Deadlights: Membranes

Permeable barriers hold a special horror for us. They render the line between the known and the unknown tangible while also obscuring what lies beneath them, leaving to our imaginations the task of picturing their denizens and environments. The oil-black liquid into which Scarlett Johansson's nameless character lures a series of unsuspecting men in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin distills our anxiety over these barriers into a single monolithic image, a bottomless black nothing into which entire human beings can vanish without a trace, consumed by mysterious bio-machinery for purposes unknown.

In part our experience of the void is one of introspection. Confronted by nothing we're left with only ourselves to scrutinize, a foundational psychological experience of projecting one's subconscious self-image onto blank slates. The imagery underlying Glazer's void is wonderfully grotesque and ambiguous, empty skins drifting in cloudy water, conveyor belts pulling a slurry of meat and blood into some red maw or shaft. What does it mean? Is it a meditation on the role women play in humanizing their male partners? Does it relate to the masculine practice of projecting idealized personas onto women and then losing their footing once those personas inevitably collapse?

The void's meaning is left deliberately opaque, but the significance of the boundary separating its victims from their grisly fate is clear. The world we understand is a skin stretched by common agreement over irreducible chaos, our self-images reproductions of this caul in miniature. The only tools we have to decipher the world around us are incoherent instruments produced for obscure purposes by that selfsame world. When the men Johansson's character lures to their deaths sink beneath the surface of the void they are sliding into another order, another skin, an insectile structure of action and reaction as incomprehensible as their own world. 

The protagonist's programmed behavior eventually stutters and fails. She's left alone and hunted in her own personal abyss, unable to communicate with others or to take in sustenance. When in the end that world tears her open and consumes her we see for a moment that she shares her makeup with the oily black emptiness of the void, her real skin its smooth reflection. By looking inward she destroyed her ability to reflect the world back at itself as a neutral surface, revealing her own nature and thereby destroying her connection to a world of empty ritual and solipsism.