The Weird and the Eerie

Woman sawn apart in a wooden crate, wearing a bathing suit, smiling, a trick done with mirrors, I read it in a comic book: only with me there had been an accident and I came apart. The other half, the one locked away, was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal. I was nothing but a head, or no, something minor like a thumb; numb.

Pleasure and pain are side by side they said but most of the brain is neutral: nerveless, like fat. I rehearsed emotions, naming them: joy, peace, guilt, release, love and hate, react, relate; what to feel was like what to wear, you watched the others and memorised it. But the only thing there was the fear I wasn’t alive: a negative, the difference between the shadow of a pin and what it’s like when you stick it in your arm, in school caged in the desk I used to do that, with pen-nibs and compass points too, instruments of knowledge, English and Geometry; they’ve discovered rats prefer any sensation to none. The insides of my arms were stippled with tiny wounds, like an addict’s. They slipped the needle into the arm and I was falling down, it was like sinking from one level of darkness to a deeper, deepest; when I rose up through the anesthetic, pale green and then daylight, I could remember nothing.

I didn’t feel awful; I realised I didn’t feel much of anything. I hadn’t for a long time. Perhaps I’d been like that all my life, just as some babies are born deaf or without a sense of touch; but if that was true I wouldn’t have noticed the absence. At some point my neck must have closed over, pond freezing or a wound, shutting me into a head ...

— Surfacing, Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s 1972 novel Surfacing and Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin offer complementary cases of the eerie. In Surfacing, we move from a position ambiguously “inside” to one outside; in Under the Skin the inside is apprehended from outside. The two lead characters’ problematic relationship to what Lacan called the Symbolic order (the structure through which cultural meaning is assigned, and which, Lacan said, is secured by the name of the father) is underscored by the fact that neither is named. The narrator of Surfacing comes to feel as if she is an alien who has been play-acting the role of a woman; the lead character in Under the Skin is an actual alien, who seeks to simulate human behaviour.

Surfacing turns on the enigma of a missing father. The narrator has returned to her childhood home in Quebec to look for her father, who has disappeared in the Canadian wilderness. The question what happened? hangs over the novel, and the ultimate lack of resolution to the mystery — not only is the father never found, but the narrator herself becomes lost, unmoored, operating without co-ordinates — means that the eerie atmosphere is never dissipated. As with Garner, in Surfacing there is a tremendous sensitivity to the power of terrain — not now the British countryside, with its vastly overdetermined history of civil war, atrocity and struggle, but the depopulated space of the Canadian bush, with its promises and threats, its openness and its terrifying emptiness. It is not the spectres of history which haunt Surfacing, but the spaces outside or at the edges of the human itself. It seems, so far as we can make out, that the father has fallen prey to a fatal fascination with the wilderness, its animals and associated lore. When the narrator enters his cabin, she finds that her father has filled his papers with images of strange human-animal creatures: signs of madness, or preparations for a shamanic passage out of what passes for modern civilisation? As the anti-psychiatric rhetoric of the time might have had it, is there actually a difference between these two possibilities? Does not any real rejection of civilisation not entail a move into schizophrenia — a shift into an outside that cannot be commensurated with dominant forms of subjectivity, thinking, sensation?

In some respects, Surfacing could be seen as registering the bitter awakening after the militant euphoria of the Sixties; Atwood’s famously cold prose freezing over the Sixties’ heated loins, and drawing, from the semi-desolation of the Canadian bush, a new landscape as alluring and forbidding as any in literature. A conservative reading suggests itself — what surfaces here, it might seem, are the consequences that Sixties permissiveness imagined it had dispensed with. The repressed — which in this sense would mean the agencies of repression themselves — returns in the spectral form of the unnamed narrator’s aborted child, encountered in a dark lake space where excrement and jellyfish-like foetal scrapings float, the abjected and the aborted commingling in a sewer of the Symbolic. Far from enabling her to “regain” some “wholeness”, the reintegration of this lost object destroys the fragile collage of screen memories and fantasies the narrator’s unconscious has artfully constructed, projecting her from the frozen poise of dysphoria into psychosis — which, in the conservative reading, would constitute a proper punishment for her licentiousness.

There’s a great deal at stake in resisting this conservative reading, and the concept of the eerie can help us in this task. Atwood’s narrator increasingly finds that there is no place for her. She lacks the capacity to feel that is supposedly constitutive of “ordinary” subjectivity. She is outside herself; a mystery to herself, a kind of reflexive gap in the dominant structure: an eerie enigma. The point is not then to too-quickly resolve this enigma, but to keep faith with the questions that it poses.

