I Would Like to See It: In My Skin

Consumption — there’s a loaded word, bridging the gap between the physical act of eating and the more abstracted capitalist act of purchasing goods and services for purposes ranging from comfort to social signaling. In Marina de Van’s In My Skin, the two concepts interpenetrate with slow, sensuous deliberation. What does an individual’s pleasure mean under capitalism? How does the sex drive conform to the demands of production and expansion? In the body of Esther (de Van stars as well as directs) the idea of consumption is at war with itself, twisting her animal motivators and social ambitions around a single point of violent torsion after a chance injury leads to a pathological fascination with self-mutilation. The film challenges the connection between personhood and the body as a larger metaphor for status, life milestones, and connection. In one scene shortly after the inciting injury, a doctor asks the off-puttingly casual Esther “are you sure it’s your leg?”

Rather than opting for simple cosmetic surgery to repair the gash in her calf, Esther becomes obsessed by it, first picking at it, then expanding it, then finally moving on to other forms of self-injury. From simple fixation she graduates to a sort of sublimated sexual ecstasy, replacing her enthusiasm for her relationship to her boyfriend — who views her behavior with frustrated lack of understanding purely as an extension of their connection and in confounding opposition to their fiscal and romantic success — and her blossoming career in corporate esearch management. During an evening of small talk with her boss and several clients, Esther stops eating and succumbs to an uncontrollable compulsion to mutilate her hand with her fork and knife under the table. If capitalism exists to enable and fuel consumption, it begs an existential question: what, ultimately, are we consuming?

Pursuit of wealth and status, working toward sexual and romantic gratification, the only real and undeniable resource you have to spend on any such things is your one frail and breakable body. When Esther locks her teeth in the meat of her wrist she’s boiling all life’s struggles down to simple oral fixation, to an infant’s bliss at finding the breast. If you’re going to spend your body in pursuit of sensation, surely the only authentic choice is to be the final architect and authority in its destruction, as well as the sole futile beneficiary of its nourishment. The film’s exquisite prosthetics and wound makeup lend a gut-wrenching realism to these scenes of cannibalistic pleasure, prefiguring the similar ecstatic autophagia of Julia Ducournau’s RAW, and as Esther’s breakdown progresses she is lit and framed in increasingly beatific fashion. She is beautiful for no one but herself, and if the line of thinking is akin to solipsism, it is no less true and devastating for it.