Representation of Women
Under the Skin is heavily focused on its representation of women as it aims to disregard the conventional representations of women in film. Generally, there tends to be three key female archetypes in film: the love interest/'princess', the maternal figure and the sexual female. Throughout the film, Under the Skin slowly rejects all three of them through the alien's actions. She is shown to not be built to have a conventional relationship, leaves the baby to drown on the beach and stops luring men back to the 'void'. Furthermore, despite there being a large amount of female nudity in the film, the film body is barely ever sexualised. All of these things are a complete subverting of Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory. The film also represents a sort of 'opposite rape culture', as instead of men preying on women in the night it is actually women who do that to men instead. Finally, the film also discusses the perception of beauty in society and how people only care about on the surface beauty. This is represented with the reveal of what the alien truly looks like - a black figure with no distinct features. Humans, like the people the alien picks up, don't actually care about personality only how they look and Glazer has chosen Johansson (a literal supermodel) to portray this character to get the ideology across as best as he can.
Scarlett Johansson
Scarlett Johansson is an instantly recognisable actress who over the years has become known as a 'sex symbol' in Hollywood. This film critcises the people who only care about surface beauty, which people are attracted to Johansson for. This may be the reason why she chose this role as she is fed up with people only seeing her in this way instead of as a normal human being with feelings and a personality.
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