Revelation of the Subcutaneous

There's a moment near the beginning of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin when I almost fall off my chair after realising the van that Scarlett Johansson's alien is driving was cutting about just outside where I live. She stops and asks some poor unsuspecting Govanite for directions back onto the M8 motorway. He asks her if she knows where Asda is, because the motorway's right behind it. She doesn't so he hops in to direct her. Meanwhile, muggins here is shouting at the screen, 'I know where it is, it's just round the corner. I'll show you.'

The revelation here was two-fold : that I could've possibly missed the production crew and the van scouting about my hood, and the obvious one, of an alien, slightly confused and bewildered in this human bodymind, cutting about Glasgow in a transit van. I surmised that at about the time of filming (sometime in late 2012 when I began this blog) they must have spotted me tramping the streets like a lone wolf as a likely candidate for a pick-up. Chances are, being the cinephile that I am, I would've scuppered any opportunity for hoodwinking that they might have had. Yet, I was disappointed that I hadn't been stopped, considering the amount of city walking I did that winter. My ego aside however, the film was a strange one, and deeply affecting. It used the sea, the trees, and the tarmac rivers of greater Glasgow (i.e. Scotland) to great effect.

I had always thought of using the plantations that surround Glasgow as some sort of setting for a horror movie. Whereas being in a wood or a forest is a primordial experience, being in a plantation is not. It is firstly, for those of us who can attune to space and life, a perverting and horrific experience where not even death lives: trees so tightly packed together (for the sole purpose of being cut down) that not even light enters the thickly set canopy. The plantation floor, unlike that of a forest or a wood, is dead, matted solely with fallen spruce needles and fetid water. One of the more terrifying experiences of my life was trying to find my way through Lennox Forest (actually plantation) several years ago and losing my way. I almost had a panic attack finding that even the body (nevermind the body and mountain bike) was struggling to pass between the ever-tightening gaps between trees. I felt like I was slowly being swallowed up.... alive. The Blair Witch never had a look in.

At any rate, Glazer's film touched a chord, that Michel Faber's book (of the same title) didn't. Perhaps it was the Glasgow locations, and the plantations which I could directly relate to. Or perhaps it was just the revelation of the subcutaneous itself: that under the skin (within a dualistic, and anti-contemplative society) we are all alien, to each other, and to our selves. That, quite possibly, the only way to return to the sacred, to the godhead within, is to enter the void (as one of Mica Levi's sound tracks is called), and release one's self from the pathetic nonsense that we are invariably involved in; entering the void being synonymous with the Buddhist expression of burning your house and heading into the east.

The Belgian-born writer, poet and painter, Henri Michaux, once wrote of painting that it is the production of a thing which breaks 'the skin of things'. Well, here, if you can excuse the coincidental title, Glazer breaks the skin of film, and delves deeper into its flesh, so deep, one might say, that he actually hits the bone. And when that happens, you cannot help but feel it.

Spruce plantation up above Dumbarton in the Kilpatrick Hills....