Upstream - S4E22.5: Under the Skin

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Now it's time that we talk about the Jonathan Glazer film with Scarlett Johansson. Check out the film Under the Skin (2013) before listening to this. Get the whole episode on Patreon here! --- Friend of the show Bella, a refugee evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021, is raising money for her gender confirmation surgery! Anything you can give would be hugely appreciated! https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/team-bella ----- Check out friend of the show Mattie's new book Simplicity here, or wherever fine graphic novels are sold! ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. In our home, we talk a lot about how insane everything feels, and agonise constantly over what can be done to best help the Palestinians trapped in Gaza facing the full brunt of genocidal violence. My partner Rebecca has put together a list of four fundraisers you can contribute to- all of them are at work on the ground doing what they can. -Palestinian Communist Youth Union, which is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla https://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 -Thamra, which distributes herb and veg seedlings, repairs and maintains water infrastructure, and distributes food made with replanted veg patches https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-thamra-cultivating-resilience-in-gaza ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com , as well as on our Bluesky and X.com the every app account

I just got a bit of your heart to explain. Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly. I am joined, as always, by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Hello, Neil before Zod. What is up? RIP. to Terence Stamp

Guy we love to see 40 minutes before we started recording this so about two weeks time when they when they hear it so sorry for retramatizing everybody but yeah Guy we love to see yeah I fear him has been on my list for

a long long while so we'll get to that at some point in due course genuine rest in peace to Terence Stamp from the world cast Kill James Bond however speaking of art films we're still on religion season and Devon this was this was your turn to pick and so what have you brought us

this time? I understand religion is a very vague prompt so I brought you what I believe to be an extremely humanist movie and maybe one of my favorite of the 2010s

under the skin by Jonathan Glazer here's the thing we can do whatever we want right we are the masters of our fate here we can do this

and so I have our own domain that's right I want to kind of contextualize this with my Jonathan Glazer opinion, which is that the man has made the movie of the decade for as far as I'm aware, two out of the three previous decades, this had better be the third, right? High expectations.

What else has he made? Because I think this is my first time in County. You'll, no, people will be most familiar with him from Zone of Interest, which is his most recent movie. But he also did a crime movie, which we are going to do as part of Heist season. In fact, I think it would be get to do after point break called sexy beast, which I really think we would have gotten to before this. And like, sexy beast was the film of the 2000s for me. Sexy Beast is fantastic. Zone of interest is the film of the 2020s for me. So what I'm looking for out of under the skin and, you know, spoilers, what I found from it is the film of the 2010s, right? You're going to love sexy beast when we get to it, by the way. I think it's so good. Fucking Ben Kingsley, just incredible.

I'm already on board. That's all you had to say. That's what you had to say. So we begin with a bunch of weird art installation lights and Scarlett Johansson doing voice training. Not quite. Not quite. Yeah. We begin with the A24 and Film Four logos, which means that this is a 96 movie.

And also the BFI logo, which is how we know it was made by a white person. Uh-huh. Sure. Any other logos? I think this movie is going to be like very difficult to recount to the list is what happens without it to basically just becoming an audio description. for the most for like almost the entirety of it except the last five minutes where we find out for sure what it is

this is another one of those ones where I go hey check out the movie under the skin before you listen to the podcast maybe I do I do recommend it but it's a very sparse film but I do think there's a lot here for us to get our teeth into and I do have a theory about this film I do have a

I have a lens through which I enjoyed it that I'm not sure if other people are going to share that I'm excited to talk about excellent this is an adaptation of a book by Michael Faber from 2000 under the skin, which is an ex, it's extremely pared down from this. Originally, it was going to be, like, this would be going to be a full adaptation. They had, like, sci-fi scenes.

They had, like, big set pieces and things like that. They had a two, a boy and a girl alien. They were thinking about Brad Pitt as the cast member, you know, like, they were really thinking about this, and it just got cut down and down and down and down to just this, a budget and nine million, and most of it was just sort of Scarley O'Hansson driving a van. around the Scottish Highlands, with the entire film crew in the back of the van for most of it. People might be aware of this because a lot of it was shot around Glasgow and it used like kind of unscripted scenes with like not professional actors, right?

