Under the Skin: A Transgender Work
Director Jonathan Glazer's "Under the Skin" is an abstract and vague sci-fi work with a blunt setting. The video text mixes multiple layers of meaning, but my interpretation of the film is: how to be a trans woman in a society where trans behavior is not the norm. The presentation of transgender women is obviously absent from everyday media, so we often express it in a more subtle way in art. "Under the Skin" is a work with an implicit and gender identity theme. The film uses a horrifying approach to the alienation, anxiety and reconciliation experienced as a trans woman. Under the film's allegorical inquiry into the nature of human beings, the director seems to have accidentally revealed the transgender experience.
"Skin" opens with her birth. She was not born as a child, but directly as a fully mature individual. In that sense, she had no childhood. She came directly into the world as an adult and had to learn to live like a young woman. Scarlett Johansson's character (I'll call her Amy for convenience because she doesn't have a name throughout the film) has no learning experience, she's just suddenly given the identity of a woman. She arrives like a whiteboard, as suggested by the stark white background of the nativity scene. She walks into human society alone, an alien who doesn't understand how to be human, and an individual who doesn't know what it means to be accepted as a woman. Under transgender thinking, determining one's gender identity often means death and rebirth. For many people (myself included), childhood doesn't unfold as planned, and when you're finally ready to be yourself and be a woman, you step into a world where you have to relearn. You, like Amy, were born a straight blank adult without enough basic knowledge to be a cisgender woman.
Director Glazer arranged another typical transgender group experience after "Birth" - shopping. Amy found herself in a new world, and like many trans women, she saw what other women around her were doing and tried to fit in. Glazer is using plain camera language to describe the daily scene of women trying on makeup at the counter, and Amy is learning to do the same. She dug out a basic pink top to try on lipstick. The beauty of this scene is that it combines routine and exploratory behavior. As a trans woman, the first time I went shopping for clothes, my head was a mess. At the time I picked out the clothes that fit and finished shopping as fast as I could, because it was a completely "alien" experience for me. I am facing a whole new world. A terrifying new world that I thought I should have been involved in all the time. It's a very ordinary life scene, but it captures that terrifying sense of uncertainty very clearly. The paragraph ends with Amy sitting in the car applying lipstick like she sees other women in the store. It's the first time she's learned to behave what society thinks women should do, and trans women do the same thing in order to fit in safely.
Dating in the transgender community is frankly intimidating. Violence from men surrounds every possible romantic interaction, and for both cis and trans women, there is a risk of being murdered before and after sex (which I'll get to later). The film's narrative of the "mighty predator-prey" can be read as a metaphor for the failure of a romantic relationship. The first few men she meets in this film fall prey to this dark room, disappearing out of thin air. This is the fable of the Black Widow, where men are seduced by Amy, but things get to the point of sex with disastrous consequences. In this scene setting, Glazer flips Amy into a male position. Before death, the men stopped seeing Amy as an "ordinary woman," and their fright and panic far exceeded their previous sexual desires. Amy began to hope to find real romantic relationships, rather than brief exchanges with those who were seduced by her appearance, they only further intensified her otherization and alienation to the point that she retreated back into her safe house and Relapse into doubts about self-identity. So it's no surprise that her first real relationship was with someone who was equally socially excluded because of neurofibromatosis. He was not the same as the men who had been "eaten" by Amy before, who would not have understood that she was an outcast, but he could. The ugly man's time with Amy is one of the rare tender moments in the film that contains director Glazer's boundless sympathy for those ostracized and helpless by society.
The transgender theme becomes clearer halfway through the film when the director begins showing mirrors and bodies. When Amy found herself safe in a man's home, she was finally comfortable being herself. She seemed to have found what she had been looking for here. She had a whole new understanding of her body and, for the first time, felt something outside of herself, something she had never seen before - home. The director arranged a striking scene, where Amy's beautiful body is bathed in warm lighting, and the image is filled with warm red and yellow tones instead of the usual black and gray cool colors. Her body gleamed in the room, and she walked slowly to the mirror to examine her body. She twisted her body in front of the mirror and was satisfied watching her body change shape. When she turned to look at the beautiful lines of her back, the soundtrack eased slightly. Previously, her body had been ghostly pale, but now it was filled with the soft light of the sun. It seemed like a tearful moment for Amy because she felt visceral satisfaction with how she looked. It's the same feeling that many trans women feel when they finally have the body they want. Society keeps telling us that our bodies are disgusting, to be made fun of, and not to be; these can create a great deal of self-loathing that takes years to clear. There are moments when something shines inside us, like the sun-like halo on Amy penetrating our body and mind; these moments may only last a few minutes, but in the haze and grey of a lifetime, those Sunshine moments are like the most beautiful things in the world, and Glazer captures that intense feeling.
As a trans woman, my biggest fear is that I die of my gender identity. Almost every week I hear about an attack or murder of a trans woman. These things are always on my mind whenever I go out. Will someone see me as an impostor and punish me for wanting to be who I am? Are they ruining the life I've only just begun? The final scene of "Under the Skin" shows the ending of some "unconventional" women, the aliens living under human skins experiencing pain so similar to us. Amy is burnt to death at the end of the film by a man who was going to rape her, and she is left in ashes. There is a profoundly hollow sadness to this scene. I've seen stories in the news about the reality that women like me face, but I've never experienced these emotional experiences in a movie. I don't see this as a cautionary tale, but a mirror of the horrors of the real world. This is by no means the persecution delusion of a trans woman, a trans woman who was burned to death just last month, as at the end of this movie.
Original Author: Willow Maclay
Translation: Yulia
(Self-translated, with deletions and modifications,
Original address:
http://curtsiesandhandgrenades.blogspot.com/2018/03/under-skins-transgender-allegory.html )
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