In one of the first scenes of Jonathan Glazer’s latest film, Under the Skin, Scarlett Johansson, an alien seductress with lost eyes and red lips, hits the mall to assemble her new earthly identity. She chooses a fake fur coat, hot pink sweater, acid wash jeans, and black boots, which she hobbles around in throughout the movie like a middle-school girl in her mother’s heels.
“We wanted one outfit for her and we wanted her to feel like she had it wrong. That the nuances of how she was dressed were not quite right,” Glazer told me in a Q&A after a screening of the movie last weekend in NYC. He was sporting an army green jacket, a T-shirt, and light blue jeans, not unlike the ones Johansson herself wears in the film. “We were kind of thinking of it in terms of somebody like an immigrant almost. Somebody who’s coming from a certain part of the world to live in a new part of the world and not quite hooking into those nuances.”
The film, which came out Friday, tells the story of a extraterrestrial who seduces and kills men by immersing their bodies in a shiny black ooze. Like in most movies featuring a femme fatale, fashion plays a central role. But in Under the Skin, Johansson's cheap black wig and mangy fur coat also tie into larger themes of disguise. Like the body that wears them, these garments are skins that conceal an inhuman force lurking beneath.
When Johansson picks up a 26-year-old disfigured man––a person who feels equally uncomfortable in his own skin––she begins her attempted assimilation into this strange planet, forcing herself to eat a slice of chocolate cake, which she coughs up immediately. It’s hard to be human, and my twelve-year-old self, who once wore a purple suede jacket with fringe to a pool party in Los Angeles, would certainly agree. Watching Scarlett Johansson in her hot pink sweater, so out of context amid the stone greys and forest greens of the Scottish countryside, brought back memories of first learning how to dress. “The pink jumper was important,” Glazer said. “We wanted it to feel, again, so incongruous to the landscape.”
In the opening scene of the movie, we see Johansson's silhouette against a blinding white screen, dressing herself in the clothes of a woman who is either dead or unconscious. She finds a single ant on the woman’s lifeless body, lifts it onto her finger, and stares it down with intrigue. “Like an insect on the wrong continent.” Glazer said, “that was the way we thought of how she was dressed.”
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Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin. Photo courtesy of A24 Films
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“We wanted one outfit for her and we wanted her to feel like she had it wrong. That the nuances of how she was dressed were not quite right,” Glazer told me in a Q&A after a screening of the movie last weekend in NYC. He was sporting an army green jacket, a T-shirt, and light blue jeans, not unlike the ones Johansson herself wears in the film. “We were kind of thinking of it in terms of somebody like an immigrant almost. Somebody who’s coming from a certain part of the world to live in a new part of the world and not quite hooking into those nuances.”
The film, which came out Friday, tells the story of a extraterrestrial who seduces and kills men by immersing their bodies in a shiny black ooze. Like in most movies featuring a femme fatale, fashion plays a central role. But in Under the Skin, Johansson's cheap black wig and mangy fur coat also tie into larger themes of disguise. Like the body that wears them, these garments are skins that conceal an inhuman force lurking beneath.
When Johansson picks up a 26-year-old disfigured man––a person who feels equally uncomfortable in his own skin––she begins her attempted assimilation into this strange planet, forcing herself to eat a slice of chocolate cake, which she coughs up immediately. It’s hard to be human, and my twelve-year-old self, who once wore a purple suede jacket with fringe to a pool party in Los Angeles, would certainly agree. Watching Scarlett Johansson in her hot pink sweater, so out of context amid the stone greys and forest greens of the Scottish countryside, brought back memories of first learning how to dress. “The pink jumper was important,” Glazer said. “We wanted it to feel, again, so incongruous to the landscape.”
In the opening scene of the movie, we see Johansson's silhouette against a blinding white screen, dressing herself in the clothes of a woman who is either dead or unconscious. She finds a single ant on the woman’s lifeless body, lifts it onto her finger, and stares it down with intrigue. “Like an insect on the wrong continent.” Glazer said, “that was the way we thought of how she was dressed.”
Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin. Photo courtesy of A24 Films
