Best of 2014: Jonathan Glazer on Under the Skin

Under the Skin begins in some kind of deeper blackness, less cinema space than outer space. Perhaps it’s the same unfriendly blackness to which our protagonist will deposit her victims. A projector’s beam cuts through, and we’re looking at what appears to be the formation of an eye, listening to what sounds like the uploading of verbal nuance in infinite variety, some ultra-fast-tracked language lessons. Sound and vision—it’s alive! Alive! Or nearly so.

The “it” in question is a femme fatale of the third kind, and it’s taken control of the luscious exterior of some sacrificial lass who looks just like Scarlett Johansson. It, now she, is a long cool black widow who’s come to Scotland from another galaxy to go cruising in a big black van for hapless lusty louts, luring them to some anonymous flat where they’ll sink into some fatal ink, their bodies bloating and bursting and their flesh harvested for unspecified purposes. She hasn’t been bred or programmed for pity or compassion, but as this mysterious, singularly arresting work of science fiction-meets-quasi-anthropological experiment makes its way, she will develop something called curiosity, one of the finer but also more precarious human attributes. It can lead to discovery and empathy, but also vulnerability and danger.

The sound of a baby’s cry on some rocky beach seems to be the tipping point in our story. From here on our anti-heroine goes native begins to wonder about the world, its culture, and, in one of the film’s most humorous moments, her own body. As Mica Levi’s music—one of the best scores I’ve heard in years, its strings like agitated bees—shape the film’s sound-world into an increasingly sensitive, tenser, almost febrile place, we come to see earthly life through extraterrestrial eyes: the utter weirdness of a space heater or a television or a discotheque or kissing, or this whole eating and drinking business. I can think of few films so alienating and yet so exquisitely alert to hypothetical first impressions of what for the rest of us is just drearily ordinary life.

Jonathan Glazer

Jonathan Glazer has spent his filmmaking career loving the alien. Both of his previous features, Sexy Beast (2000) and Birth (2004), turn on the arrival of a strange and threatening visitor. In the case of Under the Skin, inspired by the less cryptic Michel Faber novel of the same name, Glazer’s visitor moves from the role of antagonist to that of protagonist in what is nearly a first-person narrative. It’s a bold, creepy notion and, it would seem, an irresistible challenge. I met with Glazer during Under the Skin’s Canadian premiere at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival and asked him about his interest in assuming the quintessential Other’s point of view.

“Making choices about what it is that she sees never stopped being exciting to me, even as years of starts and stops passed,” Glazer explains. “What does she get to experience of this world and what will it mean to her as it accumulates? Our idea in shaping the story was always that if you could understand what she saw and, latterly, how she felt, then you would find your place in this unusual story. To find that osmotic growth for her was always the bottom line.”

The project was indeed a labour of long-term love, nearly nine years in the making, yet Glazer’s perfectionism regarding filmmaking craft—those comparisons to Stanley Kubrick are not merely decorative—and the development of the script, co-written by Glazer and Walter Campbell, is shrewdly thwarted by a modus operandi designed to dismantle directorial control. The scenes which find our anti-heroine looking for men were produced by having a wigged Johansson—who’s perfect in this role, by the way—actually drive around in a van outfitted with hidden cameras and actually try to pick up random dudes off the street. The surprise and arousal of these men are real. Repurposing techniques employed by Abbas Kiarostami in Ten (2002), directorial control during these sequences was limited to what Glazer could see remotely and what he could say to Johansson via a tiny earpiece. It may sound like a gimmick, but this approach gives the film a texture that it would have otherwise lacked.

“The writing was very rigorous,” Glazer explained. “We spent a lot of time turning over ideas until they felt absolutely essential. We needed sturdy planning to allow the improvisation to flourish. Without a plan, when you go off-course you can just get lost. I wanted the film to have a clear structure but also to just find itself sometimes—and it did. Scarlett turns left and the film’s going to down that street, she turns right and it’s going down that one. It was an extremely liberating way to work, driving around in that van with all the cameras shooting simultaneously, knowing that the scene hinged on her going over to someone and making a choice in the instant. Exhilarating. I loved it. I would still be in that van, given the choice.”

