Coastal View News
With all of the recent chatter about a certain boat movie of
Biblical proportions that everyone seems to know and care so much about, some
other movies may have slipped under your radar. There is one about bears, several
about superheroes, and a couple of others about creepy children who may or may
not be demon possessed. Then there is a baseball movie with Kevin Costner and a
cartoon sequel. Yes indeed, there are many non-boat movies to be seen and maybe
even talked about.
But let me recommend one such movie: “Under the Skin”.
Warning: This movie is arty and weird. It is not like the superhero movies, the
creepy-kid movies, the cartoon sequels, or indeed, the boat movie. I say thank
God for that. But really I’m just letting you know.
In “Under the Skin” an alien who is fixed up to look just
like a human (Scarlett Johansson) rides around Scotland in a van picking up men
who she seduces and then kills. We have no idea what sort of alien she is, what
her motives are, or even what she is up to or how she is doing what she is
doing. Everything is as perplexing and foreign to us as our world must be to
her.
And the world certainly is perplexing and foreign to her. In
one of the first scenes of the movie, the cold and lifeless body of an
anonymous dead woman is laid out in front of the alien on the vacant floor of a
brightly backlit room. A tear falls from the dead woman’s eye. The alien reaches
down as if to wipe the tear away—as if to show compassion—but instead she scoops
up an ant that was crawling on the body and carefully examines it as if under a
microscope. The ant is what is noteworthy to her. How peculiar it must be to
her—how novel and curious.
Thus is how the alien sees the world. She has her mission,
and she knows how to carry it out. But, as is made clear through various wonderfully
executed cinematic techniques, this entity is indeed alien—she is foreign; this is not her home; she is out of place;
nothing makes sense to her. This is also true of us, the audience. Bewilderment
is something we share with the alien—that, and the skin that covers our bodies.
As time goes on the alien grows more accustomed to the human
exterior that envelops her. She maybe even starts to think human thoughts and
feel human feelings. But this is no fable about diversity or the coming
together of different peoples. “Under the Skin” is way darker and, really, just
way more nuanced and complex than that.
I’m not sure what all is going on in “Under the Skin”. There
are other movies where I’m not sure what is going on and I think it’s because
not much is really going on—it’s just that the director thinks he or she is
really smart and deep so he or she makes a movie that looks really smart and
deep but it is just pretentious and lame. “Under the Skin” is not one of those movies. A lot is going on here. But I’m just not sure,
at least at this point, what all it is.
What I can tell you is that this movie will seep in—it will get
under your skin. You will leave the theater still looking out at a strange and
unfamiliar world that you see every day but which is suddenly new, foreign, challenging
and confusing.
