Under the Skin • Senses of Cinema

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22/3/2016 Sounding Loneliness in Under the Skin • Senses of Cinema

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Sounding Loneliness inUnder the Ski Sean Redmond M ar ch 20 16 Feature Articles Issue 78

Listen.

If you listen closely, intensely, you will hear the sounds of loneliness scoring the most

profound encounters found on our screens and in their relatable, trace able senses.

Sounding loneliness is heard in the timbre of the vanquished voice, the rhythmic pattern of

raindrops falling, the nervous beep of a horn emitting from a car parked in the urban shadows.

Listen.

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013)

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Sounding loneliness is made manifest in the cries of a sibling, the weeping strings of a violin,

the rustle of yesterday’s newspaper, the click click click of a midnight mouse, and the

primordial raptures of the wind banging at the back door.

A goodbye, lamenting kiss; the silence of a dead tear sliding down a wretched face – its liquid

vibrations moving the air as it slowly descends. Footsteps gradually fading, aching their retre

into the long drawn out distance – all recall the sounds of loneliness.

Listen. It is the combination of sounds, the intricacies of a text’s sound design that creates a

scene of melancholy and malcontent. A scene can be busy, over-wrought with noise and

commotion and yet be a soundtrack of loneliness – such as when a character is found lost in t

midst of their isolation and distraction as the carnival plays on without them. Party scenes ofte

employ this convention of loneliness to mark out a character in crisis or deep despair. They sit

forlornly, with giggles and chatter surrounding them.

Disenchanted environments chant the name of loneliness: a desolate, rocky beach washed wit

a high tide; a high rise, brutalist housing complex humming to the sound of light strips strippebare of their dignity; and a vast cosmos emptied of its bright stars and luminous planets. An

unkempt woman sitting on the edge of an unmade bed, pinching the sheets with her broken

ngertips; a silver kettle boiling in an empty Ikea kitchen; and the creek of a swing in an

abandoned playground amplifying the sound of rust as it freezes the still air. All scream out th

idle tunes of loneliness.

Hear.

How one affectively sounds loneliness on screen is dependent on what instruments, melodies,

voices and sound effects are used to create a sonic membrane that manifests as melancholy an

malcontent. It is in the syncretic and synesthetic entanglement that sounding loneliness takes

root. It is in the added value inherent in the “sound-image” – to draw upon Chion – that

loneliness fully emerges like a black dahlia.

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So many lonely people, where do they all come from?

And yet, as I will suggest, this sounding loneliness is not only textually specic, simply or

singularly driven by narrative and generic concerns, but is historically contingent and

nationally and culturally locatable. For example, the sounds of urban isolation of the America

1940s lm noir are different from the Chinese peasant laments of Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth

(1984), or what I will presently argue are the British austere strings of sounding loneliness

today. When one employs a “diagnostic critique” , one undertakes to nd the history in the te

and the text in the history. It is in the interplay between sound and image that historical and

political truth emerges.

These contextualised and historicised soundings change across and within national landscapes

and their related imaginings. We don’t just see the crumbling walls of the imagined nation

state, but get to hear its desolate tunes: The Specials wailing “Ghost Town” – the anthem of/to

Margaret Thatcher’s rst wave of 1980s neo-liberalism – is a striking case in point.

But what specically is this contemporary “sounding loneliness”, and where does it comefrom? I would like to suggest that this age of loneliness is composed in, through and within th

sonic vibrations found in the wretched politics of austerity. My case study will be the anomic

soundings of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013).

The Austere Age of LonelinessWe are supposedly living in the age of loneliness; a period of time where we have fewer

companions, and where networks are broken down or rendered virtual and ephemeral. In the

age of loneliness we are supposedly self-driven isolates, parasocial junkies, endlessly caught i

the self-reexive glare of narcissism, and we suffer, suffer terribly as a consequence. In his

article, “The Age of Loneliness is Killing Us”, George Monbiot suggests,

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Three months ago we read that loneliness has become an epidemic

among young adults. Now we learn that it is just as great an afiction of

older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness

in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1m women over 50,

and is rising with astonishing speed… Social isolation is as potent a

cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; loneliness,

research suggests, is twice as deadly as obesity. Dementia, high blood

pressure, alcoholism and accidents – all these, like depression,

paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become more prevalent when

connections are cut. We cannot cope alone.

