The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jonathan Glazer · a film · 2013 · about 108 minutes · written with Walter Campbell, loosely after the novel by Michel Faber · in English
Mode
Science fiction of the visitor stripped of exposition; covert street document, abstraction and fable in one
Mythos
The siren who draws men down into black water; the visitor who learns pity and is destroyed by it; a skin worn and shed, near the selkie; a woman alone in a forest
Phase
A visitor’s passage through Scotland in three movements: the hunt by van in Glasgow, the turn at a mirror and the flight north, the Highlands and a forest in snow
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 108 minutes, in English, with Glaswegian speech often left unsubtitled; much of the city footage shot with concealed cameras; Daniel Landin’s photography, Mica Levi’s score, Paul Watts’s editing
Register
Low light in a moving van and the exact black of a void; strings sliding off the pitch; sea, mist and snow; very little speech
Scale
One consciousness among strangers: a city, a coast, a moor and a forest
Governing Proposition
An alien in a woman’s body drives a van through Glasgow picking up men, who follow her into a black room and sink; after she looks at her own face in a mirror and lets one man go, she flees north and tries to live in the body she wears. The wager of the film is that the human seen from outside is a creature of skin, taken by its surface; that to be seen as a woman’s body is to be appraised and hunted, which the hunter learns only when she stops hunting; and that a form which watches ordinary men through a concealed camera, as she does, can teach its audience the predator’s eye and then turn it on her.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins before there is anyone in it. A point of light, then a ring, then the shapes come together into an eye, as if an eye were being built, while a voice rehearses the sounds of a language, one by one, over the image. Something is learning to look and to speak. The rest of the film is what that eye sees and what the voice is used for, and the last shot will answer the first.
The one who looks is played by Scarlett Johansson: an alien in a woman’s body, in a dark wig, who drives a van through Glasgow. She has no name. The film gives her no history, no world of origin and no explanation of what she is for. A motorcyclist serves her and searches the roads, and he too is never explained. She is in almost every scene, and she speaks little; the city around her speaks a great deal, in Glaswegian voices the film often leaves without subtitles.
Jonathan Glazer directed the film and wrote it with Walter Campbell, loosely from Michel Faber’s novel of 2000, keeping from it a visitor who hunts men and little else. Daniel Landin photographed it, Paul Watts edited it, and Mica Levi wrote the score, her first for film. It was shot in Glasgow and the Scottish Highlands, runs about 108 minutes in colour, and is in English. It was first shown at Telluride and then in competition at Venice in 2013, released in Britain in March 2014 and in the United States, by A24, in April 2014.
Movement II
She drives the streets and asks men the way, and offers lifts. Much of this footage was shot with concealed cameras, on men who did not know they were being filmed and who consented afterwards to its use. They lean in at the window, give directions, laugh, decide whether to get in. The camera is in the van with her, and the audience sees them as she sees them: unaware, unarranged, a population of strangers being appraised. Ordinary life on a shopping street becomes the hunting ground of something that does not belong to it.
A man who gets in is brought to a black room with no walls that can be seen. She walks ahead of him across a black floor, and he follows, and as he walks toward her he sinks, without noticing, into a floor like black water, while she walks on above it. The scene is shown again with another man, and again: the same act, the same room, until the audience has learned the routine as she has. The repetition is the method. When it breaks, it will mean something.
Beneath the floor is a further dark. One man there sees another beside him, and the other is emptied: in a moment his body goes, and what is left is a skin, drifting like a husk. The film shows no apparatus and gives no explanation of what the bodies are for. The void is an abstraction with no depth, where what happens can be read only as an image. Over it Levi’s strings slide off the pitch, and a three-note figure marks the hunt.
Movement III
On a stony beach she talks to a swimmer. A dog is in the sea, and a couple are drowning. The swimmer goes into the water for strangers he does not know. She watches the couple drown, and when the swimmer is back on the shingle, she strikes him with a stone.
The couple’s infant is left alone on the beach, crying at the waterline as the tide comes in. She does not look at the child. The film holds on it, and then leaves it. It is one of the coldest passages in the cinema of its decade, and it is required: here is what she is before she changes, an attention for which a human being’s self-sacrifice and a child’s crying are not yet anything at all.
The film sets human courage, a swimmer going into the sea for strangers, beside her indifference to it, and does not explain either. The human here, seen from outside, is a creature whose kindness and violence come from the same appetite, and whose skin is what is taken. The hunt goes on. There is a nightclub, more drives, more men, and the motorcyclist on the roads behind her, searching.
Movement IV
One man she picks up has a disfigured face. He is played by Adam Pearson. His face has made him alone among strangers, and she treats him as she has treated the others, until she looks at her own face in a mirror. Then she lets him go. It is the first breach of the routine, and the film turns on that one act.