The narrator experiences the counterculture as little more than a sham, its libertarian rhetoric not only serving as a legitimation of familiar male privilege but offering new rationales for exploitation and subjugation. By 1972, the counterculture’s dreams of overthrowing and replacing dominant structures have devolved into a series of empty gestures, a congealed rhetoric. If Surfacing rejects the facile gestures of an exhausted counterculture, there is no question of its endorsing the (apparently) safe and settled world which the counterculture repudiated. That world of supposedly organic solidity — her parents’ world, where people have children who grow like flowers in their back garden, the narrator imagines — is gone, Atwood’s narrator notes, with an edge of wistfulness that nevertheless stops somewhat short of nostalgic longing. The question that Surfacing poses, and leaves hanging, is how to mobilise her discontent rather than treat it as a pathology that requires a cure — either by successful reintegration into the Symbolic/civilisation or by some purifying journey out beyond the Symbolic into a pre-linguistic Nature. How, in other words, is it possible to keep faith with, rather than remedy, the narrator’s affective dyslexia?

In some respects, Surfacing belongs to the same moment as such texts as Luce Irigaray’s Speculum: Of the Other Woman, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. These works attempt to rise to the challenge of treating discontent, abjection and psychopathology as traces of an as yet unimaginable outside rather than as symptoms of maladjustment. At her moment of schizophrenic break-rapture, the narrator’s vision resembles the “nonorganic life” and “becoming-animal” Deleuze and Guattari will describe in A Thousand Plateaus: “they think I should be filled with death, I should be in mourning. But nothing has died, everything is alive, everything is waiting to become alive.” Yet this febrile delirium is more in tune with what Ben Woodard has termed “dark vitalism” than with Deleuze, and what flows and stalks in the body-without-organs zone of animal- and water-becomings is something like Woodard’s sinister “creep of life”: “I hear breathing, withheld, observant, not in the house but all around it.” The place beyond the mortifications of the Symbolic is not only the space of an obscene, non-linguistic “life”, but also where everything deadened and dead goes, once it has been expelled from civilisation. “This is where I threw the dead things...” Beyond the living death of the Symbolic is the kingdom of the dead: “It was below me, drifting towards me from the furthest level where there was no life, a dark oval trailing limbs. It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew about, a dead thing, it was dead.”

Surfacing can be situated as part of another fin-de-Sixties/ early-Seventies moment: the post-psychedelic oceanic. Atwood’s lake, viscous with blood and other bodily fluids, has something in common with the “bitches brew” that Miles Davis plunges into in 1969, emerging, catatonic, only six years later; it approaches the deep sea terrains John Martyn sounds out on Solid Air and One World:

Pale green, then darkness, layer after layer, deeper than before, seabottom: the water seemed to have thickened, in it pinprick lights flicked and darted, red and blue, yellow and white, and I saw that they were fish, the chasm-dwellers, fins lined with phosphorescent sparks, teeth neon. It was wonderful that I was down so far...

But these spaces of dissolved identity are not approached from the angle of a now tortured, now lulled male on a vacation from the Symbolic, but from the perspective of someone who was never fully integrated into the Symbolic in the first place.

Surfacing, like Atwood’s later Oryx and Crake, is a kind of rewriting of Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents — the text with which all that early Seventies radical theory had to wrestle, and reckon. Just as at the end of Oryx and Crake, Surfacing concludes with a moment of suspension, with the narrator, like Oryx’s Snowman, poised between the schizophrenic space beyond the Symbolic and some return to civilisation. Perhaps what is most prescient about Surfacing is its acceptance that civilisation/the big Other/language cannot in the end be overcome by means of libido, madness or mysticism alone — yet, despite all this, Surfacing does not recommend an acquiescence in the reality principle. “For us, it’s necessary, the intercession of words”, the narrator concedes — but who is this “us”? It seems at first to encompass only the narrator and the lover with which she may be about to be reconciled. Then we might be tempted to read the “us” as humanity in general, and the novel would be ending with a fairly cheap reconciliation between civilisation and one who was discontented with it. Yet it’s more interesting to think of the “us” as indicating those, like the narrator, who do not properly belong to humanity at all — what kind of language, what kind of civilisation, would these discontents make?