Zygmunt Bauman takes up a similar position when he outlines how late modernity has strippe

away a range of solid connections to be replaced with oating social networks, self-interested

neo-tribes without emancipation, and just-in-time-consumption demands that govern all

aspects of our lives, including love and intimacy. When we gravitate to social media, we nd

that it doesn’t actually connect us but increases our sense of isolation, and deepens or thickens

our profound sense of loneliness.

Loneliness is writ large, far and wide across the rancid politics of austerity. It is produced by

the closure of social, medical and mental health networks; it is found buried in the discourses

that dene the marginal and the dispossessed, and those on low pay and worse, as pariahs and

mists, scroungers and fakers; and it is consumed in homes and ats where social access has

been limited or cut off. As Kirsten Forkert argues in relation to the processes and practices of

austerity:

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The present moment is marked by anxieties about society falling apart,

and nostalgia for a lost era of social cohesion. These anxieties shape

the dominant narrative about the causes of the recession – which are

seen as resulting not from the excesses of the nancial sector but from a

proigate welfare system and an overly permissive immigration system,

which has given the wrong people access to public services – the

unemployed, the disabled, single parents and immigrants. This

narrative justies the austerity measures implemented by the Coalition

government; and it is able to do so because of the cross-party consensus

about the need for cuts, and the divisions between the “deserving” and

the “undeserving”.

However, little is spoken about the soundtrack to such austere loneliness, or the ways in whic

isolation is fostered in a sonic environment. So two central questions emerge in relation to

anomic contemporary cinema: How might one sound this contemporary cauldron of

loneliness? How might one place it within a particular austere framework? The answer is

under one’s skin.

The Loneliness ofUnder the Skin Under the Skin is a perfect metaphoric and experiential exploration of this epidemic and

epidermis of loneliness, set within a dissenting austere Scotland. An unnamed, alien seductres

(Scarlet Johansson) lures single, isolated men back to her house where they are submerged in

liquid tar, and their bodies slowly consumed by an unknown force.

The lm’s cruising scenes are set in the industrial and urban wastelands of Scotland – Glasgo

in particular. The seductress drives a van around the city estates and its empty roads, but also

through the teeming metropolis where movement seems both accelerated and dead slow, like

time is out of kilter, in a state of temporal crisis.

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The streets of loneliness

Under the Skin’s architecture, its sombre materiality and its oppressive mise en scène help

create the spatial conditions of brute and fragmented loneliness. The liquid tomb that the singl

men drown in captures perfectly the sense that modern life is permeable, boundary-less, even

as the opportunity to connect and expand connections is never really there. The men drown in

the isolated and isolating conditions of liquid modernity – of beguiling austerity – just at the

moment they dreamed of, and were close to getting, sexual intimacy.

Scarlet Johansson’s character is also eventually caught in this cauldron of anomie. In one

pivotal scene, she stares blankly at herself in a mirror, misrecognising who she really is. She

examines her body as if it doesn’t belong to her (which it doesn’t, it has been lifted off acorpse), capturing the sense that the self is a project that can be made, re-engineered, in an ag

of consumer products and surgical transformations. This is the haunting mirror of neo-liberal

individualism staring back into itself. 7


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Misrecognition

Johansson’s character tries to have an intimate relationship with a man in the lm but they

cannot consummate their feelings – he has forgotten simply how to connect; and she is alien,

Other, without a vagina or a womb, and is therefore unable to love or reproduce, but only

destroy. The Otherness in the lm is the spectre of loneliness: the more human and humane sh

becomes, the further removed she is from the mechanical and anti-human processes of humanharvesting the lonely men are put through – this is austerity in its most brilliant metaphoric

form. To be human is to be annihilated.

This is very much an anti-star performance by Johansson: she appears with little glamour, and

draws upon a range of authentic performance codes that suggest a hyperrealist embodiment is

being presented. Such codes include her mass-market street attire, mournful gait, and the

improvised exchanges of dialogue which are lmed in a documentary style. This is a

performance that seems to “out” the artice of stardom, to out what stardom can do to the act

who is caught in its glare. Through her performance, Johansson seems to be addressing the

loneliness of stardom itself. Stardom and celebrity ultimately become conduits for this “cultur

of loneliness.” 8


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However, it is in the lm’s isolating and austere soundscapes that the voices of loneliness trul

emerge. I will divide these audio motifs into thematic categories, but it should be noted that it

is in their sensory unication that they are best able to paint the lm with melancholic colours

Through these soundings the impoverished lives eked out by the lowly inhabitants of austere

Britain are established.

