he says her neck is cold. She encourages him to continue to touch her face and neck. She tells him that she has a place roughly 30 minutes away and takes him to her house. This time, we see a silver figure walking behind the man. She and the man do the same song and dance where they disrobe while walking across the pitch-black room. He walks right into the black liquid, just like the other men. We see the black/silver figure again. She puts some clothes back on and walks around the house. I think this is the first time we really see her interacting with the house. She stares at herself in the mirror. Then, she walks outside with the deformed man and he is seen walking through the field that we saw at the very beginning of the movie where the motorcycle man picked up the dead girl. The deformed man is seen walking to what I assume is his own home in a quiet neighborhood at early dusk. The motorcycle man catches the deformed man, puts him in the trunk of the car, and drives away while a woman in the neighborhood across the street watches.
The Female is driving but it is so foggy outside that all we can see out of her windows is white. She gets out of the van and stands in the road. It is only foggy on the left half of the screen, but on the right half, it is clear. Her car died, so she leaves it there. She goes to a café nearby and orders a piece of chocolate cake. This will be the first time we see her eat or drink anything. She puts one bite in her mouth and immediately spits it out. She was not built to eat or drink. She continues to walk and a man on the street waiting tells her that the bus will be coming any minute now, so she decides to wait for it. On the bus, the bus driver berates her for not wearing a jacket or coat, or hat. The man that waited for the bus with her asks if she needs any help or if he can do anything for her. She tells him yes; she does need help. He gives her a jacket to wear and takes her to a small grocery store. She then goes with the man to his apartment. He makes her some food that she doesn’t eat and they watch tv together. She watches him do the dishes and he brings her a cup of hot tea to her guest bedroom. What a super nice man this guy is! He even gets the heater set up for her.
She proceeds to get naked and study herself in the mirror. Cut to multiple men on motorcycles speeding off from a starting point and going in opposite directions. The next morning she goes on a walk with the man she stayed with and 3 men on horses ride past her on the walking path. The man is pretty smitten with her. The men on the motorcycles are looking for her. They go exploring during the day and she gets frightened by how high up they are. He is patient with her and helps her walk down the stairs they climbed up. Back at his house, The Female is seen for the first time actually attempting to engage in sexual activity with a man. It is also at this point that she discovers that she has no genitalia, and so sex cannot be an activity that she partakes in. The next morning, she is walking through a forest and encounters a man in a yellow reflective jacket. He tells her to be careful because it is pretty slippery since it rains constantly and asks her the questions she always asks the men she encounters (i.e., are you alone?). their conversation ends and she walks off. The men on the motorcycles are still looking for her.
She is hiding in the forest. She comes across a shelter that says that it takes hill walkers and she enters the cabin. There is no one else inside, but it looks like it does get used pretty regularly. There are blankets and chairs and tables and art supplies. There is a fireplace, but it is not lit. she lays down on the wood floor and I guess maybe she sleeps but I am not sure if she can sleep since she can’t eat or drink or pee. But she does close her eyes. Outside, it is super windy. She walks up to the man in the yellow jacket touching her private parts and she runs out and hides behind some mossy logs. The man in the yellow jacket is nowhere in sight. She keeps running and finds a semi-truck with logs piled in the bed. No one is in the truck, so she climbs in and looks for the keys. She can't find them, and as soon as she realizes she can't start the truck, the man in the yellow jacket is walking toward her. She gets out of the truck and starts to run, and the man finally catches up to her and tackles her to the ground. He attempts to rape her, but she fights him until she can stand up again and this is when we realize that her skin is a suit. The man has ripped her skin suit and runs away horrified. She takes off her face and hair and suit of skin and is left with nothing but black. Her entire body, face, and eyes are black. She holds her face and looks at it, the eyes still blinking and moving. The man in the yellow jacket comes back with gasoline and pours it on her and tries to set her on fire. He does successfully catch her on fire and she falls into the snow. The motorcycle man is on top of a snowy mountain, looking for her. She burns into ash and the grey smoke from her burning goes up into the white sky. The movie ends with snow falling on the lens of the camera.
Okay, so at first I thought this movie was pretty confusing and in the end I still think it is pretty confusing. My first impression was that this movie was about a woman killing stupid men. That is something I can always get behind in a movie. Move over, Aileen Wournos! But then I started to think more deeply about it and I came to the conclusion that, to me, this movie is about the female experience. It is a commentary (yes, I know another commentary). The main character is literally just called The Female. She doesn’t even have a name. And literally, all she does is drive around Scotland and lure dumb men into her home with her promiscuity and she never even has sex with these men. They barely make any physical contact with her at all. But when she tries to have sex for herself for the first time in the movie with the man who is taking care of her, she cannot because she does not possess the anatomy to do so. Others are using her for her sexuality. The greater being that she is feeding by luring these men into her home has planted her on the earth for the sole purpose of providing for it by using her skin suit/looks to feed the being. She is using her sexuality in this instance for another reason other than for herself.
But then, I thought about the fact that The Female is an extraterrestrial being, and that landed me more into the AI thought loop. Yes, I know she is not AI and is an alien. But I could not help but think of the thought experiment of Mary in a Black and White Room. This thought experiment is also called the knowledge argument and is often used in arguments about AI and philosophical debates about what it means to truly know something. First proposed by Frank Jackson in his 1986 article “Epiphenomenal Qualia, the experiment is like this: “Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like "red", "blue", and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue". ... What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?[1]”
So this is where it gets interesting. Yes, Mary knows everything about color, but Mary has never actually experienced color. This argument is in direct opposition to the physicalism argument, which dictates that everything in the universe, even all mental things, is entirely physical. Physicalism also requires that we view the brain and consciousness as identical things. So if Mary learns something new when she escapes her black and white world, then physicalism is false. In other words, if Mary knows everything that there is to know about color perception as a science, and Mary sees red for the first time and learns from that experience that the color red and her scientific knowledge of the perception of the color red, then she has in fact learned something new via experience and physicalism is not real.
That is what I see in this movie. Our Female knows what sex is. As far as we know, she has never experienced it because all of the men she brings home die before they have sex, but she understands conceptually what sex is. Then, she tries to experience sex rather than just knowing what it is. And even though she is not able to due to her anatomical constraints, she would have learned during that experience that sex is more than just the meeting of two people’s genitals. It has emotions associated with it as well, amongst other things. I know just speaking from personal experience that in school, we were always taught that babies were made when sperm fertilizes an egg. And I was always like “okay and??” I knew conceptually and scientifically what sex was, but have not experienced it until later in life, my understanding of it was incomplete. So because she cannot experience what sex actually feels like, her knowledge of sex will never be complete and she is forever trapped in her own black and white world. And ultimately, I think that this is what led to her demise. She was so distraught over the fact that she was using her perceived promiscuity to lure men but she will never be able to explore this for herself.
The imagery of the movie even speaks to this. When she brings the men home, the whole entire screen is just black, and the only color we can see are the clothes she and the male counterpart are wearing and their bodily features. Her room is black because she has no understanding of what it is she is actually doing. When she dies at the end in the field after being set on fire, everything is white all around her except for her black smoke and completely black body, signifying that the world she lived in all along was just black and white.
It is also broader than sex. The Female is not human but is living the human experience. Her information is also asymmetrical in this instance. She is living life as a human and can drive a car and make conversation with men and use cognitive processes to make decisions about the men she chooses to try to attract and kill and let go of.
