/ Liao Hongfei
Jonathan Glazer (Jonathan Glazer) The science fiction thriller "Under the Skin" released earlier this year is adapted from Michael Faber's The novel of the same name tells a story about temptation with Scarlett Johansson as the heroine. Scotland's bleak sky, gloomy sky, and silent snow-capped mountains and forests are all suitable to exaggerate a mysterious and alienated atmosphere, and bring us into a world in the eyes of a different kind. No one knows when the alien played by Scarlett came, and the film never explained her purpose of coming. It seems that all she did was just to seduce men on earth. She drove a small truck on the street, searching everywhere like a hunter for men who could be tempted, and after she succeeded, she led him to a hidden house, in which she undressed and led the naked men into transparent step by step. Mysterious abyss, where the men’s bones and blood were drained until a skin sac was left. However, when she tried to seduce a man with an extremely ugly appearance, everything reversed. She seems to have discovered and appreciated her charm for the first time, gradually becoming like a human, and even bravely tasting human food. The hunter eventually became a prey. She was chased by forest loggers and almost raped. Finally, she was burned to death on the snow-white glade by gasoline.
Femininity
At the beginning of the movie, we heard a kind of intermittent surrealistic babble, accompanied by piercing strange noises, the circular patterns expanded, joined, and contracted, and finally revealed the heroine's pupils. This heterogeneous world and heterogeneous gaze are also reflected in Scarlett’s subjective perspective when driving on the street to search for prey: shaking, blurry, and distorted. This is reminiscent of Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" (Taxi Driver, 1976), in which the male protagonist wanders the dirty and sinful streets of New York at midnight due to the trauma of the Vietnam War and the effects of alcohol. Above, I also see the world from such a swaying, distorted and fuzzy subjective perspective. Unlike Scorsese's movies, the heroine of "Under the Skin" is not a real human being. She is an imitation of women, a simulation of humans, and an assembled femininity: the fairness of beautiful women. Skin, constantly applying lipstick, graceful posture and contemplative eyes. All in order to perform the task of temptation perfectly. "Because a woman who is not a woman, a woman who moves in the symbol, can reach the pinnacle of temptation better than a woman who has been proved by gender. She can exert an unambiguous charm by herself, because she is more sexy at this time. It is more tempting. When the true gender is revealed, this charm is lost." (On Temptation, pp.19-20.) What really tempts people has nothing to do with true gender, but just a kind of The assembled femininity, it is a pure surface, there is nothing behind it.
If we don't understand this, we can't understand why the seductive story in the movie "Mr. Butterfly". The women played by Zun Long successfully assembled a gentle oriental femininity through different costumes and performances to women, which deeply attracted the French diplomat. The tempted object cannot face the truth directly. "Temptation is the solution to the mystery, and the secret does not need to be solved. The secret to be solved and the truth to be revealed is a matter of sexual desire." (ibid., p.122.) Behind the surface of the temptation is more false than false The thing is the emptiness that cannot be acknowledged or looked directly at, or the original traumatic scene of psychoanalysis. Diplomats can accept that they are seduced by a female spy, but cannot accept that this is not a female spy at all, not a woman at all; in the same way, the lumberjack chasing and wanting to commit rape is tearing Scarlett’s man. After the skin, what I saw was something indescribable: a dark, inhuman body. It was indescribable and could not distinguish between organs and tissues. It was not even a human, let alone a woman? “Temptation is a game, and gender is a function. Temptation belongs to the category of rituel, gender and sexual desire belong to the category of nature. What women and men oppose each other are these two fundamental forms, not A certain biological difference, or natural competition for power.” (Ibid., pp.33-34)
Game
Temptation is a game, and sexual desire is production. Temptation is to production what woman is to man. "The only irresistible power of femininity is the reverse power of temptation. This power is nothing in itself, nothing of itself, it only reduces the power of production. And it always reduces the power of production. (Ibid. p. 23.) A man pursues a woman just for production: an emotional relationship? Or a child?... The lumberjack must have been holding back in the deserted forest for a long time, when he first met Scarlett in the woods Because of the inertia of ethics and morality, he behaved very friendly. However, the flow of desire finally drove him to break through the shackles of morality and law, and approaching the hut where the heroine rests was intended to be violent. Desire, as Deleuze said, It is a desire-machine. The desire as a machine is always seeking new production links, constantly encountering and combining with external heterogeneous factors, and forming production. "Production is to compulsorily combine things in other sexual categories. To materialize things in the category of secrets and temptations. Temptation is the opposite of production everywhere and at all times. The temptation grabs something from the scope of the visible, and the production puts everything in broad daylight, whether it is the production of objects or the production of numbers and concepts. "(Ibid., pp.55-56.)