The Beehive EffectSitting just beneath the dominant diegetic sounds of Under the Skin is the “beehive effect”,

described by Mica Levi, the lm’s composer, as “this alien language.” It stains and stings the

images of the lm, undermining its hyper improvised realism and impregnating its

“improvised” shooting scenes with a cold metallic futile futurism. The beehive effect exists in

what can be dened as the “sound en creux ”, or “sound in a gap”, whereby the orchestration

exists in dissonance and contradiction with the mise en scène . In Under the Skin , every image

is undermined or destabilised by these buzzing waves. The narrative centre, as a consequence,

cannot fully hold. Moreover, this “acousmatisation”, whereby a repeated sound source enters

lm without its origin being witnessed and is thus denied embodiment, creates an alienating

space for a phantom acousmetre to emerge, or:

…a kind of voice-character specic to cinema that derives mysterious

powers from being heard and not seen. The disembodied voice seems to

come from everywhere and therefore to have no clearly dened limits to

its power.

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One can hear in the acousmetre the very disembodiment of this contemporary culture of

loneliness: one cannot be social with it, because it cannot be materialised beyond liquid

vibrations. The acousmetre is also the nameless author of austerity, its reach exponential and

seemingly without end. The hive-like vibrations it draws forth implies it belongs to, or

emanates from, a supra-collective for which human individuals must be sacriced. But these

sacricial individuals must not be individualised, but framed as living isolates – they are

chosen because they will not be missed, not by anyone. The men in Under the Skin form a

disconnected mass – they are a herd of near silent and incoherent no-hopers left behind and o

their own by the politics of austerity. Their voices are the drones of bees.

This alienating sound en creux requires the viewer to ll in the missing semiotic orrepresentational properties absent from the image. But because the origins of the sound will

never be witnessed, the gap can never be successfully lled. Entering into the gap requires on

to be also alienated, to become part of the skin of inexplicable loneliness. We are also

immersed in the verses of the no-hopers.

Austere drownings

Voices in the City


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As mentioned above, many of the lm’s cruising scenes take place on deserted city streets. Th

alien seducer – a lone single white female – drives her van into edgy areas in the hope of

picking up single men without ties, so they can become food for alien entities we never see.

The soundscape in these proto-realistic scenes, many of which were improvised and involved

non-actors, is naturalistic, with the urban noise occupying the spaces of the working class

urban milieu. The sound here feels thin, essentially lonely, emptied of connection and

connectivity – the city is a mausoleum for the near-dead men who walk it. However, these

scenes are also lled with the beehive soundings and percussion that beats out a lonely drum.

In one key improvised scene, Johansson’s character falls over, and on-lookers immediately go

to her rescue. What we witness for less than a bare minute is humanity ood the scene, only t

be quickly replaced by disconnection as people return to their winding wasp runs.

Nonetheless, it is in the conversational exchanges between the seductress and the isolated me

that the darkest deadening takes centre stage. She draws them in with the faux warmth in her

voice, and her easy acceptance of who they are. She initiates the conversation, shows interest

in these deadbeat wanderers who in turn reveal their isolation and desire to be wanted. Her

warm American accent brings a touch of the exotic, the foreign, to this parochial environment

The conversations are often about directions but are directionless – monosyllabic and

monotone – and yet deceptively avoured. Delivered as they happened, full of dry, lifeless

improvisation, the conversations capture the death of intimate language itself. As viewers we

become immersed (versed) in this dialogue of emptiness, and are positioned to see and hear

through the delivery bare performances, and the uncanny soundings, loneliness as a

deterritorialisation experience. This is the experiential rendering of austerity conversation, the“afterlife of the image.” 12


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Kaja Silverman has argued persuasively that Classical Hollywood cinema fetishes the woman

voice and suppresses or contains her speech in the service of patriarchy. Women may also be

coded as duplicitous through the lies they tell, their forked words a marker of their deception.

The gure of the femme fatale is central here. Men, masculine characters, are seen to control

the voice-over, dominate dialogue, auto-position the narrative, in the same way as they hold t

gaze:

By folding the female voice into diegetic recesses, submitting it to the

“talking cure,” and anchoring it to the female body, dominant cinema

attempts to move the male subject from a position of linguistic

containment and subordination to… a position of superior speech and hearing. The position is in turn only a reection of the symbolic order or

auditory aura.

This masculine auto-positioning and silencing of women is complicated in Under the Skin . O

the one hand, Johansson’s character is a classically constructed femme fatale – her voice one

the weapons she uses to ensnare the men. On the other hand, she controls the dialogue, directs

the narrative – until the lm’s ending. She embodies the derided gure of the post-feminist, th

hated but voiced gure of much austerity politics.

