Antichrist in Translation: UNDER THE SKIN, HABIT

Showing off scars, from top: Under the Skin, Habit

Under the Skin (2014), the new slick dark green opus from Brian Birth Glazer, is a film that links up panic attacks before and after itself (as seen by you, the viewer) and signals the future of cinema horror or science fiction as less about acting and thrills and more about the brain dissolving itself in a pool of black oil in the middle of a dark forlorn forest wondering as it fades how it hears the rain and sizzle without ears. It's 2014's first official transhumanist off-world chance to begin again --the Blade Runner for the 22nd century -- at that stage of post-modern social decay where the screen is as permeable as a jet black oil-filled swimming pool surface and anyone can dive in, not just a Cocteau Orphee, not just Shauna Macdonald in The Descent (the last UK horror film this good). Just don't expect to climb out in the same skin you wore when you dove or were sucked in.

I know how it is, bro. I began the weekend with a terrible panic attack as my whole world crashed down around me in hailstorms of at-work red tape hot potatoes, allergies, depression, anxiety. When my girl wanted to go out to the movies, my blood ran cold and I shook like the gallows pole was sliding up til she tossed a half-Xanax on the floor and like a good dog I went scrambling and so we caught the late show of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin down at the BAM and wandering back from it around midnight, through half-deserted and strangely-lit Good Friday-empty Brooklyn streets in a haze of alienated liquid light reflection, stale popcorn nausea and post-half Xanax glow wobbliness, we knew something weird had happened, to us, to film, to Brooklyn. I admit it I couldn't quite get past the feeling Glazer's film was more of a video art installation swerving towards an And then the Darkness detour than an actual movie. Instead of a flow there is, buried in mossy 'membrances of Basil Twist-y underwater shirt twirlings, the sense of drowning in place -- the darkness of the theater swallowing me up - even as we floated back home up Flatbush back to the smoky din, the paranoid terror red hot potato Poe-level paranoia waiting, unabashed, I felt half-digested.

Then, I realized where my paranoid terror was coming from. It was related to rewatching all six seasons of Mad Men in prep for the new and final season and realizing I'd mixed up Don Draper's forced hiatus from Sterling Cooper with my own work woes. I can't tell where the TV ends and my life begins anymore. I'm realizing I'm already half-sunk into the black oil image. When things get too intense at home, by which I mean onscreen, I move to the kitchen to fix a drink or go to the bathroom and repeat to myself, "it's only a movie, it's only a movie - I'm 'here.'" To our pets we at home must look often like statues, frozen in seated positions on the couch, before the glowing square, awaiting our orders....

But away from the safety zone, the world is cold, dark, harsh: Glazer lures us into a dark and alien theater on the power of Birth and the sexual allure of Scarlett Johansson. Set mostly in and around the dark shroud of Glasgow, Skin is rich with bleakly beautiful panoramas of bowling alleys, cobblestone streets with sad pubs, panic attack strobe dance clubs, drenching rain over misty mountain moors and lashing surf rolling and crashing down in fast accelerations on a family at play (at first), sucking them all into their presumed deaths in a chain of failed rescues, sans suspenseful music or any indication they've drowned, leaving only a screaming infant behind, a sequence so harrowingly existential Herzog-level dark that it kind of crawled inside my stomach like a nightmare I had as a child and suddenly all the layers of assurance and support that nothing bad can happen to an infant onscreen is swept up and away with nary a sympathetic string to let us know that the filmmakers too are horrified rather than mountain-level indifferent. We're not given any indication anyone cares, and it's chilling. And there's also working class yobbos, slang as indecipherable as an alien tongue setting up a class divide against Scarlett's posh Londoner accent and damn I get back to that infant. How do you get back to a film's familiar 'Mars needs Men'-style plot (the rural UK-set Devil Girl From Mars coming instantly to mind) after seeing that poor bereft toddler screaming, abandoned in the primordial surf as the sun sets down around him like an evil shroud? This poor kid's screams hang like a torture-tricked sucker punch cheap shot over the remainder of the film --until the sheer weirdness of the deformed boy pick-up throws us for yet another mickey. Whole reels of what the fuck seem to have been edited out, though based on our familiarity with films like La Femme Nikita and The Man Who Fell to Earth we can deduce those missing pieces, but why should we have to if it's only so Scarlett can suddenly turn compassionate Ann Bancroft at the Lynchian epidermal symbolism carnivale? I'm not an animal! See me! Feel me! Touch me! I'm dreaming. Take the shot, Miss Moneypenny, Glasgow is for drunks and junkie loo divers but too dangerous even for a black oil seductresses. Run, (into) forest! Not that one!