Under the Skin probes some of the same areas, but from a different direction. The film could be a case study in how to produce the eerie out of unpromising resources. Its source material, the novel by Michael Faber, is effective enough, but it doesn’t possess much of an eerie charge. Or, rather, the way the narrative develops progressively eliminates any trace of the eerie until it disappears entirely. The novel soon becomes recognisable as a literary-science fictional satire on meat-eating and the meat industry, with the inconsistencies in human carnivore ethics exposed and mocked when human beings become the prey of alien meat-traders. It is a fable complete with talking animals (although of course the point of the satirical-fabular reversal is that, from the alien perspective, it is the humans who are “talking animals”, who must have their tongues removed when they are forced into captivity).

The film is a very different beast. Effectively, it is extrapolated from the early part of the novel — alone in a car, driving along the A-roads of Scotland, a young woman, or what appears to be a young woman, stalks men. In the novel, we soon learn that the “young woman” is Isserley, a surgically-altered extraterrestrial in the employ of an interplanetary luxury meat business. The men she lures into her car and sedates have been targeted because they look like prime cuts.

The film denies us any of this information (in fact, it’s far from clear that the film retains any of these narrative commitments; we never learn if the lead character is called Isserley, or if she works for a meat corporation). Crudely, we could say that the quickest way to produce a sense of the eerie is to restrict information in this way. But, as I argued above, not any mystery whatsoever will be eerie; there must be a sense of alterity, and this sense of alterity is something that Glazer adds to Faber’s source material. There is a curious quality to these additions, of course, because what is added, effectively, are gaps in the viewer’s knowledge. The tendency in Faber’s novel is to eliminate the alienness of the extraterrestrials, to make an equivalence between them and us — under the skin, we are the same (something reinforced by Faber’s having the aliens calling themselves “humans”). By contrast, the film not only emphasises the differences between the aliens and homo sapiens, it also denudes human culture of its casual familiarity, showing the taken-for-granted from an undetermined yet exterior perspective.

In terms of its generation of a sense of the eerie, the film is at an advantage over the novel because it is not required to give the lead character (played by Scarlett Johansson) any interior life. This means that it is not only the nature of her interior life that is left open: so is the very question of whether she has anything like “interior life” in any recognisable sense. The Johansson character is seen only from the outside (just as, reciprocally, her illegible behaviour and motives, her lack of “ordinary” emotional responses, give us an outsider perspective on the social world through which she moves as a predator). Her dialogue is bare, functional — perhaps limited by her competence with language and accent (as the film begins, we hear her learn to pronounce a series of words in an English accent). In any case, she speaks only enough to draw men into her vehicle — and this, in a passing mordant commentary on a certain kind of male sexuality, does not usually entail much talking. She is never required to give any but the most minimal account of herself, and almost everything she says is in any case a deception. She never gives voice to any feelings. When she liaises with another alien, they do not speak. Do they have their own language — or is language something that they merely acquire in order to trick humans? Do they have feelings in the same sense that we think we do? The film tells us practically nothing about what these creatures are, or what they want — or indeed, if what drives them can be construed as “desire” at all.

Perhaps Glazer’s most significant additions are the scenes in which the human prey is captured. In the novel, the capture is a simple matter of the men being drugged in their seats. The capture in the film takes place in some undetermined interzone, a semi-abstract space, in which the men, as they approach the half-clothed Johansson character, find themselves slowly sucked into cloying black ooze. Are these scenes — glacially oneiric, darkly psychedelic — a representation of the intoxicated men’s state of mind as they slip into some state of half-death? Or is this an actual interspace, with the black ooze an example of alien technology? Or could it be, as one commentator has suggested, that this is what sex feels like to the alien? The film provides us with no answers, and further scenes only add to the nightmare opacity. We see some of the captured men, now entirely submerged in the ooze, barely conscious and bloated (perhaps in a reference to the fattening of the human prey that happens in the novel). As they pathetically reach out for each other, one of the bodies is subjected to a horrible sucking and sluicing action. There is a cut to an image of what looks like rushing blood, as if the body has been liquidised. It could be that this is a semi-abstract image of the meat processing described in the novel; or it could be suggestive of some other (barely imaginable) mode of energy transfer.

These fragments — so many eerie ellipses — make the extraterrestrials, if that is what they are, as alien as anything we have seen in cinema. But the scenes of the Johansson character in her van, picking up men on lonely side-roads and in crowded clubs, or sizing up potential victims on crowded streets in Glasgow, generate something like a reverse eerie effect. Here, contemporary capitalist culture is estranged, seen through an outsider’s eye. The Johansson character’s tonal flatness makes her look from the outside as the narrator of Surfacing describes her own inner state — numb, detached. Yet this seeming numbness may of course be a whole different affective comportment; or it could suggest a type of being that has no capacity for what we understand as emotions. It could be, after all, that these kinds of creatures have more in common with insects than with human beings.

