Translated by Louise Pain

In Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (UK 2013), a woman dressed in a black wig, red lipstick, and a fake fur jacket travels through Scotland in a white van. Driving through the streets of Glasgow, she stops periodically to ask male passers-by for directions, before offering to give them a lift in the rain or luring them into her vehicle with some awkward flirtation. Using the implicit promise of sex, she is able to convince several men to come home with her. Behind the door of a decrepit building in an industrial backwater, her eager passengers find themselves in the pitch blackness of a limitless, otherworldly void. The unending black emptiness is occupied solely by the body of the driver and her latest passenger. The woman forges ever deeper into the nothingness, striding across the smooth, firm surface of the black, mirror-like floor, gradually removing her clothes and casting a seductive glance over her shoulder, while her guest obediently follows in her wake. Lost in her seductive pull, the man fails to notice that the once solid ground has now transformed into a black, viscous liquid. With every step, his body sinks deeper into the tar-like mass, until he is ultimately engulfed entirely. Meanwhile, the woman continues to stride forward on solid ground (Fig. 1).

This game of seduction is repeated several times throughout the science-fiction film. For the woman in the van—played by US-American actor Scarlett Johansson—it is nothing to lure one man after another toward their fate in the black waters. But what these readily ensnared men do not realise is that their companion is not a sexually liberated stranger, but rather an alien who has taken a human—or, to be more precise, a female—form. Its real body, concealed beneath a sheath of human skin, is composed of the very same jet-black matter into which its prey are submerged and disappear.

The siren-like pull exerted by this otherworldly apparition and the men’s ecstatic descent into the black liquid draw on a complex of motifs that has featured prominently in Western cultural history for centuries: from antiquity to the Middle Ages and the Romantic era, to popular contemporary narratives, men have time and again encountered aquatic beings that compel them into the watery depths (see Stephan, 1993; Stuby, 1992). This dynamic between humans and mythical creatures—who either serve to personify the element of water or who dwell within it and who are, with few exceptions, depicted as decidedly feminine or female—is characterised by a fascinating reciprocity: a combination of bewitchment and submission, an erotic yearning that flows seamlessly into the surrender of self: ‘Halb zog sie ihn, halb sank er hin / Und ward nicht mehr gesehn’ (Goethe, 2000 [1779], p. 272).

With these words, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe describes the dynamic between his drowning fisherman and the ‘wet woman’ (ibid.) who has ensnared him. Goethe’s phrasing distills the dramatic climax of an ambivalent interplay between lust and peril into an ecstatic dissolution of boundaries. The setting for this fatally erotic encounter is the surface of the water, which is pierced from both sides: by the water spirit as she stretches out her hand toward the fisherman, and simultaneously by her victim as he enters the water. The surface thus functions as a permeable interface that separates seemingly dualistic principles: reality and myth, air and water, culture and nature, male and female.

The association of water with the ‘feminine’ is one of the most enduring analogies in Western cultural history. Yet the relationship between femininity and the aqueous is in fact conceived as a kind of mutual intertwining: in the collective cultural imagination, water is feminised, just as ‘the woman’ is ascribed aquatic qualities. In his study Male Fantasies, literary scholar Klaus Theweleit examines this phenomenon from a perspective that is critical of masculinity (Theweleit, 1987). He deconstructs the association between water and femininity as a concept that primarily serves male pleasure and patriarchal self-affirmation—in other words, as a male fantasy.

Over and over again: the women-in-the-water, woman as water, as a stormy, cavorting, cooling ocean, a raging stream, a waterfall; as a limitless body of water […]; woman as the enticing (or perilous) deep, as a cup of bubbling body fluids; the vagina as wave, as foam, as dark place rimmed with Pacific ridges; […] the ocean […]: the irreproachable, inexhaustible, anonymous superwhore, across whom we ourselves becomes anonymous and limitless, drifting along without egos, […] immersed in the principle of masculine pleasure (ibid., pp. 283 f., emphasis in original).

