Wednesday, 3 September 2014

Under the Skin

Also Known As:
Unknown
Year:
2013
Country/ies:
UK
United States…
Predominant Genre:
Science-Fiction
Author(s)/Director(s):
Jonathan GLAZER
Outstanding Performance(s):
None
Premiss:
A mysterious woman seduces lonely men in the evening hours. Events lead her to begin a process of self-discovery.
Theme(s):
Alienation
Compassion
Emotional repression
Friendship
Humanity
Identity
Loneliness
Loyalty
Mercy
Narcissism
Nature
Original Sin
Personal change
Political Correctness
Pornography
Redemption
Religion
Republicanism
Science
Self-expression
Sexism
Sexual Repression
Social class
Snobbery
Solipsism
Stereotyping
White culture
White guilt
Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
Man Who Fell to Earth
Review Format:
DVD

The Woman Who Fell to Earth

Only guilt-ridden Whites would ever think it a good idea to tell a story based on Robert Burns’ famous:

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

Most people in the world have little problem seeing themselves objectively and are, thus, not in need of the mindlessness of Political Correctness. This is an esthetic experiment that only partly works; albeit a more interesting one than most of the Hollywood nonsense produced today (2014). If Whites took people as they found them in everyday life, films like this would have no meaning since they would be referring to that whichg already happens - rather than something hoped for, as here.

Here, style is everything, since characters never really form to enable one to feel any real empathy for them - despite the implied human feelings developing within the serial-kidnapping alien shown here. Here is the narcissism Clifford Geertz talks so eloquently about:

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.

Clifford Geertz (born 1926), US anthropologist. Local Knowledge, Introduction (1983).

A not fully-thought-out film that becomes precisly the kind of solipsism it seeks to critique.


Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute this posting in any format; provided mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

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Science:



No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.



Jacob Bronowski… (1908 - 74), British scientist, author. Encounter (London, July 1971).


Sleep of Reason:



The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty.



Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes… (1746-1828), Spanish painter. Caption to Caprichos, number 43, a series of eighty etchings completed in 1798, satirical and grotesque in form.


Humans & Aliens:



I am human and let nothing human be alien to me.



Terence… (circa 190-159 BC), Roman dramatist. Chremes, in The Self-Tormentor [Heauton Timorumenos], act 1, scene 1.


Führerprinzip:



One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves… There is no organ of conciliation or mediation interposed between the leader and the people, nothing in fact but the apparatus - in other words, the party - which is the emanation of the leader and the tool of his will to oppress. In this way the first and sole principle of this degraded form of mysticism is born, the Führerprinzip, which restores idolatry and a debased deity to the world of nihilism.