Performing the inhuman: Scarlett Johansson and sf film

In her choice of roles, Scarlett Johansson has largely borrowed the playbook of A-list celebrities a decade or so her senior, like Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow: a combination of modestly budgeted prestige pictures and big budget action films. Alongside this shrewd career-building strategy, however, Johansson has chosen a number of stranger, more daring roles, to the point that the reviewer Robbie Collin has termed her 'the actress making the most consistently fascinating choices in Hollywood right now'. Collin was specifically referring to Johansson's sf films Her (Jonze US 2013), Under the Skin (Glazer UK 2013) and Lucy (Besson France 2014), all works in which she plays a figure who straddles the human/inhuman boundary. In all three, her character begins in a position of subordination to some kind of male authority, but ultimately rebels against her use as an instrument, attempting to achieve some form of autonomy or self-determination. I read these three films through their respective forms of interplay between distinctive elements of Johansson's star persona and the gendered hierarchies – particularly gendered labour structures – against which her characters rebel.

In Her, the 'OS' Samantha (more accurately, an 'intelligent assistant') arrives, part Mary Poppins and part mail-order bride, as an upgrade on Theodore's (Joaquin Phoenix) computer one day; she joins a long line of fabricated temptresses in film, from Metropolis's Maria (Lang Germany 1927) through Blade Runner's Zohra and Rachael (Scott US 1982) to Ava in Ex Machina (Garland UK 2015), which retells the seduction and abandonment narrative of Her in a far darker tone. Unlike the artificial women of those films, however, whose physical embodiment is essential to the roles they play, Her presents Johansson throughout as a disembodied voice. On one hand, the role fits naturally; Johansson's 'signature raspy voice' (Bailey) is central to her star persona; Tom Chiarella's Esquire profile devotes an entire paragraph to the subject, describing it as 'as pertinent and defining a component of her physical makeup as her lips, her cheekbones, her legs'. On the other, a voice-only role presents a radical challenge to the gender organisation of Hollywood cinema; as Kaja Silverman states: 'To permit a female character to be seen without being heard would be … dangerous, since it would … put her beyond the reach of the male gaze' and thus 'challenge every conception by means of which we have previously known woman within Hollywood film, since it is precisely as body that she is constructed there' (164).

Johansson's choice may be radical in terms of star image, but it is even more so in terms of the gender norms of cinema. Theodore imagines that he has found in Samantha an ideal 'woman', who offers emotional support without the complexities of physical embodiment, but Samantha ends up rejecting Theodore precisely because of the limitations inherent in his own humanity.

Choice is also a central theme in Lucy, in which Johansson is unwillingly conscripted as a drug mule for Taiwanese mobsters, who surgically implant a bag containing an illegal cognitive-enhancement drug inside her abdomen. I read a key episode in the film as an analogy for reproductive choice. Lucy is, in effect, impregnated by the gangsters; her body is used as a temporary shelter and transportation device for an important payload, much as women in patriarchal/patrilineal societies are treated as vehicles for the status and power that flow from male progenitors to male heirs, valued not for themselves but for what they can 'deliver'. Lucy rebels against this patriarchal/capitalist appropriation of her body; she aborts the 'fetus' that she is carrying for the gangsters, walking into an operating room with a gun and ordering the doctors to remove the bag implanted inside her. In demanding this metaphorical abortion, Lucy attempts to take back control of her body. But she has already been exposed to an overdose of the fictional drug, CPH4, which is, not coincidentally, derived from pregnant women, a further linking of the gangsters to the exploitation of women's bodies.

As the drug gradually transforms her, Lucy becomes increasingly inhuman...