She leaves Glasgow and goes north. The second movement of the film is a flight, into the Highlands, into mist on the moor, and away from the work she was made for. She tries to live in the body she wears. She sits at a meal, puts a piece of cake into her mouth, and cannot swallow it. The body she wears does not accept what human bodies take.
After a bed, she holds a lamp over her own body and looks at it, as the men were looked at in the van, as a surface she does not understand. The camera has come closer to her as she has changed, the frames turning from surveillance to portraiture. She has begun to be someone, and the film shows it from outside and never enters it. The motorcyclist, meanwhile, searches for her across the hills.
Movement V
She walks into a forest in the snow. A woodsman meets her there, and now she is the one watched, from outside, by a man. The hunter has become the hunted: what she learned by wearing a woman’s body, the film’s argument holds, is that to be seen as one is to be appraised and pursued, and the empathy she has learned makes her prey. The oldest matter of fairy tale, a woman alone in a forest, is played without consolation.
The human skin comes away. The black body beneath it, the thing that wore the face, lifts the face it wore and looks at it. The skin that was the instrument of the hunt is now an object in its hands, and the eye that was built in the opening looks at what it has been. She is set alight. Smoke rises from her into the falling snow, and the last image rhymes with the first.
The film made little at the box office, and its standing has risen since its release. It is screened, taught and written about at length: on the gaze and gender, on the ethics of its concealed camera, on disability and its casting, on Scotland, on its score. Levi’s music had a wide influence on film music, and Glazer carried the concealed rig into his next film, The Zone of Interest. What it made is a form: a star among strangers, filmed as a species is filmed, and a hunter who learns what she is by looking.
Act III · The Twelve
The film is built by repetition, and the repetitions are required: each lure is the same act shown again, so the audience learns the routine as she has, and its breach means something. The beach is required, since the infant left crying on the shingle measures what she is before she changes. The disfigured man is the hinge: she looks at her face in a mirror and lets him go, and the film turns on that one act. The flight north, the meal, the bed and the forest each go further into the body she wears. What gives is in the middle: the nightclub, the long drives and some of the Highland wandering run longer than their work, and the motorcyclist’s searches repeat what is known.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: to be seen as a woman’s body is to be appraised and hunted, and the predator who wears that body learns it only when she stops hunting; and the human, seen from outside, is a creature of skin whose kindness and violence come from one appetite. Ordinary men of Glasgow, filmed without knowing it, appraise a stranger who offers a lift, and the audience watches them as she does, as material. Held at the figure because much of the disclosure arrives as estrangement and dread, nearer a mood than a meaning: her turn is shown and never entered, and the men are types more than persons.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Elevation recurs, and it is mostly cold and dreadful. The opening: a point of light, a ring, an eye being made, with a voice rehearsing sounds over it. The black room, where a man walks toward her and sinks, without noticing, into a floor like black water; beneath it, one victim seeing another emptied to a skin that drifts like a husk. The beach, the dog, the drowning couple, the swimmer struck with a stone and the infant at the waterline as the tide comes in, one of the coldest passages in the cinema of its decade. Mist on the moor; a face lifted and looked at; smoke rising into falling snow. The middle third rises less often, and holds the axis below the top.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The myth is built in part and evoked in part. Built: the siren, a woman who draws men down to drown in black water, is the literal mechanism of the first hour, not a figure laid over it; and the visitor who takes a human form, learns pity and is destroyed by those she has learned to pity is the spine of the whole. The skin worn and shed, in a film made in Scotland, sits close to the selkie, uncited and unneeded. The woman alone in the forest, met by a woodsman, is the oldest matter of fairy tale, played without consolation. Held a tenth below the gate: with no name, history or world of origin, the archetype stands by abstraction more than by a particular grown into it.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is double: science fiction of the visitor, with The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) its nearest elder, and the body horror of the alien among us; and British social realism of the city street. The departure joins them as neither had: a film star in a wig driving a van through Glasgow, filmed by concealed cameras, picking up men who did not know a film was being made, cut into abstract sets of black and white void that explain nothing. Exposition, backstory and the alien world are refused. The stake was real: about a decade in development, a star of the largest commercial films of the time in an unexplained part, and a method that risked yielding nothing usable. Held a step from the top because the turn sits inside art cinema, where precedents existed.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The concealed camera is the knowledge: the men are seen as she sees them, unaware and unarranged, and the audience is placed in the hunter’s van looking out at a species. As she changes, the form changes with her: the camera comes closer, the frames turn from surveillance to portraiture, and by the forest she is the one watched, from outside, by a man. The black room is the form’s other instrument, an abstraction with no depth where what happens to the men can be read only as image, never as event. Held below the top because the Highland third relaxes into a more ordinary drift, and the motorcyclist is plot more than form.