You Love to See It: Under the Skin

A silent observer stands on a shale beach in the north of Scotland, watching people drown. A woman is swept screaming out to sea. A wetsuit-clad swimmer pulls her desperate husband out of the surf only for the man to stagger back into the water, leaving his rescuer spent and gasping on the rocks, and join his wife. Through it all a baby sits wailing not far from the watcher, tiny form unbearably vulnerable against the sharp rocks and pounding waves, cries a metronome of terror and confusion. The watcher, played with opaque stillness by Scarlett Johansson, is as much uncomprehending as indifferent, devoid of the traits we associate with and project onto women. Her reproductive instincts drive her instead to brain the half-conscious swimmer with a rock and drag him to her van, food for the void she serves, or feeds, or supplies.

It’s a disturbing scene, the child’s cries heart-rending, the observer’s blank affect insectile and alien. The natural world is in violent motion throughout, wind roaring, waves pounding the shale, and Johansson’s stillness further separates her from any sense of the organic. That dissonance feels otherworldly at first, but as the scene grinds inexorably onward it becomes easier to see unsettling traces of the real in its cold, cruel fiction. Every day the clades and empires of human society construct, deploy, and reinforce systems of intentional neglect and butchery, killing the weak and undesirable not by violence but by directing attention elsewhere, by building worlds with no place for vulnerability.

The idea of a thinking creature motivated by instincts and values fully alien to human beings frightens not because it’s outlandish but because we live in a world fully saturated with its reality. Every day we report dutifully to work for corporations sucking the marrow out of our planet and the joy out of our lives, to police departments and army reserve offices and boardrooms where the idea that a human life is valuable in and of itself is at best tacitly ignored. We squirm watching Johansson’s character ignore a child in danger because we know our own lives in the West rest atop the suffering caused by sweatshop labor and our endless wars. Every day, we wake up in a world where a child is screaming, and it’s nobody’s job to care.