Decaying Strings and Three Note SeductionsUnder the Skin employs a particular microtonal music structure, capturing the decay of the

present through wavering between the 12 tones we are used to hearing in mainstream cinema,

and lling the void of the lm with a fragmented “scrape of the strings” melody, as if the lm

itself is expressing its own melancholy and loss.

This decomposition is supported by an evolving three-note leitmotif that accompanies

Johansson’s character whenever it appears on screen. In the cruising scenes at the start of the

lm, it is a hushed, buttery seduction arrangement, but by the lm’s end it is full of

disintegration – capturing her predatory and preyed upon transformation. As Mica Levis notes

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She uses that theme – it’s her tool. At the beginning, it’s like fake – it’s

her perfume, it’s the way she reels in these guys with a tune. Then it

deteriorates, it becomes sadder. We called it the “capture” melody.

Then there’s this major triad, a warm chord, and that’s her “human” or

“love” feeling. And there’s this darker minor triad of trilled strings that

recurs throughout.

There is more than a touch of Looking for Mr Goodbar (Richard Brooks, 1977) in the lm’s

ideological allusions: Johansson’s character is ultimately punished for consuming the men she

didn’t desire but wanted on her own terms. This is austerity soundings calling upon rape

culture motifs to position women as deadly and deadening sirens. Her murder, an immolationat the hands of a would-be rapist in the hushed, ever-so-quiet snow covered tundra, is a viciou

moral retribution of order by the type of “failed” man she had taken to task earlier.

An immoral retribution of order

This is where post-feminism is undone in the lm – cast as a predatory shadow on Johansson’

character. Much UK austerity discourse has centred on the role and function of women, with

“forms of classed and gendered shaming to generate public consent for the government’s

welfare reform.” Under the Skin’s austere soundings are inherently gendered, and yet no one

is at home in the lm. Rather, death is everywhere.

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Death at the BeachSome of the most disturbing moments in Under the Skin are two scenes set at a remote and

rocky beach. Narratively speaking, they are built around two murders – including one of a ba

left to die on the shoreline – but sonically they create layers that are profoundly upsetting and

unsettling. We hear the sounds of the waves breaking on the shore, a dog barking, a baby

crying, screaming and shouting, as well as footsteps on shale, the beehive effect, and the wind

in the air. However, each sound carries its own impressionable register – the sublime enormit

of the waves and white horses set achingly against the piercing, hysterical cries of the baby th

has been left on the beach. The scene’s horror doesn’t just come with the three adult corpses,

two of whom drown, and one of whom is murdered by the seductress, but with the death of th

baby that will be. The return to the beach scene some hours later, to nd the child still wailingin the (now) acrid darkness, sounding waves now close to his feet, carries real and all-

encompassing phenomenological power.

These wretched encounters are “holding onto air” moments; moments that occur when the

scene is so resolutely, ethically and morally ghastly, or is so uncomfortable to view, that one

feels the need – the unstoppable, thoughtless urge – to reach out and hold onto the nothingnes

This is not a screaming moment or a time for looking away from the screen. This is not a

moment when you clutch or claw at the person sitting next to you. It is a moment of deafenin

silence and absolute centeredness. One’s eyeballs ache and one’s ngers and hands reach out

towards the horror that one is experiencing. One’s breathless silence is in marked contrast to

the noise before one. It as if holding down air will somehow stop the trauma, reconnect one to

terra rma and the material underpinnings of everyday life. We hold onto air to arrest the

drama unfolding before us.


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When a baby screams

In these moments of vaporisation, one attempts to anchor oneself on a property that is

groundless, because the ground has been swept from beneath our feet. One reaches out,

stretching ones arms to their limit, and grips, grasps, grabs, clutches at it – the very act a

moment of self-help, a closing off of narrative possibility, and a helpless attempt to intervene i

the story-world. Your eyes and ngers silently whisper, stop! We hold onto air as if the thing i

the ctive (or factual) world that disturbs us so can be changed and challenged. It can’t. We

hold onto air and undergo a quiet death in the process – helpless witnesses rendered complicit

in the silencing gaze that wounds.

This attempt to ground the groundless, root the rootless, is very much like the condition of

austerity itself. Faced with an impossible discourse we seek ways to stop it and empower

ourselves. But we can’t. The message of Under the Skin is that the baby’s abandonment is our

abandonment – it is a scene in which bare life is enunciated and annulled, which is the

supposed truth of austere politics: stand on your own two feet or drown, drown, drown.