That's the problem with this film though I respect others who love it - lord knows I would have followed alien Scarlett J. anywhere, even over to the commercial multiplex wherein she's seducing Captain America and kicking ass instead of playing Venus Flytrap to some juicy soccer hooligans. It's strange and scary but she seems to have very little real power and decays in ways that make us hope Lars Von Trier is waiting in the wings to snatch her from the Kubrick coldness and douse her in the Charlotte Gainsbourg womb of old testament Griffith mortality instead of the unsettling idea that human males might be collectively more terrifying than any carnivorous alien sexually hypnotic prowler. Still, I saw some things I don't usually get to see at the movies - things so weird they're like the dark rural cousin to Matthew Barney's Cremaster. But I guess I'm on the fence (after one viewing) as to whether this is a real movie, a work of staggering foresight and genius that will one day be regarded as the 2001 of our era, or just a long experimental hot mess. Then again, I've seen 2001 and thought it was just a long experimental hot mess before. It took awhile.

The string of previews BAM showed before the film included something for Locke, which is set entirely inside Tom Hardy's car in real time as he talks on the Bluetooth. A whole hour and a half no doubt of artsy glistening street lamp reflections on rainy dark streets looking like luminous watercolors dripped on a black canvas whilst techno throbs hypnotically and family members and work acquaintances shout their panicked exposition at him via Siri's surreptitious digital strands and signals and strings. Is this preview meant to prepare us for the endless driving shots and slow loop to nowhere repetitions of Under the Skin? It seemed an ill omen. I felt the whole of Under the Skin was trying to escape that Locke, the idea that if you want a real movie that does real things you need to stay home - movies are now about big screen compositions set within cars and the minds of predators --they don't expand your horizons but shrink them until they grab you by the neck like a dominatrix dog collar and pull til you're purple. The next stage will be where you spend your ten dollars just to sit in your car and think about what the movie you paid to see might look and sound like if it was ever made, while you drive around. Dig, the movie is you, mate! Ten dollars!

Locke 

Another problem: what's with the mean male handler (Jeremy McWilliams) with the motorcycle humpsuit? There's a kind of icky chauvinist undercurrent--like male filmmakers aren't comfortable with castrating Venusians unless there's a man in charge (see my sizzling expose of cinema's pimps both before and behind the lens) and with Scarlett's voluptuous body stripped to black bra and skintight black jeans she becomes the whole show, just her and the black box rooms with the wet floors --so we really don't give a shit about this handler with his smug countenance. Ain't right. The first film of this ilk that transcends the pimp factor head on and smashes it -- Daughters of Darkness -- the most recent -- Neil  Jordan's Byzantium!

All that aside, Under the Skin tries hard to puncture some hidden and vital vein in our culture, the way any sense of a dislocated universal all-seeing perception dissolves in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere; Scarlett drives slowly trying to lure into her SUV figures of hunched over men, pummeling their way on foot through the darkness, shopping or working long after normal people go to sleep, for good reason, and Scotland especially seems as abandoned as some lifeless corner of the galaxy. From the darkness of an experimental intro that's just drones and a pinpoint of light, onwards to the rainy woodsy finish, it's hard to get a straight bead on anything. We're used to that pinpoint of light becoming a tunnel, but it's not going to be so easy. Aside from 'in Scotland' we never know where we are, except that we're treading the line between modernist ambiguity and hedging indecisiveness. In Glazer's debut, the Kubrickian Birth, we had a real soul in Nicole Kidman, beautiful with her Rosemary buzz cut and Anne Heche a brassy Lady Macbeth that colored the painting of our fear. It was more Kubrick than Eyes Wide Shut on some level, but still it lacked the feeling of planetary orbit of The Shining and 2001 -- films where you can actually feel the world turning below the feet of the Steadicam operator, and your own seat, the orbit of the Earth spinning around the sun and the longer orbit of the sun around the lip of it's galaxy as the universe expands outwards, and how one orbit --the film--and the other--your head-- meet and eclipse each other until both disappear, the sense that any kind of stasis or stillness is an illusion. Under the Skin has only one decaying orbit, and lots of flashy editing tracks and scars are displayed out from under its sleeve, including an extended melange of overlapping images through which Johansson's strange and lovely face gradually appears, but when the charm's unwound there's nowhere to go but towards the macroscope finality ala the end of Easy Rider. It's the kind of film that depends on Wikipedia and summations of the original source novel for sense. My GF read them to me afterwards but I was sick off too much stale popcorn, and was coming down off a doggie Xanax, and the terrors of bureaucratic power finally besting me am der werkhaus. My weekend was ruined! At any rate, I appreciate the hypertextual angle - a film that needs a drive or walk to and from itself, and also the internet to explain the source novel demands to be judged accordingly, thereto...

