Recommenation: UNDER THE SKIN
Book & Adaptation Back-to-Back
I saw the movie first because I love Jonathan Glazer’s work and I had just finished reading THE ZONE OF INTEREST screenplay.
The movie UNDER THE SKIN was visually stunning and spare on context. An unnamed protagonist (labeled The Female in the script and portrayed by Scarlett Johansson) traps human men. She entices her victims back to a derelict house where they sink below the floor in a trance-like state. The men don’t seem to be in pain, suspended naked in a dark liquid. We don’t realize the brutality of what is happening until one victim’s insides are harvested in an instant, leaving only their filmy skin floating like an empty plastic bag.
Despite her role in the killing, we can’t help but pull for The Female. She is only a tool in this alien operation overseen by menacing bikers, presumably also in human disguise. In one scene, the leader (labeled The Bad Man) leans up to her face and searches her eyes. She looks on with a vacant gaze. In our Eat-or-Be-Eaten reality, emotion and empathy are bad for business; costly.
When The Female tries to spare a victim, she knows her own life is forfeit. She hides in the Scottish Highlands where the hunter becomes the hunted. The Female tries to live as a human but her body—her real one—fails her. She is alien. She is alone. She is doomed. And this is when we love her most.
The 2000 novel UNDER THE SKIN by Michel Faber is social science fiction at its best. Isserly is an extraterrestrial foreign worker in the Scottish Highlands. For the last four years, she has picked up male hitchhikers in their muscular prime on the A9 highway. They are bi-ped “vodsels”—and Isslerly herself is now a bi-ped after many surgeries and amputations that make her almost appear as a native female. (Her true form would look something like a large lemur.) Mutilation has left her in constant pain but it was a price she was willing to pay. Isserly’s home planet is ecologically dead. On Earth, she is blessed with sky, sea, rain, sunsets, grassy fields, and signs of life everywhere she looks.
Unlike The Female of the loose adaptation, Isserly is petty, classist, and pitiless to the “animals” she drugs and sends underground to be processed as livestock. At the Farm, vodsels are castrated, their tongues are cut out, and they are chemically bulked up for a month before slaughter and transport back to the planet where their flesh is an expensive delicacy. Parallels to the story and our real-life factory farms are brilliant and chilling. Parallels are what make social science fiction so damn powerful.
I recommend both of these works for their differences and similarities on important themes. Glazer and Faber are two great UK storytellers molding important material in their own, intriguing way.