Consuming Desire in Under the Skin

Bibliographic Data

ID20248643
AuthorsYael Maurer (Independent Scholar, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume9
Issue2
Pages39
Publication date2020-05-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHumanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/h9020039
OpenAlexW3023708929
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited6

Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin is a Gothicized science fictional narrative about sexuality, alterity and the limits of humanity. The film’s protagonist, an alien female, passing for an attractive human, seduces unwary Scottish males, leading them to a slimy, underwater/womblike confinement where their bodies dissolve and nothing but floating skins remain. In this paper, I look at the film’s engagement with the notions of consumption, the alien as devourer trope, and the nature of the ‘other’, comparing this filmic depiction with Michael Faber’s novel on which the film is based. I examine the film’s reinvention of Faber’s novel as a more open-ended allegory of the human condition as always already ‘other’. In Faber’s novel, the alien female seduces and captures the men who are consumed and devoured by an alien race, thus providing a reversal of the human species’ treatment of animals as mere food. Glazer’s film, however, chooses to remain ambiguous about the alien female’s ‘nature’ to the very end. Thus, the film remains a more open-ended meditation about alterity, the destructive potential of sexuality, and the fear of consumption which lies at the heart of the Gothic’s interrogation of porous boundaries

Aesthetics · Alien · Allegory · Alterity · Art · Depiction · Human sexuality · Humanity · Literature · Meditation · Narrative · Nothing · Sociology · Theology · Zombie · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Gender Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Philosophy · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology

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