The influence of Kubrick on Glazer is obvious, but Under the Skin contains more distinctive and intriguing echoes of the films of Nicolas Roeg, not only because Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) works from a similar premise, but because the radical approach to editing and perspective in Roeg’s best films invite a balance of precision and spontaneity into storytelling that Glazer seems to be aspiring to. Of course, after spending so many years conceiving of and giving birth to Under the Skin, Glazer’s eyes glaze over when the subject of precedents or influences arise. So much goes into making a movie, the countless choices and compromises, it’s hardly like Glazer spent the whole time thinking, “What would Nic do?”

“Film is a language,” Glazer says with a calm objectivity that kind of mirrors that of his film’s protagonist. “You start with the letters, working through the alphabet, and then one by one you write a sentence, then a paragraph, and then you get to the point where you’re fluent enough to write poetry.”

Glazer’s particular poetry is layered in a way that’s native to cinema, austere on the surface but dense with sensations arrived at by the collision of artifice and reality, direction and observation, fruitful collaboration and auteurist vision, exposition and mystery. There is a long, dreamlike dissolve near the film’s unforgettable ending that matches nothing else in the rest of the film, yet it is haunting, and it feels absolutely critical to the protagonist’s journey. It is perhaps the strongest evidence in favour of Glazer’s unique creative gifts—other directors would not have found it. Under the Skin will surely frustrate some. It does have a way of getting under your skin. And it is a work of eerie and cruel beauty.

       

Radiation addiction

Ever wondered what happened to that radioactive Pandora’s box that suddenly transformed Kiss Me Deadly (1955) from a terse, sordid, ultra-stylized little noir into batshit sci-fi apocalypse in the film’s final, unforgettable moments? Turns out it wound up in the trunk of a 1964 Chevy Malibu, driven by a rather peculiar scientist (Fox Harris) with only half a pair of sunglasses, some three decades later. Only now the hell-fiery whatsit has turned into a cache of alien corpses—or do I have it wrong? We first spot its/their emerald glow when said scientist is stopped by a ill-fated highway patrolman somewhere in Southern California, perhaps not too far from Kiss Me Deadly’s exploded beach, in the opening scenes of Repo Man (1984), British writer/director Alex Cox’s truly inspired, tonally singular, frequently hilarious, genre-gobbling feature debut.

What the hell is wrong with me that I hadn’t seen Repo Man before now? I was a little kid when it came out, but its cult status burgeoned rapidly in the months and years following its initial theatrical release. I remember it so often being showcased in the suburban Calgary video stores I would frequent. I somehow missed the appeal. Go figure. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

A film riddled with elaborate conspiracies, boggling cosmologies, rarely seen Los Angeles geographies, old cars and a trove of So-Cal hardcore soon-to-be classics, it follows one Otto (Emilio Estevez), a blank slate of a punk rocker from Huntington Beach who can’t get laid and can’t hold a stupid job long enough to save up any money, while his baby boomer burnout parents give all the family savings to some caffeinated televangelist who insists that God wants their money. Otto impulsively quits his gig stocking generic food items at the local grocery, making a show of shoving a fellow clerk into a pyramid of cans with the same oddball air of faux-aggression he applies to dumping a can of beer all over the floor of the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation, the small automobile repossession agency where he will soon find gainful employment legally stealing people’s cars, and getting chased and attacked by angry drivers who neglect to make their payments. Otto likes the money and he likes the thrills. He even seems to like his mentor, Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), the senior agent who manages to recruit Otto without Otto’s knowing. The job lives up to Bud’s promise, which happens to be one of this imminently quotable film’s many quotable—if often misquoted—lines: “Repo Man’s always intense.”

But is Repo Man intense? More like audacious, spastically inventive and wildly entertaining, an underground comic come to life, with an absurdly economical final act in which our hero is captured and escapes, is captured and escapes and is captured and escapes in short shrift. The film’s parade of memorable supporting characters help streamline what might otherwise seem a narrative derailed by detours: Sy Richardson’s Lite, Dick Rude’s Duke, Del Zamora and Eddie Velez’s Rodrqiguez brothers, and most especially Tracey Walter’s Miller, who outrages the other repo men with claims of John Wayne’s homosexuality and blows Otto’s mind with a philosophy centered around the universe’s “lattice of coincidence.” But Stanton is the film’s enigmatic and weary center and key emblem, a figure of bizarre resilience in Regan-era America. It remains one of this great character actor’s small handful of larger roles. It’s also probably still the most interesting use of Estevez, who is often seen in his bright white underpants. And it remains the best and most successful thing Cox has yet managed in an industry that’s never given him as big a break. 