However, temptation has no purpose different from its own purpose. The purpose of temptation is merely temptation. Don’t ask what the meaning of temptation is, because it opposes meaning, and it happens that “this is The inner power of temptation, it extracts everything from truth, puts it into the game, into the pure game of appearance. In the game, it frustrated all the systems of meaning and power in a blink of an eye: let the appearance revolve around itself, let the body play in the appearance, not as the depths of desire-but all appearances are reversible- —On this sole level, all systems are fragile and vulnerable — meaning is only vulnerable to attacks in witchcraft. "(Ibid., pp.12-13.) Scarlett lures the men into the dark hut, not to have sex with them. The ground there can instantly turn into a mysterious transparent liquid, and the more men are in it. The deeper the sinking, the eventually when the woman is out of reach, she also turns into a skin with no depth.
Mirror
Temptation is a pure surface, so it can reverse itself, like a mirror. "Temptation is something that can be reversed immediately, and its reversibility is composed of the challenges it provokes and its self-destructive secrets." (Ibid., p.122.) The reversal of the movie story occurs when Scarlett encounters an ugly man Time. The ugly man is the most tempted person, because he is easily tempted, so for Scarlett he has become the most tempting person. "In temptation, the active and passive positions are equal. The subject or the object is the same inside or outside: it plays a game on two slopes, and there is no boundary between the two slopes. This is true for anyone, if others are not If someone tempts, then he can’t seduce other people.” (Ibid.) Ugly, weak, ignorant... can all cause temptation to happen. "Temptation is to make people vulnerable. Temptation is to make people exhausted. We seduce others through our own fragility, and never through powerful power or symbols. We use this fragility in temptation, which is also giving Temptation is a powerful thing.” (Ibid., p.125.) For example, in the AV of the island country, the heroine in the island country often plays as a weak female teacher, or is tied up with a rope, calling "helplessly" Butterflies, so as to further strengthen the desire of the seduced.
Among all the forms of temptation, the temptation of eyes is the purest temptation. Baudrillard said: "The temptation of the eyes. The most direct and pure temptation. There is no need for the temptation of words. Only the eyes are intertwined in a two-person duel, a kind of instant entanglement, without the knowledge of others, and their Discourse: a static and silent excitement of plain charm. When the beautiful tension of the eyes disentangles words or breaks down into caressing movements, it weakens this intensity. The entire virtual quality of the body (and its desires) is reduced to one The subtle moment is the tangibility of the gaze. It is like a punch line—a duel of pleasure and sensuality, and at the same time a duel that removes the flesh—the perfect pattern for the dizziness of temptation. After that, there is nothing more physical. The enjoyment is comparable to that. Those eyes are shining, but they are like they have been cast on you for a long time. These eyes are meaningless, so they are not the eyes of communication. There is no desire here, because desire is not attractive. And eyes. , It is like an accidental appearance, with its charm, and this charm is composed of pure symbols, a symbol that transcends time, a symbol of a duel between the two sides, a symbol of no depth.” In the car, Scarlett confronted the car. The most effective weapon used by men in temptation is the eyes, followed by words, and finally the body. Using gaze as a tool of temptation to bring men into the land of death, Scarlett’s heroine is just like Medusa who turns people into stone statues with gaze in Greek mythology.
In "Under the Skin", the mirror appears twice. For the first time, Scarlett walked down the stairs in a panic, saw herself in the mirror, began to touch her face, and then released the man from the dark cabin for the first time. For the second time, Scarlett was rescued by a man who really fell in love with her, and when she was taken home, she closed the door and looked in the mirror to admire her body. Here, the mirror undoubtedly has a special meaning. The mirror is the absence of depth, the abyss on the surface. "This is the strategy of seduction: it gives itself a mirror-like humble appearance, but it is an operational mirror, like Perseus' shield, and Medusa himself was very surprised. The girl will be surprised by this. Captured by a mirror, the mirror thinks of her, and analyzes her without her knowledge.” (Ibid., p.161.) If the heroine who seduces a man is like Medusa, then an ugly man is like a mirror. , Let Scarlett see her charm clearly for the first time, making her self-appreciation, narcissism, and becoming like a human being. In the discourse of psychoanalysis, the construction of human subjectivity is based on a narcissistic mirror image, and the baby learns to distinguish himself from the other in the mirror stage. "When another person is tempted, when he falls in front of the deception, he often counteracts the seducer, removes any control of the seducer, and the seducer will fall into his own trap. He has not estimated any kind of temptation. The power of reversibility. This always makes sense: the person who wants to seduce others has already experienced the charm of others.” (Ibid., p.270.) When the hunter himself transforms into a prey, his death date is The moment of transformation has become doomed; when Scarlett began to become a narcissistic human, she also lost her mission as a seducer. As a pure symbol of temptation, "She must clear herself out of this absence through non-stop games. It is precisely because of this absent secret that people can fall in love with her, and she can fall in love with herself. A mirror, behind the mirror, she is away Suicide is not far away, but she turns suicide into a staged, contrasting seduction process like anything else-she will be immortal in her glorious sphere of influence." (Ibid., p.184.) In the end, she was chased and burned to death by a logging man, which was just a sign of the ending.
View more about Under the Skin reviews