Before that, there was Larry Fessenden's low budget Habit (Netflixed after admiring his You're Next) in post-Blank Generation style and Liquid Sky content, Fessenden wears all the hats and stars, as Sam, a bartender and witty drunk from the era of the 90s;  I drank the same way, at the same time, in his same neighborhood - (he bartends at the Hat, the great Mexican restaurant in the LES with the with the super strong margaritas --they'd give them to you in plastic cups for take-out!!!) I think I've even used his great line about committing suicide on the installment plan before. And with his wild hair and missing front teeth Fessenden is a great shaggy antihero, one of those where intellect and the ability to succinctly share one's inner feelings is not the mark of a square nor missing teeth the mark of a working class yobbo. He must have been really drinking cuz he's amazing. And there's some really great drinking scenes, where concerns about his girlfriend Anna (Meredith Snaider) and her habit of sucking his blood during sex come out organic and low key as any normal conversation, neither forcedly so or otherwise and she doesn't need a pimp to wave his wand and 'allow' her to feast.

Fessenden also has a great gift for framing within the tight confines of small realistically dilapidated apartments -- the Halloween party early on is a masterpiece of tight economical framing - we've been to that same party before and the low key conversational tone is also a marvel; sounding like an early Jack Nicholson but not trying to, and believably trying to navigate his way through a rapidly downward spiraling series of options! The hand job in Battery Park with Anna was one of the hotter sex scenes I've witnessed in some time, too, for being so sudden, realistic, intense, out of left field, punk rock, real - exciting --it left me bleeding psychic energy from out my limp imprisoned genital matrix in a way I've not been bled since Lydia Lunch in Kern's Submit to Me Now!

All that said, there's still the issue of the horror, the weakest element of this otherwise strong and moving film. The vamp fangs are clearly the two dollar plastic variety and while that could have worked --like if he was too drunk to tell if she's just joking or really trying to bite him -- plastic or real - etc., they play it straight and by then the film's run on kind of long, there's still no denying this is a significant and impressive low budget work; if the climax is a let-down it's only because the rest of it is so much better than it has any right to be.

The main issue with both these femme fatales of course is the weird dichotomies - Scarlett rocks the posh accent but dresses like a waterfront Lars Von Trier prostitute, and why is her spaceship an SUV? And as vamp Anna, Meredith Snaider is too short to be scary; I would have liked to see her taller, or more mature, played by a real gravitas-bearing actress who somehow seemed separate from the murky twentysomething slacker low-key characters in the film, none of whom seem to emerge from the murk to become any archetypal vampire types (the one kid tries to be a Van Helsing rescuer of sorts but it never pans out though he does get in a great stream-of-babblelogue about the real vampire being all around us in the choking overreach of society and popular culture). So in the end it's not as effective as a vampire or horror film but does work as an authentically booze-engulfed LES twentysomething denizen depiction, wherein the sense of world-weary isolation, the cultural vampire metaphor, works.

The reverse is perhaps true for Under the Skin, which has a few striking visuals involving black goo (are the aliens merely tar babies drawn from this murk, as in they're all one giant amoeba that occasionally splits off and dons a pelt like a wolf in sheep clothing?) and in one climactic shot we're able to realize the way even the most horrifying sight can blend in perfectly with twisting sunless old growth forest. Critics have noted the way Earth becomes so easily alien and terrifying through Scarlett's eyes, and how inherently alien she looks to begin with, and the weird similarities between these alien seduction / immersions and the reality of reported alien abductions, and the similarity between these aliens and the weird eye thing in Liquid Sky. While I get all that I'm still not convinced. Were my expectations too high? I wasn't high at all... just poisoned by panic... was that it?

Days later I'm still thinking about it, and the film did help strangeify that long walk uphill from BAM to our Park Slope digs on a late night Good Friday, half the locals seemingly gone upstate to visit relatives for Easter, leaving the neighborhood feeling very abandoned and surreal like an alien world. I guess, that's the best movies can do if they want to be both artsy and get us to not wait for video. To get us to trek out there into the dark foreboding night and pay over ten bucks to spend a couple hours parked next to strangers, our purse and coat pockets easily accessible to bed bugs and junkie fingers, the film has to seamlessly link up to all those things, to forge a doorway between our lives, where we are inside our own skins and their outer furs, wherein our seeing the film, and the film itself, become merged. If a film can't make the walk home resonate through a different pair of eyes than the ones we came in with, then why did we ever leave the safety of our homes to begin with? Wherein films of the past, like Habit, can link up to our memories of the 90s rather than our dreadful 20's tomorrows, and trekking to the neighborhood video store in the wearying sunshine of a Sunday used to help create some kind of anticipatory context, some ceremony, even for old favorites, all that is forgotten in favor of Netflix, the delivery system that sluggens down to a slowmo swim the last vestiges of our impetus to move through the tar pit black quicksand stasis of reality in pursuit of an escape. One day maybe soon we won't even need our own memories, our own darkness, a seat, speakers, ears, or the screens in our retinae. We'll be the viewer and the viewed in one looping orbital motion -the entirety of our senses transferred onto a stack of DVDs on a dusty shelf, and hopefully none of them, not ever, will be Transcendence.