          

Society and the Spectacles

An Allegory of the Cave for the age of conspicuous consumption? Or a genre throwback that opens one’s eyes up to little more than the director’s faux-paranoid resentment of the dismissive elite? The terrain mapped out in John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) is broad enough, and politically incoherent enough, to accommodate such seemingly incompatible readings. Its central conceit—that global power is being sneakily usurped by alien creatures Jonathan Lethem, in his excellent monograph on the film, pithily describes as “monsters from the yuppie id,” thanks to a consciousness-altering television signal that blinds us to oppressive subliminal commands and to the usurpers’ carcassy ugliness—might seem far too obvious a metaphor to be “read” at all. But among the many reasons that They Live still lives as a cult film is because that central conceit, along with the director’s peculiar approach to storytelling and social commentary, congeal into thick stew of blurred intentions, mixed conventions and gleefully dumb entertainment, hitting a sweet spot somewhere deep in the collective psyche.  

A strapping guy wearing plaid, denim, leather, a backpack and a mullet strides into Los Angeles. He’s looking for work and means business—he even has his own tools. “I believe in America,” he says, though he’s suspicious of its unions, or at least Chicanos. He’s our hero and surrogate, not an American everyman exactly—he’s played by a pro wrestler, after all, and a Canadian to boot—but a neutral, a mind-yer-own-business type, an insignificant—the credits reveal his name to be Nada, Spanish for Nothing—a guy who doesn’t rock the boat. Until the boat rocks him. Nada finds a place to sleep in an inner-city hobo campsite called Justiceville. (These days it would called Occupy Hollywood.) But while the cops barge in and tear Justiceville up, Nada begins to sniff out an underground movement with a pretty wild conspiracy theory. The revolutionaries try to alert others to their claims, but everyone, yuppie and prole alike, is too busy watching lobotomizing TV broadcasts to care. Long story short, Nada comes to see what the underground is on about. He acquires a pair of shades that look like Ray-Ban knockoffs—which look kinda funny with his worker gear—and allow him to see things as they really are: billboards and print media ordering us to OBEY, CONSUME and PROCREATE, and those carcassy creatures, called “ghouls” in the credits, who look like us without the glasses, and are assuming all positions of power and influence. Nada sees the monsters for what they really are—and Nada’s going to take action. “I’ve come here to chew gum and kick ass,” he declares. “And I’m all out of gum.” 

But first he has to kick his friend’s ass. The best/worst (but mostly best) scene in the movie, and the most wildly homoerotic: Nada, aka Rowdy Roddy Piper, tries to convince his buddy Frank (Keith David) to don the shades. Frank refuses and refuses and refuses, so… get ready to rumble! The buddies fight in an alleyway, punching, kicking, pile-driving, kneeing in the balls—for six minutes! “Put the glasses on!” Nada demands. And really, why won’t Frank just put the glasses on? Why is he so resistant? Is it because, subconsciously, he already knows, already sees the ghouls? Because the glasses are a mere prop, granting us granting permission to “see” what was always in plain sight, ie: the apparatus of ideology? Is this gloriously ridiculous movie trying to tell us something? Of course it is. But don’t take it at its word. There's more going on than even the movie itself knows. Look deeper. Look long. Seeing is believing—so long as you’re wearing the right glasses. 

Ain't no life nowhere...

The Man in question is David Bowie, extremely famous several times over by then, yet still arguably about as close to a space alien as a famous person can get. He falls to Honeyville, New Mexico, which is, strictly speaking, Earth, though it certainly seems like one of Western civilization’s weirder outposts. The film’s director is the great Nicolas Roeg, who already had a masterpiece or three under his belt (Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now), as well as some substantial industry cred and star magnetism, despite the fact that his films were audaciously adventurous with form and occasionally baffling in content. (This was the 1970s.) So don’t look too surprised if The Man Who Fell to Earth leaves you feeling a little lost in space. It is indeed far out. Some might say too far. Every time Rip Torn turns up in the film he has this look on his face that seems to say, “What the fuck am I doing here?” It’s a fair question.

