Under The Skin review by Lauren Cates : Pop Culture Leftovers

Under The Skin review by Lauren Cates

September 1, 2013 3:35 pm | Leave your thoughts

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Amid all the news of James Spader as Ultron, Bradley Cooper as the voice of Rocket Raccoon and Detroit being used as the backdrop for the Man of Steel sequel, one bit of news came in for me that personally touched me.

They’ve made a movie version of Michel Faber’s novel “Under the Skin”.

I can’t express my feelings for this book without getting into heavy spoilers, but I’m going to disclaimer this by saying: if you were raised on The Twilight Zone as a child (like I was) and claim that, by the way, there is no science-fiction/fantasy show in the history of the world that did it better (like I do), you’d have spoilered yourself for what’s really going on in the book within the first thirty pages.

So, spoilers. Basically, it’s a far more on-the-nose version of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” (which Sinclair never meant to write it as a paean to vegetarianism, but rather to expose the exploitation of the working class, for which the slaughter of animals was a metaphor).

That said, I am a vegetarian (not a militant one, I promise; I have a strong belief that if the world were forced into vegetarianism tomorrow, two-thirds of the public would die of malnutrition within three years), it had nothing to do with the Sinclair book, and I hated “Under the Skin”. I don’t care how acclaimed it was, I hated it.

I hate it when writers have their stupid anvils and can’t seem to hide that their characters and narration from pointing out that there’s an anvil in the room every thirty seconds.

I hate it when the narrative seems structured such that the author is withholding information because they think it’s particularly clever to do that, rather than to build suspense. Usually, writers only do that when they’re hiding a shitty premise and feel as if after you’ve been snowed for 80% of the story, you’ll forgive the fact that they were hiding a shitty premise in the first place.

Like, for instance, Seven Pounds. Christ, how I hated that movie.

I’m not saying that not revealing the entire premise right away is necessarily a bad framework for telling a story. I was affected deeply by Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Yes, I got that one right away, too, sort of. It was obvious that the kids were going to meet with a dire end, but I didn’t feel like it was being constantly pointed out, either.

But let’s talk about Under the Skin, which stars Scarlett Johannsen as an alien (named “Laura”, per IMDB, but in the book it’s “Isserley”), sent by an alien corporation to find humans that will not be missed to provide food for her world (hitchhikers, who she was careful to screen for mentions of family or people waiting for them).

Which is…stupid.

How can you justify interstellar travel: the wear and tear on spacecraft, the fuel, the time, just to harvest human meat one individual at a time?

That really only makes sense if the meat was to provide all inhabitants on said planet at once and feed on a few flakes of dandruff at a time. So what the real intent was, I gather, was to get us to a later scene where we see the humans are corralled, and one recognizes his captor, but can’t speak (his tongue was removed, the method of which was described by the book, and I felt that this scene was meant to shock me because I needed to be shocked or something), and so he writes the word “mercy” in the dirt in front of him to accordingly shock her right back.

Again, I’m a vegetarian, but if you talked to me about considering vegetarianism, I would not try to guilt you into it. I would tell you that unless you really, really wanted to do it, don’t do it because you feel you need to make a statement. Do it because you want to do it, because you feel you are capable of making that change. Or else you will feel resentful of having to doing something you feel obligated to do rather than something you made the choice to do.

Consequently, cheap emotional manipulation, like trying to convince someone of your position through guilt) is something that pisses me off. Because it’s manipulation of the cheapest kind: “I’m calling you a bad person. And then after I call you a bad person, and while you’re befuddled with how awful a person you are, I’m going to slam you with emotionally charged words like ‘mercy’ so that I’ve hit you while you’re vulnerable and you’ll agree with just about anything I say at that point.”

I’m going a little overboard, I’m sure, but don’t lay your emotional manipulation on me and call it “satire”. Take a lesson from Rod Serling, who wrapped that shit up in half an hour and never ever tried to beat me into submission.

Toss that shit on general principle.

Under The Skin review by Lauren Cates

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