What underpins this imagery is a binary gender ideology that characterises the masculine as decisive, powerful, and steadfast, while casting the feminine as fluid, formless, and enigmatic. As Theweleit demonstrates, however, fluidity, the fluid, and floodwaters also function as scenarios that invoke fear: they threaten to imaginatively engulf the robust monument of masculinity and may ultimately lead to its erosion (see ibid., pp. 229–233. Nevertheless, this fear of losing the male ‘ego-armour’ is, paradoxically, coupled with a desire to transcend boundaries—by the allure of dissolving the body’s ironclad frontiers and transgressing moral bounds (see ibid., p. 232 f.. This yearning for the transgressive is echoed in the myriad aquatic sexual metaphors that abound in Western-influenced culture: metaphors of overflowing, becoming engulfed, overwhelmed, of bodily boundaries becoming blurred. It is not uncommon for the act of entering a body of water to be conceived as an act of penetration (Fig. 2).ⁱ The aquatic realm thereby becomes the stage for an encounter that is at once eroticised and hierarchised, with the feminised creature constructed as ‘the Other’, to be simultaneously coveted and conquered by a male protagonist.

It is precisely this nexus that Under the Skin addresses with its conceptualisation of the alien seductress and the dark, voidlike substance. The film’s various engagements with the analogy between femininity and water, as well as with specific aspects of the water-nymph myth, have not gone unnoticed by film critics. Despite the alienation, Michael Ranze, for instance, describes the character played by Johansson as a ‘sensual siren’ (Ranze, 2014), and Andrew Wyatt titles his review of the film ‘The Siren Song’ (Wyatt, 2014).ⁱⁱ Under The Skin thus draws upon the traditional constellation of an alien, femininely coded entity and a man who surrenders to its seductive pull, while simultaneously detaching this dynamic from its association with water and transforming it into a modern constellation of fluid otherness.ⁱⁱⁱ Just as the water in mythical narratives embodies the metaphorical dimension of the Other, so the black liquid subtance represents, in an exaggerated form, the inverse of the real: the enigmatic and the opaque in the fullest sense of the word. The dark entity is at once solid and liquid, diaphanous and opaque, reflective and absorbing, preserving and corrosive. It is, impossibly, everything at once.

A closer look at the peculiar dynamic that characterises the film’s recurring seduction scenes reveals the new dimension that the black matter introduces in lieu of the water’s surface. Keeping a distance of roughly two metres, the alien walks together with its victim into the depths of the space: Johansson moves backwards, seductively drawing the man toward her with her gaze, while he follows behind at the same pace (Fig. 3). No physical contact takes place between the seducer and the seduced. Unlike classical depictions of the water-nymph trope, Johansson’s alien does not reach out toward its counterpart or attempt to draw him by hand into its own realm, into the watery depths; instead, it maintains a consistent distance. It stays on the surface, continuing its horizontal trajectory ever further into the endless darkness. It is only the man who actually breaches the threshold, his body descending into the fluid depths of the black matter, which has been rendered liquid only for him. The alien, meanwhile, remains, quite literally, on the outside. While the submersion and sinking of its sexually aroused victims may be understood metaphorically as an expression of lust and passion, of surrender, or even penetration, the alien itself is excluded from all of these emotions and symbolic registers. It remains rooted to the rigid ground and, following its prey’s descent into coital oblivion, emotionlessly resumes its work. Under the Skin thus counters the nightmarish image of the ravenous man-eater with a polished, albeit affectless, process of luring its victims to their deaths—a process that appears to bring the alien siren no gratification whatsoever. The lethal agency no longer resides in the entity disguised as a femme fatale, but in the substance itself, which thrusts itself into the relational constellation as an active force.

The man does not seem to perceive his descent as threatening, or indeed to register that it is even happening. Even when his face has almost completely disappeared beneath the surface, he continues to stare at Johansson with undiminished intensity (Fig. 4). It is only beneath the surface that the dark matter reveals its true nature. The camera follows the submerged man into a strange underwater space, where the liquid that engulfs him appears virtually transparent from his perspective (Fig. 5). Once there, he comes face to face with another victim who had previously sunk into the depths, his bloated body preserved like that of a taxidermied animal. The second victim reaches his hand out toward the first in a gesture of comfort and consolation. But this display of support is only fleeting: the viewer watches as the first victim abruptly loses his very physical substance, the contents of his body dissolving until all that remains is his skin. The skin then floats, drifts, limp, deflated, in the liquid (Fig. 6). Whereas in traditional representations of erotic drowning the dissolution of the body is generally conceived in metaphorical terms as a merging with the water element, Under the Skin radicalises the motif by rendering the loss of self a physically tangible event. The man does not melt away into endless pleasure; he is quite literally dispersed, emptied, and hollowed out.

