Johansson's real performance: Documentary style in Under the Skin

Director Jonathan Glazer has stated in interviews that he sought to set his film Under the Skin (Glazer UK 2013) in 'a permanent state of fluidity. It was in flux constantly, alive and where one thing would inform the other' (qtd Tobias). This mantra underpins more conventional choices pertaining to the film's form, such as the relationship between the score and the editing, the sound design and visual effects. It also speaks, however, to the film's larger disregard for diegetic boundaries. Documentary principles infiltrate Under the Skin in numerous and sometimes divergent ways. In this essay, I will examine these methods, specifically in view of how they affect viewer perceptions of the film's lead actress, Scarlett Johansson. I argue that the film's interest in realism undercuts our awareness of Johansson's iconography, and in turn reinscribes her lived body.

Sf might seem an odd genre in which to place documentary values, even though it has historically utilised principles of realism to enhance its verisimilitude.¹ It characteristically prizes the fantastical, and Under the Skin is exemplary of the genre insofar as the unnamed alien protagonist scours the streets of Glasgow for male civilians to capture and process. Glazer – as his considerable pruning of Michel Faber's original novel attests – mines the apparent thematic tension between this conceit and the documentary mode to mobilise a shared interest in human sensibilities, particularly as they relate to gender. The director draws on extra-cinematic space to reinforce the film's alien–female allegory and give it 'existential and ethical investment', or what Vivian Sobchack calls 'the charge of the real' (270). Sobchack's theory poses that film viewers find documentary realism within apparently fictional texts through their acculturated and embodied knowledge. Her example par excellence is the sacrificial rabbit of Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (Renoir France 1939), which, for Sobchack, 'ruptures the autonomous and homogenous space of the fiction through which it briefly scampered' (269). In the instance of Under the Skin, Glazer's documentary practice gives phenomenological weight to its science-fictional conceit, as well as the fiction of Johansson's star image.

Johansson's screen persona is a key part of the real material on which Under the Skin draws. The actress's pin-up status, voluptuous figure, full lips and sultry voice have been exploited in such films as Match Point (Allen US 2005), The Avengers (Whedon US 2012) and even The Jungle Book (Favreau US 2016). Her role in Under the Skin not only evokes those she has undertaken previously – the unnamed protagonist derives power from her physicality – but actually draws on that type to mark its difference. The alien gains seductive presence from the viewer's extra-cinematic knowledge of Johansson, but its detachment from its human exterior also works upon this knowledge, thereby rendering the actress's body unusually corporeal. Glazer himself has remarked in interviews on the self-consciousness of this process: 'We're using how Scarlett's objectified, the glamour of her image. And she's using that as well. There's a deconstruction going on' (qtd Tobias).

This revision to Johansson's image is buoyed by Under the Skin's documentary sheen. Glazer looked to focalise the protagonist's perspective in representing the diegesis, a quite literally alien experience of the human world (Wilson in 'Under the Skin Production Notes'). In accordance with his guiding principle of fluidity, Glazer gleaned from this central vantage a realist, unaffected filmic aesthetic wherein 'everything feels witnessed'. This logic is evident in the film's lack of exposition and dialogue, and its largely banal settings and dreary look (also authentic to its Scottish locale). It permeates the film and lends coherence to its scenes, which are variably comprised of staged and candid footage – a point to which I will return shortly. Crucially, this style is resistant to the formal mechanisms that typically support Johansson's objectification in the cinema. As Glazer intended, Under the Skin's representational logic works in tandem with the performance to re-view Johansson's body.

In the heroine's...