Outside of Itself

 

 

Under the Skin is a movie (directed by Jonathan Glazer and starring Scarlett Johansson) about a space alien that manifests itself in Scotland in the form of a sexy empty-eyed fur-coat-wearing lady.  She goes on a predatory rampage, luring young men into her black-tar trap apartment, seducing them into literally sinking into blackness.  The artistic spookiness of the movie does not come from the plot, but from Johansson's silent, stoic yet completely devastating performance and Glazer's intense redefinition of what a sci-fi flick is supposed to be.  Glazer takes the glum run-of-the-mill alien conceit and inverts the purpose of its conception, slows down the whole apparatus to focus on moments that slowly click into one another.  The interior spaces of the film (the alien's epic strange black-nowhere apartment, the yellow-dark kitchen domesticity of a sad young man who takes the alien in, the horror-movie woodenness of a cabin in a gray wintry forest) have an inescapable sense of obsession and completion, as if Glazer is working things out of his own consciousness, merging actual memories with movie scenes until they blur into something else, a sort of escape from both memory and from genre, producing what Stanley Kubrick was always after:  a strangeness that can only be style. 

 

You feel connected to a spinal column, not a movie at times, a dreamy, closed-eyed trip through a biological landscape lit with blood-thick sunsets casting shadows across pavement and straw and brick.  And then Johansson's slightly too pallid flesh, her black hair, her Elizabeth-Taylor lips.  She is a movie star, and this movie is her total iconic turn.  She is the movie.  We follow in her tracks but never completely understand her until the last moment of the movie, a gorgeous non-shock that's still shocking.  Her skin gets pierced, and it starts to slide off in a wintry Scottish forest after she's turned from predator to prey by a backwoods rapist.  What's underneath is a skinny shiny black mannequin that seems to be the source of all silence and all noise.  The connection between that object under the flesh, and the flesh, is what Johanson locates so skillfully in the movie.  Her eyes and her expression throughout the whole ordeal release a subtle twitchy sorrow that mimics both starving animals and newborn babies without losing that ethereal oddness the movie needs to stay outside of itself.  Johansson is a genius.

 

The only victim that the alien allows to escape in Under the Skin is played by Adam Pearson.  The character is a lonely, sexually inexperienced man with facial neurofibromatosis.  Pearson's face is a constellation of tumors, and it's Glazer's triumph here that he did not hire an actor without a disability to portray someone with a disability.  The deformity is real, and Pearson's way of using his disability to increase the movie's meaning and atmosphere is to remain himself while also finding a way to connect with Johanson's monster.  A new kind of beauty corresponds from that telepathy.  The alien recognizes herself when she understands that this man is not like all of the other lonely guys she picks up in bars.  He's struggling with something that she struggles with without knowing it:  their shared loneliness reaches beyond sex and seduction into a realm of understanding.  Pearson plays the part without one shred of ego or self-pity.  He's there, himself.  If Glazer would have hired an actor without a disability, the prosthetics would have been the meaning here.  We would have been aware of the phoniness and in awe of the audacity.  With Pearson's subtle, grim performance, we recognize so much more.  The two "aliens" find a way to connect outside of ability/disability.  They are both wandering the earth in search of an escape that can only happen when people close their eyes and rethink every thought they've ever thought. 

 



Mashed Potatoes

 

 

Watched Close Encounter of the Third Kind last night, and was shocked by its elegance and adroitness.  It's one of those movies that was built to last, and the pleasure of watching it starts from scene one and never lets up until the final flotilla of UFOs graces the skies above Devil's Tower.  What really is inspiring, though, outside of the whole sci-fi Utopian bliss, is the outsider art narrative involved.  A crew of souls who have witnessed UFOs in the flesh become overnight aesthetes, and their unending drive to create is what churns the movie's narrative forward.  Richard Dreyfuss' Roy Neary is the major case in point here.  An electrical lineman from Muncie, Indiana, he becomes so obsessed after his initial close encounter that he uses whatever material is at hand (from mashed potatoes to dirt from his backyard) to produce a monumental sculpture in his suburban living room in tribute to where he has to go.  He is a visionary by accident, and yet his burning need to make something out of whatever he has in his vicinity is inspiring in a way most documentary and fictional depictions of outsider (or insider for that matter) artists aren't.  His thoughts in being creative are not connected to museums, fame, or even self improvement.  His need to make something comes from his need to figure shit out, and even then the "figuring shit out" part takes a backseat to that simple, guttural urge to turn his home and his life into an art project his family, neighors, and even he himself just can't understand. 

 

That dedication reminds me of Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, Henry Darger's Realms of the Unreal, and Raymond Thunder-Sky's Destruction/Construction vortex.  Roy does not have his eye on the prize, other than trying to figure out how to get what it inside his head outside of it.  There's no relinquishing that need outside of searching for chicken wire and shrubbery in his backyard to complete his masterpiece.

 

When he stumbles on the connection between what he could not not himself from doing, and the origin of his quest, in a TV news report, there's not a lot of fanfare or messing around.  He pursues the next phase.  The function of his art was to get somewhere outside of what art can do.  I think that's truly one of the best descriptions of "outsider art" and just plain old "art."  You have to make something so you can escape it, and then find what you are truly after.