The Lady Vanishes: assimilation, sexuality, and Autonomy in Ali Smith's 'The Accidental' and Jonathan Glazer's 'Under The Skin'

“Interactions without resonance. Instead of the great paranoid fear, we are trapped in a thousand little mono-manias, self-evident truths, and clarities that gush from every black hole and no longer form a system, but are only rumble and buzz, blinding lights giving any and everybody the mission of self-appointed judge.”

- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

Ali Smith’s novel The Accidental (2005) and Jonathan Glazer’s film Under the Skin (2013) engage in the destruction of ideal femininity through anti-realist means to explore assimilation and autonomy in postfeminist contexts. In Under the Skin, Scarlett Johansson portrays The Female, a hypnotically beautiful alien predator whose earthly experiences come to reveal her own humanity. The Accidental’s Amber/Alhambra is more phantasm than fantasy, a mysterious arrival in the Smart family’s existence, who appears to know them and what buttons of theirs need to be pushed better than anyone possibly could. The duality of both women as corporeal but ungraspable bodies works in combination with their magnetism to seduce and reform those around them. The works are structured around moments of incidence and collision because of these magnetic pulls and attempts at connection in conditions of alienation. The text and film respectively centre around fugitive women with uncertain origins who have arrived as interventions to the environments they occupy. The Accidental kaleidoscopically circles through the alienated consciousnesses of Amber, Astrid, Michael, Eve, and Michael in three acts – The Beginning, The Middle, and The End, as each family member’s interaction with Amber is detailed in the third person. The Female’s narrative follows her as she hunts men until she attempts to integrate with the community she has been delivered to, but it ends tragically as she becomes more human and more vulnerable. She cruises through Scottish streets to charm and pick up men (all but one of whom are unaware of their involvement in the film until after they get in the car with The Female (Collin, 2014)) in order to kill them make them sustenance for either herself, the force that guides her, or her overseer, The Biker. Once they get in the alien succubus’s van, she brings them to her dilapidated house, where they follow her until they sink erection-first into a thick oil-like fluid which The Female can walk over, but which swallows them. Both works engage in a problematising of narrative through genre and formal hybridity – looking outward to cinema to create a coherent but rhizomatic experience. Amber drives to the Smart family’s Norfolk home in the car she sleeps in, disrupting their lives in ways specifically tailored to each person’s traumas and anxieties: the daughter, Astrid, trying to forget being bullied for her perceived queerness by filming her entire holiday; the son, Magnus, trapped in an episode of post-traumatic despair after playing a sexually aggressive prank on a classmate that led to her suicide; the stepfather, Michael, performing hollow promiscuous masculinity to the effect of his own mid-life crisis and ennui; and the mother, Eve, struggling with the inauthenticity of her work and her relationships. The film and text’s premises have elements of fairy tale, film noir, horror, and science fiction. Both works are self-consciously intermedial, with The Accidental being reminiscent of Don Siegel’s The Beguiled and more explicitly influenced by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema – obliquely referenced throughout the novel (Horton, 641; citing O’Neill, Poole, and Kakutani). Under the Skin is a loose adaptation of Michael Faber’s novel of the same name, while being inspired by The Man Who Fell to Earth and utilising a version of Richard Wilson's sculptural work ‘20:50’ to symbolise the false solidity of reality, and the process of reflection as a means of achieving clarity. While Under the Skin uses documentary and arthouse techniques as a means of crossing the diegetic boundaries of realism and anti-realism, The Accidental hybridises genre, perspective, and voice to emphasise the unreality of its heroine and the relativism of Amber’s anarchic existence. Both texts revolve around the exposition of their formal and societal conditions through deconstructing and reconstructing semiotics within interactions, all of which contain a duality because they involve women who are innately dualistic. Through considering births, sexualities, and destructions as means of investigating autonomy and assimilation, the problematics of performing the feminine are revealed by engaging with Kristeva’s theory on abjection, and Deleuze and Guattari’s consideration of the ‘Bodies Without Organs’ (BwOs). Where The Accidental criticises New Labour neoliberalism through defiance of its transactional nature, Under the Skin condemns it through evidencing the gendered vulnerabilities inherent to its punishing individualism.

