Loving the alien: introduction to dossier on Under the Skin

摘要

The five essays included in this dossier began as papers on two panels—one specifically focused on the film Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013, UK) and the other on the body politics of Scarlett Johansson in her recent films—presented at the 2015 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Montreal. Under the Skin had generated considerable cinephilic attention and critical lauds[1] [ open notes in new window ] since its theatrical release almost exactly one year prior to the conference, in no small part because it is a “difficult” film. For the spectator, the film provokes such questions as, “What is going on?” and, by the film’s end, “What on earth have I just seen and heard?” The pleasures of the film (though some audiences surely found the film’s inexplicability to be maddening and dis pleasurable) are dual: the excitement of a largely new cinematic style and the attendant experience of disorientation.[2] These papers engage in the pleasures of attempting to puzzle the film out, through different lenses of analysis.