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Thirteen years is a short span, so much of the axis is forecast. The evidence so far is real for a recent film: a large literature on the gaze and gender, the ethics of the concealed camera, disability and the casting of Adam Pearson, Scotland, and the score. The questions stay open: what she is and what the operation is for; whether her turn is empathy, curiosity or malfunction; whether the film looks at the men with compassion or contempt; whether the ending is punishment, martyrdom or release. The form yields on return, in the rhyme of the opening eye and the last shot and in the match of skins. Held there because the span cannot yet show what decades show, and some of the rereading is of method rather than meaning.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2010s, and the intrinsic force is strong: the film joined vérité capture of an unaware public to abstract genre cinema and a star, and showed that a science fiction film could be built almost without exposition, by image and sound alone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real, and mostly within art cinema. Levi’s score, her first for film, had a wide influence on film music; the void and the sinking floor are widely compared with later images, though no line of descent is shown; and Glazer’s next film, The Zone of Interest, carried the concealed rig into a new subject. The box office was small. Force exceeds reach, and both stop short of the gate.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across thirteen years from the first showing in 2013. Form: the film survives whole as released, with nothing lost and nothing replaced. Presence: continuous but not of the widest kind, in repertory screenings, on home video and streaming, in steady teaching, and in a critical standing that has risen since release. Fabric: the digital image is of its making, and the streets, phones and clothes of Glasgow in 2012 will date as surface, though the film’s abstraction protects much of it. Survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted, and thirteen years demonstrate only a little; a presence that is narrow rather than wide holds the axis at the figure.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Daniel Landin’s photography holds two regimes, low-light concealed capture in the van and the exact, lit abstraction of the void, and makes them one film. Mica Levi’s score, strings tuned and slid off the pitch and a three-note figure for the hunt, is the film’s nervous system. The sound design makes the street a roar and the void a silence. Scarlett Johansson gives a performance of attention without inner life that slowly acquires one, among non-actors who did not know they were in a scene, and Paul Watts cuts hours of hidden footage into a single line. The costs: some night footage is murky beyond what the method requires, and the Highland passages slacken in pace and composition.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a laughing man in a Glasgow street, filmed unawares, giving directions to a van, and a black body in a snowy forest lifting a human face off itself. One law governs both: the skin is a surface by which creatures are taken, and seeing is predation until it becomes recognition. The street, the void, the beach, the mirror, the meal she cannot eat and the woodsman obey it, and the film never steps outside her to explain. The range is wide, from vérité to pure abstraction, and it is held. What holds the axis is the motorcyclist, whose function is plotted rather than governed by the same law, and the Highland drift, where the law slackens.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Consciousness is the centre: an alien attention becoming a self. Sex and gender are held as appraisal, desire and violence. The city is present as a population of strangers, its shopping streets and a nightclub. The natural order is sea, moor, forest and snow, and a dog drowned. Disability is held in the man whose face makes him alone; mortality and the family appear only in the drowned couple and their child. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or nearly so: labour, the state, history, the sacred, and any community beyond the passer-by. What is present is held through one consciousness and joined by it, not listed, and the narrow reach is by design.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 8.8, then The Sublime and The Living Form at 8.7. A departure that joined the science fiction of the visitor to concealed street capture and an abstract void, at real cost; a cold elevation that recurs from the eye at the opening to the infant at the waterline and the smoke in the snow; and a form whose knowledge is the hunter’s view, turned at last on the hunter.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.1: consciousness, gender, the city, the natural order and disability are held through one attention, while labour, the state, history, the sacred and community are absent. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, a strong force with a reach mostly within art cinema, and The Imperishable at 8.0, a survival of thirteen years with a presence narrow rather than wide.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Swerve at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls a tenth short, The Unconcealment at 8.2 three tenths short, and Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable, each at 8.0, five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.3 from a sum of 99.3, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Under the Skin as released, about 108 minutes, from the point of light at the opening to the smoke in the snow: directed by Jonathan Glazer, written by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer, photographed by Daniel Landin, edited by Paul Watts, with music by Mica Levi; first shown at Telluride and Venice in 2013, released in Britain in March 2014 and in the United States by A24 in April 2014. The film as released is the unit, and no other version is judged. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The Glaswegian speech the film leaves unsubtitled is part of the work and is neither credited nor charged as a difficulty. No line of dialogue is held to the word, so none is quoted, and speech is described. Michel Faber’s novel (2000) is not part of the work and is named as its distant source. The method of the city footage, concealed cameras and consent obtained afterwards, is stated because the axes rest on it; other accounts of the making are not the object. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the sound designer’s name, the actor who plays the motorcyclist, the backers of the production, the number of lures shown, the order of some Highland scenes, scene and shot counts, a crowd at a football match, placings in critics’ polls, the composer’s later work, and claims that later films descend from this one.