The Accidental and Under the Skin begin with a fantastical and surreal birth, neither of which are easily understood but both of which involve the manifestation of “images lacking substratum” (Lupton, 515) as human earthly women. The Beginning for The Accidental is Alhambra/Amber’s birth in the Alhambra, a cinema she later imagines burning down; this birth is a projection, a fantasy, an escape. She is media simulacra interpellated with Caledonian antisyzygy to create an erotic magical phantasm symbolising the "contingency and absurdity" in postmodern consumerism (Germana, 87). The Beginning for The Female is a merging of the phonetic and optic into The Female’s eye, made from abstract alien shapes. It begins with a hole, abstracted to potentially being a vaginal canal or an iris, spasming, fluctuating and defining the terms of the film as one of optics and haptics. The sound of her voice, which at first seems like monosyllabic chant, develops a coherency, with the first recognisable word uttered being a stilted “N-n-n-no.” The naked Female then disrobes a murder victim of The Biker’s for her clothes, a clinical exercise in a clinical white environment, the first demonstration of The Female’s total lack of affect. This lack of empathy or sympathy is perhaps most strikingly demonstrated in a later scene, in which The Female watches a dog, its owner and her husband drown on a beach. She focusses on abducting the surfer she was trying to seduce, leaving the couple to die and their infant child exposed to the elements, screaming until its cries are indistinguishable from the cries of seagulls and the crashing waves. The ant that has clung onto the disrobed woman’s body appears in focus on the screen, the curvature of its body being immediately compared to the curvature of The Female’s, comparing her lack of affect to that of the ant’s. The Female is initially demonstrated to be a catatonic/empty BwO: an assemblage with no underlying principles, a means for experience but whose experience passes through her rather than constructs a functioning discourse with her environment, resulting from of her lack of affect and the anti-productive nature of her behaviour. Amber, however, functions as the healthy BwO since, “The BwO is not "before" the organism; it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of constructing itself.” Part of Amber’s appeal is her constant shifting and proliferation of interactions with resonance: “What is retained and preserved, therefore created, what consists, is only that which increases the number of connections at each level of division or composition” (D&G, 508).

The aesthetics of postfeminism are critiqued upon the arrival of both women in their new environments. The Female takes herself to Glasgow’s Buchanan Galleries in a sequence where she walks against the crowd, secretly captured by the filmmaker who walks behind her to achieve the most realistic intervention in this environment. She goes to buy clothes and make-up in order to aesthetically perform femininity, exposing it as a means of assimilation while troubling the typical societal association with this costumery. Rather than assume the “mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men” (Riviere, 303), The Female uses it to allay male anxiety and throw them off the scent of the danger she embodies. Where wearing make-up has been handled as a means of making the female face softer, more feminine, and therefore more sexually appealing, here it is weaponized by The Female as a means of camouflage in order to set her trap through subjectification. Artifice is the most important element of her strategy, as she kerb-crawls through swathes of men and picks them off individually, relying on her performance of confusion, vulnerability, and sexual interest to attract her prey. Her aesthetic has elements of Disney’s Snow White and 1960s Elizabeth Taylor, while her clothes are on the cheap side of unremarkable, creating a vision of non-threatening sexuality that is easily assimilable but seductive. The discourse of these desires, and the feeling of desire more broadly, is further dissected as mechanics of capitalism in A Thousand Plateaus: “There are no internal drives in desire, only assemblages. Desire is always assembled; it is what the assemblage determines it to be” (D&G, 230). The designations of what has been desirable are all inscribed on The Female’s body to cater to her prey while unwittingly catering to her predator, while Amber’s desirability is indexed by her refusal to cater to anyone:

“The BwO is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one desires. And not only because it is the plane of consistency or the field of immanence of desire. Even when it falls into the void of too-sudden destratification, or into the proliferation of a cancerous stratum, it is still desire. Desire stretches that far: desiring one's own annihilation or desiring the power to annihilate.” (165)

