Lucy

Lucy was an example of Austhralopithecus afarensis, an early ancestor of man whose remains were discovered in l974. It also explains the provenance of the name of the character Scarlett Johansson portrays in the movie of the same name. But the real question is why one of Hollywood’s most alluring starlet is playing a succession of aliens? In Lucy, Johanssson becomes one due to a drug, CPH4 which makes her smarter than everyone else. In Under the Skin her character comes from outer space and in Her, she’s the operating system in a computer. The alien persona makes the characters Johansson plays curiously unempathic to mere mortals at least in the latter two instances. Could it simply be a case of a hot number being standoffish? Progeria is a disease precocious aging. Scarlett Johansson’s character Lucy is a bit of a cliffhanger to the extent that it records the effects of precocious evolution that bring her brain capacity up to 100%. (human brain capacity is only 10% opines the film’s resident Mr. Wizard, Professor Samuel Norman, played by Morgan Freeman; it’s an assertion that’s, by the way, confuted by Gregory Hickok in a Times Sunday Review piece entitled, “Three Myths About the Brain," NYT, 8/1/14).When Lucy texts ‘I am everywhere,” as she disappears into thin air in the finale, she seems to be a representative of the theory of panpsychism argued by the philosopher David Chalmers and others. That’s the disconcerting thing about the movie which was directed by Luc Besson. It wants its cake and eat it too--mind and body, if you will. It attempts to redeem its almost laughably gory techno violence with constant cross cuts to scenes out of Wild Kingdom or from the lecture hall where Norman offers disquisitions on the future of man. However, it’s heart lies in the gutter. At the beginning of the film the Chinese gangland violence is so outlandish you’re waiting for Mike Myers to show up and unleash another Austin Powers parody. Instead the film takes itself seriously and turns into little more than a Wikipedia entry with a bloody centerfold.

Under the Skin

Would you be enticed by Scarlett Johansson even if you knew you were going to die? Would you be able to resist those sensual lips, even if you knew she was an alien who would destroy you? Would you be lured by the sight of her undressing, as are the marks in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin? Speaking of aliens, one of the most wonderful touches of the movie, which was adapted from a science fiction novel by Michael Faber, is that the Scottish residents of Glasgow, where the film was shot, all sound like them. It’s practically impossible to fathom the accents, as Johansson in her iconic van asks for directions around town. Besides the accents there is an almost surreal reality to the film, accentuated by the fact that Johansson apparently was set loose in uncontrolled environments. In one scene when she trips on a sidewalk and falls on her face, it’s reportedly the residents of Glasgow who came to her aid. This aleatory element only makes Under the Skin appear more like a performance piece or installation. Scarlett Johansson is definitely a drawing card for all the right and wrong reasons: she gives a bravura performance in which she succeeds in not anthropomorphizing her character and everyone wants to see her naked. But Under the Skin is the kind of film you could also see at the Whitney Biennele—say something done by an avant-gardist like Matthew Barney in his The Cremaster Cycle. Narcissism is an overused word, but the scenes in which men with erections drown in an alien miasma are a unique spin on the myth (and demonstrate that the specter of Scarlett Johansson’s body can be an alternative to Cialis). Glazer also redefines the meaning of the word inhumanity. When Johansson walks away from a crying infant whose parents have drowned, it’s not that she lacks empathy. It’s because her creation, at least at first, doesn’t admit such an emotion into her vocabulary. The final scene in which the creature “under the skin,” is set afire in the snow, as it attempts to escape, is the stuff of museums.