Disgusting Women

On Under the Skin and rape/revenge

Irreversible (2002) has been lauded for its clever backwards narrative rewinding of the rape/revenge genre—you see the retribution first, and then, chronologically second, the sexual violence which sparked it. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is usually thought of as a sci-fi thriller—but it performs the same trick. The insect creature wearing Scarlet Johansson’s skin seduces and murders her way through a cornucopia of Scottish men. And then, finally, at the end, you get the rape; a lumberjack sexually assaults the alien woman— inadvertently revealing the chitinous abomination beneath her lovely surface.

In rape/revenge narratives from the 1970s, the grim, castrating scythe of the plot is, often, explicitly feminist. In Ms. 45 or I Spit on Your Grave, women avenge their own violation—and that vengeance is figured as a just reaction not just to individual wrong, but to systemic evil.

Under the Skin flirts sinisterly with that logic as well. Johannson is so successful at cruising for men only because men are so determinedly cruising on their own account—hitting on her in clubs with clumsy pick up lines, offering her unsolicited roses, chatting her up and then attacking her car. Women for their part are shown at make-up counters, putting up a front to attract men, just as the alien has pulled on Johansson’s pulchritude like a wetsuit. In a world where men see women solely in terms of their outer skin, it seems only fair that women should show men the skin the men want, the better to devour the lookers.

Indeed, the first half of the film fairly revels in its ruthlessness. In one scene, a good Samaritan tries desperately to save a wife and husband from drowning. After the Samaritan has failed and lies exhausted on the beach, Johansson walks over laboriously in her high heels, picks up a rock, discards it, chooses another one, and then bashes his head in. She then pulls him away, while the drowned couples’ baby wails helplessly.

The alien woman’s feeding ritual is also gleefully, if dreamily, vindictive. She leads the men into her home, and when they have stripped, lures them into a black pool, where they float, genitals mutely visible to the camera, until some unseen force sucks their insides from their bodies. All that’s left behind is the detumesced, flapping, shapeless skin—a full body version of the rape/revenge’s beloved castration trope.

For better or worse, this is the genre pleasure of rape/revenge—the vision of women picking up the violent weapons of patriarchy and using them with more skill and viciousness than men themselves ever managed. Men judge women on their outer carapace, so the alien woman turns men into nothing but their surface. Men violate women; so the alien woman turns men’s entire selves into a brutally violable orifice. It’s not pleasant, but it’s justice, of a kind.

In a normal rape/revenge, that justice is delivered at the end of the film; the woman is assaulted, and then returns, empowered, to tear off the bloody phallus for herself. In Under the Skin, though, the alien starts out with that bloody phallus—and then, hesitantly, tries to put it aside to turn herself into a more standard issue Hollywood feminine victim.

To the consternation of her male, motorcycle-riding, and mostly superfluous confederate, the alien starts to develop a conscience. She has an ambiguously guilty flashback to the crying baby. She picks up a man with a facial deformity, and rather than killing him, allows him to escape. Critic Kailyn Kent says that this encounter “is as emotionally generous as the film gets,” but that wasn’t exactly my takeaway. Rather, the film shunts the disabled man into an easy narrative of stereotypical goodness and innocence. He’s friendless, has never had sex, and so is to be pitied. He’s offered the fantasy of sleeping with Scarlet Johannson, and in return offers her and the audience the assurance that #notallmen. That assurance saves Johannson, whose generosity, erotic and otherwise, puts her on the path to humanity. (The man isn’t so lucky; like many disabled characters in Hollywood, once he’s fulfilled his role in someone else’s narrative arc, he’s summarily executed, in this case by the motorcycle guy.)

So what does it mean to be on the path to humanity? In the alien’s case, it means she becomes feminine—or, in the logic of the film, disempowered. The former rapacious hunter, capable of animation, charm, and a cold competence, becomes an unexpressive dishrag, not unlike the skins of those guys she used to eat. To replace her former diet, she tries to consume cake without success. Saddened by that failure (no cake?) she lets some guy on a bus pick her up. She trails around after him, and eventually, unenthusiastically, submits to sex, which she breaks off when she realizes she doesn’t have the right genitals for it. She leaves for a walk in the woods, is sexually assaulted by a lumberjack, and then, finally is murdered. The assault causes her skin to tear off, and she is fully feminized in her victimhood through the revelation of her black, semi-insectoid inner self.

The unpleasantness of the alternatives here are fairly consistent with rape/revenge films more broadly. Rape/revenge generally presents violence and empowerment as deeply compromised; The Stendahl Syndrome, in which the victim psychologically adopts the personality of the rapist she murdered is an extreme example, but not out of line with other films in the genre. In Ms. 45 or I Spit On Your Grave, too, revenge is as much a capitulation as a triumph; to pick up the knife is to become the monster violator. You can be the rapist or you can be the raped. Being human is not an option.

Patriarchy is bleak in Under the Skin; patriarchy is bleak in rape/revenge. Still, the progressive revelation of that bleakness works somewhat differently when you switch cause and effect. In rape/revenge, the weak, feminized protagonist must become a killer to protect herself. In Under the Skin, the killer needs to become weak and feminized to gain her soul. The first is a story of destroying oneself for the sake of empowerment; the second, of destroying oneself for the sake of disempowerment.

And why exactly does the alien want to be disempowered? Why does the monster want to be human? The film’s artsy ambiguity is a convenient way to avoid answering those questions. A child’s cry and a disabled man’s desire combine into a siren call to selflessness; inside every monstrous feminine is a stifled yearning for domestic bliss. The parallel with Johansson’s Black Widow in Age of Ultron is oddly synchronous. In both, the insect-affiliated awesome wielder of violence reveals that she hates her own distance from femininity, and longs to be a normal woman—bearing children, having sex with nice guys, not committing murder on a daily basis.

In Under the Skin, though, if you’re not the murderer, you’re the murderee. Again, that’s consistent with rape/revenge. But it’s also, in this context, disappointing. The film’s protagonist, after all, is not a woman. She’s something else—and her monstrosity, while horrible, could in theory offer an alternative to the dreary, familiar skin of gender. She isn’t interested in sex; she isn’t interested in children; her motivations are oily, black, opaque. She is a dream, not necessarily of a better world, but at least of a different one. When she abandons that difference for the comfort of convention, it seems like a tragic lack of imagination—not least when the film tells us, with the usual gestures at pathos, that the final embodiment of womanhood is rape and death.

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This first ran on my Patreon some years back.