Under the Skin

There are a lot of films that I think are too weird. They’re different, which is certainly a feat, but different doesn’t necessarily mean good. They just don’t seem to make enough sense for the audience to care. There are also a lot of films that aren’t weird enough; they make too much sense. It’s the same story we’ve seen a million times, and we just don’t care. I think the key to good films, and also just life in general, is balance. I think Under the Skin is just the right amount of weird. It’s good weird. 

Under the Skin (2013) is a sci-fi film directed by English director Jonathan Glazer. At the risk of undermining this blog and sounding pretentious, I think it’s a good example to use as a way of exploring why certain kinds of films like it are often labeled weird, confusing, or boring, and therefore unappealing. I’d be remiss in doing that without acknowledging how specific a kind of storytelling Hollywood filmmaking is, and thus how, at least as Americans, we’ve been trained to expect a specific kind of experience when we go to watch a movie. The films that I was talking about that make too much sense are usually Hollywood films, and the ones that tend to make less sense,  typically labeled “indie” or “arthouse”, are usually not. In school I studied French film, New Zealand film, Latin American film, and every culture has its own style of cinema, which is super interesting. It also points to how Hollywood films’ style isn’t unrelated from our larger American culture. Our films’ stories tend to be nice and neat because the American way of living is to think our story is nice and neat. Why was there literally one page about slavery in our history books? There are many good Hollywood films; but I think it’s important to examine how our country’s systems affect us both on a cultural and individual level. Why do we hold certain beliefs? Why do we think certain things are weird? Why do we like the films we like? It’s hard for people to understand white privilege, or wear a mask right now, because we don’t want to do things that make us uncomfortable, because this is what our country teaches us to do. I had that initial, uncomfortable reaction at the beginning of this movie, impatiently asking myself “What the hell is going on?” and “Where is thing going?”. But asking questions is a good thing, and not having them answered right away makes you pay closer attention to what is going on, and think more about why it is, not only in film, but in real life.