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Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin is a Gothicized science fictional narrative about sexuality, alterity and the limits of humanity. The film’s protagonist, an alien female, passing for an attractive human, seduces unwary Scottish males, leading them to a slimy, underwater/womblike confinement where their bodies dissolve and nothing but floating skins remain. In this paper, I look at the film’s engagement with the notions of consumption, the alien as devourer trope, and the nature of the ‘other’, comparing this filmic depiction with Michael Faber’s novel on which the film is based. I examine the film’s reinvention of Faber’s novel as a more open-ended allegory of the human condition as always already ‘other’. In Faber’s novel, the alien female seduces and captures the men who are consumed and devoured by an alien race, thus providing a reversal of the human species’ treatment of animals as mere food. Glazer’s film, however, chooses to remain ambiguous about the alien female’s ‘nature’ to the very end. Thus, the film remains a more open-ended meditation about alterity, the destructive potential of sexuality, and the fear of consumption which lies at the heart of the Gothic’s interrogation of porous boundaries.

After expressing my enthusiasm for Murray Smith’s Film, Art, and the Third Culture, I offer a critical discussion focused upon the place of the experiential-phenomenological dimension in Smith’s naturalized aesthetics. I look closely at two films, Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011) and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), in relationship to Smith’s claims about the qualia filmmakers impart to their creations and the highly specific states of mind, emotional and otherwise, that they manage to express and to evoke in viewers.

Constable examines the opening scene in Jonathan Glazer's 2014 film Under the Skin. The brief credits at the beginning of the film take the form of white lettering on a black background, culminating with the name of the star, Scarlett Johansson. For the following 22 seconds the screen remains black and the audio track silent until the appearance of a dot of white light centre screen. The dot becomes the central point of an emerging circle whose edges are partially delineated by two symmetrical curving lines of light. The score by composer Mica Levi commences with the appearance of the dot of light, its lack of recognisable melody and use of rapid tremolos of synthesised strings creating a prickling play of discordant sounds that emphasise the alien, unknown quality of the emerging form.

Osterweil takes up questions of sexuality and desire in another of the season's most debated films, Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, arguing that its narrative of the sexual awakening of an alien (who takes the irresistible form of Scarlett Johansson) represents a significant advance in the cinematic depiction of female desire in a space of freedom denied to mortal females. Under the Skin asks the big questions about what it means to be human, but its true inquiry is into femininity.

In this article, we contribute to thinking about the emergence of the face in digital culture. Building on work in the fields of art history, cinema studies, and surveillance studies, which have long established a technological interest in the human face, we move this critical discourse on by locating in contemporary popular culture, and Hollywood narrative cinema in particular, anxieties about, and play with, the face as a new kind of digital object. By studying the face as a digital object away from its primary sites of recognition - online, in CCTV imagery, in identification documents - we encounter in narrative cinema the face as a story. In particular, the recent films of Scarlett Johansson tell stories about the face as made by and in relation to digital technology, but also in relation to discourses of celebrity, whiteness, and femininity. Johansson's face is a generative filmic object with which to interrogate the normative conditions of the face in contemporary digital culture. It is her face that becomes the computer in Lucy (dir. Luc Besson, 2014), her face that is the alien black sheen of Under the Skin (dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2013), and her face that is the absent signified in her (dir. Spike Jonze, 2013). Focusing on Johansson's films enables us to think together the interface-object of celebrity in the contemporary, the technological face of digital cinema, and importantly, the face as primarily a gendered and raced technology in the making.

[Nicole Kidman] plays Anna, an upper-crust New York City woman who has, after a decade, gotten over grieving for her dead husband Sean, whose body we see as the movie opens. She's now engaged to the wealthy Joseph (Danny Huston). Oddly, they live in a huge New York City Central Park West apartment with her mother, Eleanor (Lauren Bacall), and her pregnant sister Laura (Alison Elliot) and Laura's doctor husband, Bob (Arliss Howard). On the night of their engagement party, Sean's older brother Clifford (Peter Stormare) and his wife, Clara (Anne Heche), appear to wish them well. Clara carries a gift but takes it outside and buries it, then rushes into a store to purchase another.