There is a kind of affinity between Johansson’s flatness and the naturalistic style in which much of the film is shot. She is the figure through whom the film is focalised — the audience’s point of identification — but since there is precious little with which we can identify, she functions as a kind of analogue of the camera itself. In the improvised scenes with passersby and non-actors in particular, we are invited to experience human behaviours, interactions and culture without the associations that we habitually bring to them, and without the forms of mediations that usually intercede in mainstream cinema. Since the scenes are stripped of much of their standard generic, narrative and emotional furniture, the naturalism becomes denaturalizing, as the camera effectively simulates the gaze of an alien anthropologist.

As the film goes on, the Johansson character shifts from being a predator into becoming an increasingly vulnerable figure. Not accidentally, this coincides with her becoming more immersed in human culture, as she engages in what might be an attempt to understand human affection and relationships. There is a disturbing sex scene, in which she passively and seemingly uncomprehendingly submits to her male partner, and afterwards examines herself with a flashlight, as if she has been badly wounded. Human sex becomes estranged, the object of panicked alien attention. The unnerving qualities of this scene are retrospectively intensified when, in another contrast with the novel, we learn that the alien’s human body is a kind of prosthesis. We discover this only in the distressing climactic scene, when a passerby attempts to rape her. As he attacks her, part of the prosthetic body comes away, leaving a gaping hole in her back, like a rip in a dress. The alien then casts aside the destroyed human prosthesis, and another figure — a smooth black humanoid form, lacking many defining features — emerges from inside the wreckage. We see the exposed alien body now studying the Scarlett Johansson face as if it is a latex mask — an echo of an earlier remarkable scene in which Johansson examines her own naked body in a mirror in a strangely dispassionate but appreciative way. It is now clear that the mirror scene redoubles the “ordinary” self-objectification that happens when we look in the mirror: the alien is not looking at herself, but at the human body she is wearing.

But this disjuncture between alien subject and human body-object only brings to the fore the fantasmatic structures that underlie “ordinary” human subjectivity. The climactic image of this almost featureless figure throwing aside its human form corresponds to a certain persistent fantasy of the relationship of subject to body. This fantasy was codified by Descartes into the philosophical doctrine known as substance dualism (the belief that mind and body are radically different kinds of things). According to Lacan, however, Descartes’ error was more than a simple philosophical mistake, since a certain kind of dualism is embedded in the structure of language, particularly the language of the subject. The I which speaks and the I which is spoken of are structurally different. The I which speaks possesses no positive predicates, it is something like the speaking position as such, while determinate features (height, age, weight, etc.) can only be attributed to the I which is spoken of. The featureless figure in those final scenes of Under the Skin, then, is something like a physicalisation of this soul-subject, this I which speaks: lacking in positive physical predicates, it dwells somehow “inside” the body, but it is ultimately detachable from this body-housing. The film’s final contribution, then, is to remind us of the sense of eeriness intrinsic to our unstable accounts of subject and object, mind and body.

The eeriness of the relationship between body and mind was the subject of Andy de Emmony’s 2010 BBC adaptation of M.R. James’ “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, which was discussed in an earlier chapter. In this radically reworked version of the story, Parkin is tormented by the dementia that has reduced his wife to a catatonic shell: “a body that has outlasted the existence of the personality: more horrifying than any spook or ghoul”. “There is nothing inside us”, the Parkin in this version mordantly declares. “There are no ghosts in these machines. Man is matter, and matter rots.” Yet Parkin’s own statement establishes that there are ghosts in the machine, that a certain kind of spectrality is intrinsic to the speaking subject. After all, who is it who can talk of having no inside, of man being rotting matter? Not any substantial subject perhaps, but the subject who speaks, the subject, that is to say, composed out of the undead, discorporate stuff of language. In the very act of announcing its own nullity, the subject does not so much engage in performative contradiction, but points to an ineradicable dualism that results from subjectivity itself. The condition of materialists such as Parkin (our condition in other words) is of knowing that all subjectivity is reducible to matter, that no subjectivity can survive the death of the body, but of nevertheless being unable to experience oneself as mere matter. Once the body is recognised as the substrate-precondition of experience, then one is immediately compelled to accept this phenomenological dualism, precisely because experience and its substrate can be separated. There are ghosts in the machine, and we are they, and they are we.