This just might get under your skin

I'm not sure I have the words in which to describe the art house science fiction/horror film Under the Skin, but try I must for the film was a substantial experience for me.

Directed by the British Jonathan Glazer (of Sexy Beast fame), Under tracks the activities of an alien named Laura, played superbly by Scarlett Johansson, as she drives through the streets of a very working class Glasgow, picking up men in her van, taking them home and then consuming them, or devouring them sexually. The men are shown to sink into a dark pool on which Laura walks.

That's it, it's when we see Laura walk on water, we know she isn't human, i.e. not human in the sense we know humans to be.

Laura goes about the business of seduction in a disinterested way; she isn't titillated, or aroused; she is simply curious. While Laura prattles away a series of questions to her male victims, what's their name? Where are they headed? Where are they from? Are they single? the males, mostly un-literate, poor, into drugs and slightly thuggish, are mesmerised by her attention to them. These aren't men that attractive, London-accented young women would spare a first look at. The film seeks to jolt the sexual vanities of men out of their complacencies.

The prospect of having sex with Laura overrides the instinct for self-preservation, or benumbs the man to the fact that they are drowning in a nefarious cesspool while Laura, stripping herself off clothing, walks away from them. The men who drown are the proverbial donkeys who, lured by the shiny carrot of promise, would walk into their very deaths.

But one has to keep in mind that Laura isn't preying on the genteel; she's careful in her choice of slum dwellers. They won't be missed; their disappearance won't be an anomaly.

The film is also about Laura herself; Unlike other movie extraterrestrials, Laura looks remarkably like a human female and we are not given any distinct signs of her alienness. We, however, get ample evidence of her alienation from the sliver of earth in which she roams. The streets and the occasional club, the inside of a home, appear as they would to her eyes. They zip past us and remain mostly in a blur, the color of a day-old bruise on human skin. Means that nothing holds Laura's attention.

She picks up a disfigured man who is on his way to the grocery store at night; he interests her. The encounter proves to be transformative, for in the remaining part of the film Laura seems less alienated and more in a catatonic state of existence. She quits eating men; she tries to have real sexual intercourse with a kind male but runs away upon discovering that a crucial part of the female human anatomy, the genitalia, is missing from her nether regions.

The film ends on a most poignantly tragic of notes: a peeling off of Laura's skin reveals the dark slithery entity that she is under the human skin. She is set on fire and the last interlude is a depressingly violent one for Laura, yet it's the one time when Laura is seen to be riveted to something--the face of her temporary human body. As Laura holds up the face for viewing, she twitches with emotions that tell us that she has got attached to her skin.

I felt deeply sorry at the disintegration of Laura, into a pile of ashy substance.

Science Fiction

Primer (released in 2004) is Shane Carruth's first feature film.

The story goes thus: Two young inventors, Aaron and Abe have a high-tech start-up. They project normal science-geek personas onto the world, but behind their rapid-fire science talk, issued with an air of cool authority, they hide their real invention, which is an anti-gravity device.

The device is conceived as an aid for aviation, but it turns out, Frankenstein-style, into something else--a time machine.

Carruth's arch concern: the endurance of personal identity despite breaks in the thread of consciousness.

Are we Victorians?

According to William Gibson, in many ways we are:

In my lifetime I’ve been able to watch completely different narratives of history emerge. The history now of what World War II was about and how it actually took place is radically different from the history I was taught in elementary school. If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they’re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn’t think of themselves as sexually repressed, and they didn’t think of themselves as racist. They didn’t think of themselves as colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation. 

Of course, we might be Victorians, too.

Gibsonism

In a recent Paris Review interview, novelist William Gibson says the following about his craft:

No. I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list—the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I’m writing a novel, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.

The Age of Miracles

There is a reason why Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel The Age of Miracles is scheduled to be released on June 21 (2012).

June 21 is the longest day of the year and the novel, an apocalyptic meditation on the end of the world, predicts that in the aftermath of massive earthquakes that shook Japan on March 11, 2011, the earth will be experiencing slower rotations and 48+ hour days.

The scientific rationale is as follows:

We now know that the massive earthquake that struck that country on 11 March shifted the planet inches on its axis, shortening the earth's day by a fraction of a second. In The Age of Miracles, which is told through the voice of a 10-year-old Californian girl named Julia, an earthquake shakes the planet but causes the opposite effect [...] The earth's rotation slows and days lengthen, first by six minutes, then 12, then 24. As the phenomenon – known as "the slowing" – takes hold, days stretch to 48 hours, and gravity weakens, with birds ceasing to fly and astronauts stranded far from earth.

Maureen Dowd puts Thompson's novel in an emergent literary tradition called "cosmophobia," which is literally a fear caused by a conviction that a cosmic disaster--like collision of stars--is imminent.

But, as Dowd suggests, voicing the skepticism of scientists David Morrison (Senior Scientist at NASA), cosmophobia is just another largely imaginary fear which isn't going to materialize into reality anytime soon, but will generate money for those who pedal it successfully.

Indeed Thompson's novel has struck a pot of gold in both the U.S. and Western Europe, and has fetched her a pre-release advance of 1 million dollars.