Amber’s disavowal of mid-2000s femininity is most liberating to Astrid and Eve, and echoes Kristeva’s abject rejection of the mother and father: “"I" want none of that element, sign of their desire; "I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it, "I" expel it.” (Kristeva, 3). By resisting culturally inscribed beauty practices like shaving body hair away, she relaxes Astrid’s sense that she is inadequately performing her own identity. Amber’s destruction of Astrid’s camera – her means of emotionally distancing herself and preoccupying herself from the stresses in her life – allows Astrid a confrontation of the self and environment that was previously impossible because of her cycle of self-defensive isolation. The fact that Amber does not show up in the videos Astrid has already taken (225) further establishes her anti-realism and her resistance of successful mediation. It also functions as an assertion of narrative control, which is the most inspiring behaviour to the 12-year-old Astrid.

In Magnus’s narrative Amber’s appearance out of nowhere is literally a life-saving intervention, as she catches him as he tries to hang himself in the shower, before embarking on a sexual relationship with him. In the aftermath of his photoshopping a classmate’s head onto a porn scene and humiliating her into suicide, he relives and re-enacts his trauma, demonstrably occupies a cancerous BwO. His trauma “proliferates and loses its configuration, takes over everything; the organism must resubmit it to its rule or restratify it, not only for its own survival, but also to make possible an escape from the organism, the fabrication of the "other" BwO on the plane of consistency” (D&G, 163). Amber facilitates this restratification and through engagement with her, his escape is made possible. She embodies everything he needs, wants, and aspires to through her embodiment of productive sexuality and potential for positive emotional reproduction. For Magnus, Amber = “?”, “angel”, “genius2”, “true”, “everything he didn’t even know he imagined possible for himself.” In her own words, she is Stephen King’s Carrie, Eliza Doolitttle from My Fair Lady, Katherine Ross’s characters in both Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Graduate, Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Rosemary from Rosemary’s Baby, the girl from the beginning of Jaws, Ali from Love Story, one of the women who committed Murder On The Orient Express, and grown by Barbra Streisand and Liza Minelli among others she embodies and has been nurtured by (Smith, 103-5). Despite their sole existence in these contexts as light on screens they have become culturally iconic, and recognisable to the reader through pseudo-description. She is a projection and exists to be projected: “I’m everything you ever dreamed” (306). She is light, but beyond that she cannot be captured on film, affirming her position as the Healthy BwO, letting all things pass through and inform her without calcifying her essential existential flexibility. This is the “‘cross-modal’ activity” through which “the world is made meaningful to us not only by vision, but also in cooperation and in significant exchange with other sensorial means” (Laine, 94). The novel’s constant revelation around cinema is part of the “incendiary semiotics that disrupt established cultural mythologies” (Horton, 645-6). Unlike The Female, her autonomy is implicit and enacted through her refusal to assimilate. Rather than visit she occupies, rather than engender herself to the family she antagonises them. Her unreality is part of her magnetism, just as The Female’s is, but The Female is undefined and undefinable beyond being alien and alienated because of her lack of autonomy.

Embodiment is represented as the difference between something and nothing in the texts; the difference between affect and disaffect. The unmanning and manning that the works consider also investigate how to imbue significance as a postfeminist body in terms of reciprocal sexuality and destructive sexuality, with ‘suspended men’ thematically linking the works. The Female’s third man picks her up at a nightclub in a reversal of the predatory tactic the viewer has previously seen, and the audience is allowed to see what happens after the men sink. He walks spellbound and erect towards The Female, this time with her facing him and then literally walking over him as he floats in amniotic abyss. As is revealed by another victim floating towards him, the men are disfigured in the fluid, as they seem to swell over their own skin. In a moment of tenderness, the drifting men hold hands, screaming silently, before the disfigured one is popped like a balloon and deflates: anti-erect, insubstantial, and flaccid. Here, Glazer plays on fears of female sexual power, fears of non-maternal women, and fears of female sexual autonomy as means of emasculation, forcing men into conditions of abjection:

But that word, "fear"—a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess—no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject. (Kristeva, 6)