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Death is past, present and future tense – the audio envelope that carries all the sounds in this

beach scene. This is the state of our exception. Born alone and to die lonely, if only we hear

and see its calling. Here, loneliness rises up in the image, in the sound en creux , on the empty

beach as the tides of austerity wash in.

A Brief history of LonelinessThe history of cinema can be charted through its relationship with and to loneliness. When yo

think about it, melancholy, introspection, meditation, detachment, isolation and atomisation ar

everywhere. Chaplin is but a lonely tramp that nds his lonely ower girl. Renoir’s A Day in

the Country (1936) is a reverie of companionship marked by deep pockets of loneliness. Gild

only wants Johnny; Johnny may want Balam. While Kolker denes his cinema of loneliness i

terms of certain American auteurs, I think we could usefully chart a new history of cinema

along this axis of loneliness – nding its variants and variations across national cinemas and

underpinned by social and political contexts of the time.

To return one last time to Under the Skin : its cinema of loneliness is one generated by the

ghastly conditions of austerity, of austere Britain. Its mise en scène is crafted from the urbanwastelands of today, and the wilderness the lm ends in is both escape from and an extension

of austere loneliness. The seductress is both an architect of austerity and one of its victims. He

voice carries the sounds of loneliness throughout the lm and into our bare lives…

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Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk with you again

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision that was planted

In my brain still remains

Within the sound of silence

-Simon and Garfunkel, “The Sound Of Silence”

Endnotes1. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

2. Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the

Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1995).

3. George Monbiot, “The Age of Loneliness is Killing Us,” The Guardian (14 October 2014),

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of-loneliness-killing-us[HTTP://WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM/COMMENTISFREE/2014/OCT/14/AGE-OF-LONELINESS-KILLING-US]

4. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).5. Mai-Ly N. Steers, Robert E. Wickham, and Linda K. Acitelli, “Seeing Everyone Else’s Highlight Reels:

How Facebook Usage is Linked to Depressive Symptoms,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 33:8

(2014): pp. 701–31

6. Kirsten Forkert, “The New Moralism: Austerity, Silencing and Debt Morality,” Soundings: A Journal of

Politics and Culture 56 (Spring 2014): pp. 41–53.

7. Stuart Hall, “The Neo-Liberal Revolution,” Cultural Studies 25:6 (2011).

8. Sean Redmond, “Introduction” in The Companion to Celebrity , eds. P. David Marshall and Sean Redmo

(New York: Wiley, 2015).

9. Mica Levi, “Interview,” Pitchfork (31 March 2014), http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/9366-under-the-skins-jonathan-glazer-and-mica-levi/ [HTTP://PITCHFORK.COM/FEATURES/INTERVIEWS/9366-UNDER-

THE-SKINS-JONATHAN-GLAZER-AND-MICA-LEVI/]

10. Chion, Audio-Vision .

11. Ibid., p. 24.

12. Ibid., p. 123.

13. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 99.

14. Levis, “Interview.”

15. Kim Allen, Imogen Tyler, and Sara De Benedictis, “Thinking with ‘White Dee’: The Gender Politics of ‘Austerity Porn,’” Sociological Research Online 19.3 (2014), www.socresonline.org.uk/19/3/2.html[HTTP://WWW.SOCRESONLINE.ORG.UK/19/3/2.HTML]

http://www.socresonline.org.uk/19/3/2.htmlhttp://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/9366-under-the-skins-jonathan-glazer-and-mica-levi/http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of-loneliness-killing-us


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Sean Redmond [HTTP://SENSESOFCINEMA.COM/AUTHOR/SEAN-REDMOND/]

Sean Redmond is an Associate Professor in Screen and Design at Deakin University, Australi

He has research interests are in lm and television aesthetics, lm and television genre, lm

authorship, lm sound, and stardom and celebrity. He convenes the Melbourne-based Eye

Tracking and the Moving Image Research group, and the Science Fiction Research group at

Deakin University. He has published ten books, including A Companion to Celebrity (2015),The AFI Film Reader: Endangering Science Fiction Film (2015), Celebrity and the Media

(2014), and The Cinema of Takeshi Kitano: Flowering Blood (2013). With Su Holmes, he edit

the journal Celebrity Studies , short-listed for best new academic journal in 2011.

16. Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman , third editio

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

A B O U T T H E A U T H O R
http://sensesofcinema.com/author/sean-redmond/

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Under the Skin • Senses of Cinema