With just like guys off the street. Just kind of normal blokes. Yeah. And yeah, I think it has a lot to say going on. But so we begin with some spooky future lights. Yeah, we're in a black void, just sort of discordant violins, really harsh noises. One of your classic voids. Bright blue, white light that you're kind of drifting towards. Some fragmented voices that then gradually resolve into Scarlett, Johansson doing, these are vocal warmups for actors.

Yeah, yeah. It's clearly like voice training. She's sounding out consonants. Yeah, she starts with just sounds, moves up to consonants and words. And the whole time we're seeing these like big shapes moving in the void, occluded. each other, eventually coming together to form a human iris. We really like an eye in this movie. This is a certified, I enjoy a movie. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

And then we cut to Scottish Highlands at night. A lone motorcyclist rushes along, and he stops, and he walks off the side of the road into darkness, and he emerges from the darkness carrying the body of a woman, Scarling your Hansen. A strange way of, well, not Scarling Hanson. yet. Also, strange way of walking. He's wearing the like full motorcycle leathers and he's like striding, right? He never really like breaks stride. It's very like purposeful.

It's also notable that he's wearing like a motorcycle helmet that has the brand name Shark very prominently displayed. But so he's he like picks up and carries this woman into a like a white transit van, right? And at this point, I should, I think it's easier if we lay some cards on the table here and say, as we have, that this is, it's an alien movie, right? It's a sci-fi movie because it's a movie in part about alien abduction, just not as kind of typically thought of it. It's a way of like kind of complicating that as a narrative. And in particular here, visually what we have with a guy like carrying an unconscious or like unresponsive woman into the back of a van. Is that just hitting the criminal kind of abduction?

That's just a normal abduction. Yeah, exactly. I mean, our first real clue that something weird is going on is when we cut to the interior of the van and it's an infinite white void. The void. Yeah, the void. Yeah, yeah. One of many voids that we'll see. Absolutely.

Come to Scotland, see the scenic voids. And Scarlett Johansson is there with this woman who has been brought in. And she, like, undresses her. she, like, strips her clothes off her, and this woman is not responsive at all, but we see, like, tears coming from her eyes, which implies, like, a, like a paralysis. She is Scully Hanson, right? Yeah. She gets undressed in her clothes stolen by an exact duplicate of herself.

Yes. Sam haven't quite figured that out, if I'm honest with you. In that moment, she truly becomes Scarley O'Hanson. She does. She puts on her clothes, and then there's an ant on the body of dead, scholar Johansson, original Scholar Hansen, which she picks off the body and regards with like curiosity. Yeah, she's like, lets it walk between her fingers. There's no sort of like remorse or squeamishness. She's just like, oh, interesting. Compare this as a scene of

like possession, right? Or like kind of taking control of someone's physical form, someone's body with something like devil's advocate, right? There's a lot more. Nobody gets like thrown around or like hit against the bathroom. It's a lot more like violating in that sense. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. But it's also a lot more clinical, right? And particularly, like, this void is like a white void as well, which is something that's very suggestive of the kind of the surgical, right? The medical. Yes, yeah.

It's scrupulously clean. The next shot is a block of flats in Glasgow, and it's a cloudy early morning. And it's almost shot in such a way that you could very easily miss this. And, in fact, I had to go back and check. But we do, in fact, see some, like, strange lights. in the sky. And that is the only real hint that we get of like, oh, these, these people are not from around here.

They have come from elsewhere. These are really like disconcern. They've fucking, for Fremdungs, affected me here, right? Because these are disconcertingly familiar surroundings to me. I live in Glasgow. I've lived in Glasgow for 15 years at this point. And it's, these are just

kind of like ordinary, completely ordinary like Glasgow streets, right? And she's just in the, the van in this white transit van and just driving and then we smash cut to Buchanan galleries like the big shopping mall behold clairs

alien visits Earth and the first thing they run into is clairs yeah they're going to destroy all our monuments starting with clairs which is true there's a fascinating shot in this right because I really want to talk about it because I think it's the opposite of what a lot of Hollywood cinematography

tries to do with an actor like Scarlett Johansson, right, where she's shot from the back. It's like a medium shot amongst a crowd. And it's not only is it sort of like anonymizing in the sense of like she's amongst normies, right? And it takes a second to you to like visually pick her out, right, in the composition. But also, in some ways, it's more scrutinizing because you get a sense that you never get from like a shot and say a Marvel movie because they're designed to avoid doing this. You get a shot of what Scarlett Johanton looks like to run into

on the street.