Under The Skin Film Analysis

Advertisement, Blank Slates and Sexual Pursuance
If, theoretically of course, and alien came to our planet earth, just how easy would it be for them to blend, to become invisible? Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin” explores the seemingly small mission of an alien, disguised as a beautiful woman, who’s mission it is to eliminate men who desire her for her looks. While it's intentioned as an offbeat, non-traditional sci fi horror, standing against the grain of traditional science fiction films touting the achievements of mankind scientific strength, Under the Skin manages to comment much more about mankind's failures. It’s often clashing narrative explores blank slate theories, societal expectations, and sexualization in the postmodern world.
‘Motorcycle Man’ begins the action of the film by retrieving a body from a shallow ditch beside a freeway, returning her to a blank room. It’s obvious she has been killed, and even more obvious that the man acts illegally. He handles the body as if it’s an object, showing no emotion or remorse for the woman, who in her time alive, was quite beautiful. Motorcycle Man then returns the body to the woman, who begins stripping her of her clothes, and putting them on herself. The woman acts similarly to the man, showing absolutely no emotion for the loss of the woman, and instead focuses on the mission at hand. A tear rolls down the corpse's face, but the woman once again skips over this, almost as if she’s just as incapable of reading emotions as she is in displaying them. But then, the woman is stopped. While unclasping the now naked cadavers jewelry, a small ant from the side of the freeway crawls onto the woman's hand, and this of all the inconspicuous details manages to stop her. The pause, the single instance of emotion, curiosity that is, will repeat throughout the film, and signals a defining theme of the work, as well as the postmodern theory. The woman was as blank a slate as the cold white room that surrounded her while she worked. However, almost like a newborn crawling for the first time, her experiences begin to shape her moral being. Blank slate theory is discussed as early as aristotle, where in writings ‘De Anima’ or ‘On the Soul’, he states “though actually it [the mind] is nothing until it has thought? What it thinks must be in iit just as characters may be said to be on a writing-tablet on which as yet nothing stands written.” In this context, the woman’s earliest actions indicate a classical spirit of thought as opposed to a postmodern one, as the woman