Amniotic fluid and the wetness of female arousal are treated as abject forces of destruction in Under the Skin, but Amber’s wetness is restorative and nurturing to Magnus, whose sexual relationship with Amber is one of his only ways out of catastrophic paralysis. As his existing understanding of sexuality is exclusively informed by pornography - “How wet it all is is a little shocking”– so too is his understanding of the female body, the hairiness of which surprises him (Smith, 142). This enacts another syzygetic moment of realness and unrealness in Amber, as she embodies a fantasy of femininity he did not know he could have by assuming aesthetics he considers masculine. The loneliness of Cancerous BwO is also manifested in The Female’s most vulnerable victim, a man whose face has been disfigured as a result of his neurofibromatosis, a condition where tumours grow over the body’s nerves (NHS, 2018). This interaction is a crisis point in the film, the beginning of compassion, of resonant interactions, and of affect even though The Female does not seem to initially understand exactly how different this man is from the rest of her prey. She flirts with him by focussing on his hands and he lets his guard down and is brought to her trap, but after she hypnotises him into wading into its depths, she experiences her first instance of self-awareness. Her face comes into the light as she looks into a dirty mirror and she seems to recognise something: she relates herself to the fly buzzing helplessly against the nearby window pane, and in doing so relates to the disfigured man she has picked up. She releases him naked into the wild, as exposed as the baby, and the audience watch him walk mawkishly through the long grass like a toddler, his vulnerability emphasised now he has been released. The tragedy of the man being intercepted and killed by The Biker is overwhelming; what was intended as emancipation just gives way to more brutality because he has been released into the same conditions he was taken from, reborn but without the enlightenment Magnus experiences.

Opposite to Magnus’s experience of Amber, sexual rejection marks Michael’s subjugation and emancipation by Amber - a criticism of his “New Labour love” (Smith, 174) for his wife. He is reduced to obsessively pining after Amber while she ignores him, his narrative falling into sonnet form to express his unrequited adoration, painfully aware of how this emotional annihilation is forcing a re-evaluation of his behaviour. The ‘real’ sex he has with women are so artificial and oppositional to Amber’s unreality that they are cast into conditions of tropey mundanity despite his best efforts to intellectually elevate them with rote references to ‘Eros and Agape’. “Forcing him through scorn to desist from seduction—for the precise reason that only Amber's rejection satisfies him—Amber here represents a re-enabling sexual fantasy, where self-abnegation brings awareness. In his state of agonized shame, Michael finally realizes a certain emotional maturity.” (Horton, 644). Where he insisted women were not authentic or substantial enough for him at the height of his commodification of them, he not only becomes an object of derision for Amber, but a symbol of her total disdain for patriarchal libidinal colonisation, which he recognises and reconfigures as an urge to self-awareness through self-containment.

As Michael gains a new lease of life, The Female experiences a similar renewal. She is reborn after her escape into the Scottish fog’s new white abyss, where she is unprotected but softened and blurred, birdsong cutting through the pummelling unnatural music of Mica Levi’s score. What was cold and clinical in her first birth becomes tactile, the fog embracing her, touching her skin before clearing a little. Revitalized, her skin is no longer weaponized, but acts “the ‘ground’ against which the other senses figure, the milieu where the inside and outside encounter and entwine. Through skin, the world and the body touch and caress: the skin intertwines with the world and brings about its ‘tactility.’” (Laine 98). The same can be said for Magnus’s losing his virginity with Amber, reforming his traumatic experience with female sexuality into something “innocent”:

[…] held, made, straightened out then curved by her – Magnus cannot believe how all right, how clean again it is possible to feel even after everything awful he knows about himself, even though supposedly nothing about what Amber is doing, or he is doing, or they are doing together, is innocent in any way. In fact, the opposite is true. (Smith, 152)