Soft-spoken, elfin-bodied Thomas Jerome Newton (Bowie) turns up one day with flaming orange hair, a British passport and a handful of enormously valuable patents. He finds himself a good patent lawyer (Buck Henry) and a brilliant scientific consultant (Torn) and starts up a massive global communications corporation—but what he really wants is just water, a glass here, an ocean there. His home planet has been suffering a massive drought, his own family is dying from lack of H₂O, and he’s heard that Earth is swimming in the stuff. So he sets up shop, trying to develop a long-term project. Really, really long-term. People around him get old as it goes along. He takes up with a chambermaid (Candy Clark). He settles in, makes himself a life on Earth, develops a dependency on the booze. But does he ever really become one of us? Can he? Would he want to?

Plot and backstory are both far clearer in Walter Tevis’ eponymous source novel than they are in Roeg’s film, which was scripted by Paul Mayersberg. What Roeg seems primarily interested in with The Man Who Fell to Earth is Newton’s prolonged fish-out-of-water experience of our world, which through Newton’s eyes looks far weirder and more sinister than anything glimpsed in the brief flashbacks to Newton’s extraterrestrial, dune-traversing past. Though not quite as overtly, apocalyptically condemning a portrait of the modern materialist world as what was on display in Walkabout, the television culture, abuse of alcohol, gun accessibility, general ugliness and casual consumerism on display in this film is, in its way, pretty alienating. But then so is the insistent vagueness of the dialogue. (“What are they like, your children?” “They’re like children. Exactly like children.”) So is the poor man’s Pink Floyd soundtrack. And so is the film’s meandering nature. So much of what made Roeg’s previous films (and some of his later ones) so sensorially rich can be found in the colours, montage, sound design and inspired ellipses of The Man Who Fell to Earth—no one else could have made it. Yet it lacks the urgency, the sustained energy and, more satirical than genuinely insightful, the depth those other films have. Still very much worth a visit, this Man may leave you longing for other, warmer planets. 

While they were sleeping...

An hour before midday in the village of Midwich everyone went to sleep. People slumped over desks, tables, steering wheels and sinks, livestock lay in fields, limbs splayed, a woman was facedown in a cart full of cabbage, a head among heads, and a tractor drove in circles until it hit a tree. The military’s brought in to investigate and they too fall asleep. A plane is sent in to get a better view, and the plane goes down in a ball of fire. Then, some hours later, just as abruptly as they fell asleep, everyone wakes up (except for that most unfortunate pilot). No one knows what happened. Until two months later, when every woman of childbearing age in the village turns up pregnant. 

The opening scenes of Village of the Damned (1960) constitute a paragon of captivating economy. This fairly faithful adaptation of Wyndham Lewis’ The Midwich Cuckoos sets up its fantastic premise with chilling sobriety. Director Wolf Rilla’s coverage of each scene is clean, quick, and packed with information. Crucially, there is no music; Ron Goodwin’s score is smartly held off until we’re well into the story. Nothing in the atmosphere of this little British film eases us in; there are no genre tropes to console us; really weird shit is conveyed with realism. That’s why it’s scary. 

Then things get more interesting. Our hero, Professor Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders), probably in his early 60s, is married to Anthea (Barbara Shelley), a much younger woman. They seem very much in love. They have no children, to their great sadness. Anthea’s pregnancy comes as a miracle. Which is of course the problem. It is a miracle, or at least a phenomenon of elusive origin, just like the town’s newly pregnant teenage virgin, who must think she’s either mothering the Second Coming or some Satanic goblin. All these women appear to have gotten knocked up during that attack of collective sleeping sickness. They all give birth at the same time, far ahead of schedule, to eerily perfect little Aryan children with strange eyes. And the children grow with supernatural velocity, and they’re smart as whips. And they’re not friendly. And, it would seem, they’re telepathic. 

While never resorting to facile portent, Village of the Damned lets us know from the start that something deeply disconcerting is unfolding; it generates suspense by letting wonder just how it will unfold. I’m probably not spoiling much by telling you that the women of Midwich have been made the midwives of some hostile external force—without even being aware of it, they’ve been subject to a mass rape. The thing about the source novel’s title: cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, and then their offspring try to take over those nests. 

Sanders gives a performance of rare tenderness. The villagers imbue the film with a pleasing authenticity. But it’s the actors who aren’t supposed to seem like real people that stand out. The kids are really creepy, especially little Martin Stephens as the Zellaby’s child. Their vehement anti-sentimentalism has often been compared to that of the titular aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and both films have been rightly read as parables for the era’s anti-Communist anxieties. But beyond these potent political metaphors there is a more terrifyingly timeless reading, something to do with the shadow side of parenting. Who are these little monsters? And how could they have possible came from us?