The sheath of skin that remains introduces yet another dimension to the notion of the surface—one already foreshadowed by the film’s title, Under the Skin, and brought to its culmination in the film’s final scene. Following a series of dramatic developments, Johansson’s character finds itself roaming vulnerable and disoriented through a secluded stretch of woodland, where a stranger attempts to rape it. During the ensuing struggle, its assailtant unwittingly tears open its human shell. From beneath the skin, a jet-black mass emerges, exposing the previously concealed interior (Fig. 7). The logic of the penetrable surface is thus extended to the physical body itself. This final scene lays bare the violence that may be entailed in being socially perceived and read as a woman. Yet it is precisely at the moment of this violent gendering that the character’s womanhood is revealed to be nothing more than a façade. What lies beneath the feminine exterior is not a ‘real’ woman, but a void. In this instance, the concept of the fluid, of fluidity, no longer signifies a specifically female essence; instead, it points toward the fundamental instability of gender ascription itself, thereby opening the film to feminist, queer-feminist, and cyberfeminist readings.^iv

In Under the Skin, surfaces thus become arenas of negotiation. Whether a pitch-black pool or human skin, whether the boundary between above and below or between inside and outside, these interfaces do not merely serve to separate distinct spheres; they bring the relationships between them—such as that between humans and non-human beings—into being in the first place. It is through such surfaces that the film explores different modes of mutual dependence and interrelation: proximity and distance, desire and indifference, consent and violence. Mutuality, consequently, does not emerge as a harmonious exchange or romantic melding, but as a precarious relational condition in which the borders and boundaries between bodies and subjects are continually renegotiated. Yet the differences between them do not simply disappear. Rather, what the film calls into question is the very possibility of assigning its figures to fixed hierarchies—between culture and nature, human and non-human, male and non-male.

References

Ferenczi, S. (1938) Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality. Translated from the German by H. A. Bunker, M.D. New York: The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Inc.

Francis, M. (2016) ‘Splitting the difference: On the queer-feminist divide in Scarlett Johansson’s recent body politics’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 57. Available at: www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc57.2016/-FrancisSkin/index.html (Accessed: 3 July 2026).

Goethe, J. W. von (2000 [1779]) ‘Der Fischer’, in Max, F. R. (ed.) Undinenzauber: Geschichten und Gedichte von Nixen, Nymphen und anderen Wasserfrauen. Stuttgart: Reclam, pp. 272 f.

Hole, K. L. and Jelača, D. (2018) Film feminisms: A global introduction. London/New York: Routledge.

Larigakis, S. (2017) ‘The Future is Female*: On Queer Futures and Alien Transcendence in Science Fiction Cinema and Beyond’, The Film Atlas. Available at: www.thefilmatlas.com/the-future-is-female-on-queer-futures-and-alien-transcendence-in-science-fiction-cinema-and-beyond (Accessed: 3 July 2026).

Osterweil, A. (2014) ‘Under the Skin: The Perils of Becoming Female’, Film Quarterly 67(4), pp. 44–51.

Otto, B. (2001) Unterwasser-Literatur: Von Wasserfrauen und Wassermännern. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.

Ranze, M. (2014) ‘Under the Skin – Jonathan Glazer’, Filmbulletin (5).

Stephan, I. (1993) ‘Weiblichkeit, Wasser und Tod: Undinen, Melusinen und Wasserfrauen bei Eichendorff und Fouqué’, in Böhme, H. (ed.) Kulturgeschichte des Wassers. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 234–262.

Stuby, A. M. (1992) Liebe, Tod und Wasserfrau: Mythen des Weiblichen in der Literatur. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

Theweleit, K. (1987) Male Fantasies, Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Translated from the German by S. Conway, in collaboration with E. Carter and C. Turner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ullrich, J. (2026) ‘Queere Wasserfrauen’, Kunstforum 312, pp. 106–115.

Wyatt, A. (2014) ‘The Siren Song’, The Curator. Available at: www.curatormagazine.com/andrew-wyatt/the-siren-song/ (Accessed: 3 July 2026).

List of Figures

Fig.1–6: Film stills, Under the Skin (2013)

CV

Sarah K. Becker is a cultural scientist and media designer. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis project, ‘Filmische Wassertode’ (Cinematic Deaths by Drowning), at Berlin’s Humboldt University, in which she is exploring the cinematic motif of death by drowning from the perspectives of cultural studies, media studies, and gender studies. She also works as a curator and filmmaker in Berlin and Braunschweig, with a focus on cultural and media history, nature, gender, and memory work. Since 2026, she has served as the project coordinator for the NatureCulture ArtLab at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK).

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