The Female’s sexual awakening has similar intonations. Having escaped from The Biker, from her past brutalities, she stays with a man who makes her feel safe. Having experienced her sexual relationship with her body first privately in the mirror, she then tries to have sex with him and follows his lead until he attempts penetration, which shocks her into abrupt self-examination of her genitals. In this moment, the nature of The Female’s disconnect between her objectification and the purpose of that objectification is revealed. Though the conclusion of the scene is unclear, The Female’s autonomy is made more real, her assimilation semi-successful. But this is short-lived, as the film segues into its horrifying fairy-tale conclusion. As she wanders in the woods, she is stopped by an English woodcutter who uses the language she adopted to hunt men – “Are you on your own?”  – to make sure she is as vulnerable as he hopes she is. This question obliquely points to the concerns that neoliberalism raises around selfhood and the responsibility of the victim to look after their self in spite of the conditions that make that security impossible. As The Biker hurtles along the road in wet and fog The Female takes refuge in a bothy during a sequence which most explicitly relates her to the environment she finds herself in, the only element in that space which stands out in terms of colour is the lion rampant hung on the wall, a clear warning of the impending violence and disruption to her assimilation. As she lies in the bothy Glazer transposes her body onto the landscape, having almost camouflaged into the stone and dark where she rests, howling wind replacing the frenetic strings of the score. As she becomes more earthly she is more horizontal, a symbolic resetting of her hierarchy of values that brings her closer to becoming a BwO through becoming more substantial and rejecting the vertical alignment of her former systems (D&G, 1837). In letting her environment affect her she also becomes more vulnerable. She awakes to as the woodcutter is sexually assaulting her. She kicks him off and runs into the woods, a chase with imagery reminiscent of Snow White’s escape through the woods, but runs into his truck, a scene parallel to the disfigured man running off and into The Biker. Upsettingly, she is most human in this moment, whimpering and frightened as she tries to escape from sexual violence. As he catches her, holds her down, and starts to rape her, she looks up past the trees and into the white sky until his ripping her clothes becomes ripping her skin off. He runs away, and she is left staggering, sinking down into the dirt as the men sank into the fluid, and peeling her skin off to reveal the hard onyx version of herself, looking at the still-blinking eyelids and moving lips of the form she embodied: still becoming more human despite his dehumanising assault. This recognition of her embodiment is short-lived, as she is set alight by the rapist and burns to death like coal in the snow. The viewer left in a version of the abyss she began in, the violent abyss she was unskinned in as she burns away into carbolic mater.

While this could be read as a criticism of The Female for making herself vulnerable, it is more of a criticism of the prevention of female autonomy and circumstances in which vulnerability can only be prevented through violence and self-alienation. In the mechanics of postfeminism – women are complicit in patriarchal violence or it is brought against them. Amber’s infectious refusal to assimilate is one of the most protective elements of her character, and her freeing fatalism releases Eve into a wilderness of self-exploration with a kiss, while releasing the rest of the family from their cycles of despair. Amber’s intervention and exit provides a renewal for the family that The Female is not offered or allowed because of her dependency on masculine ideologies of control. While the family watch The Lady Vanishes, Michael reflects on his newfound sense of security having escaped into film, no longer willing himself against his family, but being part of a unified experience that rewards him without forcing him to demonstrate his autonomy to himself:

“Or maybe it was just the watching something good in a dark room, with other people watching it the same way he was. Whatever it was, he felt expansive, bigger than himself about it. And he hadn’t thought once about feeling bad, not once, all the way through it.” (Smith, 281)

In Horton’s words, “The novel understands these characters' psychic and familial interrelations precisely as a product of capitalism's wish-fulfilment system, envisioned in terms of elitist, patriarchal, and nationalist contemporary social discourses” (Horton, 644). While Amber resurrects the Smarts and repurposes them The Female is too enmeshed in the language and aesthetics of destruction and masculinity to be immune to its violence in the way Amber is. Solitude is unsafe, and assimilation is unsafe because unlike Amber, The Female is answerable to a man: both before and after her assimilation she is bound to masculinity. These fantasies of enlightenment, nourishment, and connection play out with anti-realist imagery and iconography to impart the importance of autonomy and the inefficacy of assimilation as a means of self-protection from the patriarchal capitalistic conditions that prey on vulnerability.

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