Othered form and insectile subjectile: under the skin

This article investigates Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin as it pertains to the ‘insectile’ or, in other words, to an entomological imagination. The insectile, I argue, is structured according to apparent opposites, form and formlessness, and refers to particular manifestations of subjects. On the one hand, the insectile is instrumentalised as racialized technology centred on the face, rendering a fixity of form, and, on the other, it is coded as that which undoes precisely this logic of form. In a first instance, I am paying attention to the faciality of the unnamed, alien woman (Scarlett Johansson), constructed as insectile; the second part of the essay lends an ear to the film’s sonic environment, the buzz of its extra-diegetic score. The essay, further seeking to respond to Sheryl Vint’s claim that the film cannot offer an ethics of difference, suggests a position from which an ‘improper’ ethics of difference might begin to be thought.